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IDOLS AND IDEALS.

B Y THE SAME ' A UTHOR.

THE SACRED ANTHOLOGY (Oriental).
A Book of Ethnical Scriptures. Collected and
edited by M. D. Conway. Fifth edition, i2mo,
(uniform with the Carlyle and Milton Anthologies).
THE EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE.
I2mo.
IDOLS AND IDEALS, with an Essay on
Christianity. i2mo.
HENRY HOLT & CO., PUBLISHERS, N. Y.

Idols an"d Ideals

AN ESSAY ON CHRISTIANITY.

MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY, M.A.,
"i
Author of " The Sacred Anthology '," " The
Earthward Pilgrimage," etc.

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1877.

Copyright uv
HENRY HOLT

ClG

INDEX.

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

Consequences
Growing Superstitions .
Faith, Fact, and Fairy Tale .
The Praying Machine .
The Pre-Darwinite and Post-Darwinite World
Footprints of the Great .....
AnthropomorphismThe Dream of Socrates .
Flower and Thorn
Real and Ideal
The Angel of Death

5
2349
63 79
105119 145
163 175
201

CHRISTIANITY

Its Morning Star
Its Dawn
Its Day.
Its Decline .
Its Afterglow
The Morrow .

CONSEQUENCES.

CONSEQUENCES.

N unhappy sign in any country is the appearance
of pessimist speculations. Some English eyes
appear to be troubled with the vision of a
black star hovering over their country, threatening the
wealth, greatness, and even the stability of the nation.
There are apprehensions that the coal will give out, and
with it all the manufacturing and railway enterprises which
make the commercial supremacy of England ; next, that
the intelligence of the country is alienated from its religion,
which renders it certain that the masses of the people will
presently be also alienated from it ; and since these will be
without the restraints of culture, the downfall of creeds
will involve the downfall of the social and political insti
tutions which have grown up along with the creeds. It will
require, say our sad soothsayers, a culture and refine
ment which the masses do not possess, to detach the social
organism from the dogmatic parasites which have grown
around it ; and when the scepticism of the educated has
filtered down into them, they will make a rude, indis
criminate sweep of good and evil alike. Then " enter "
Macaulay's New Zealander with sketch-book, seeking
picturesque ruins !

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

It is not within the scope of this essay to consider the
particular perils pointed out by our prophets of evil. I
merely refer to their warnings as illustrative of apprehen
sions felt by many in another direction, namely, the effect
of religious inquiry on human happiness and character.
And I do so because such apprehensions appear to me to
rest upon fallacies quite similar to those fears of the results
of free inquiry which I propose to consider. The main
fallacy is the fear that the same intelligence which has
adapted man to his present condition is to remain standing
still while everything else changes. Our coal mines, it
may be, are gradually to diminish, possibly to fail ; but
will that intellect which has invented steam engines, and
other machinery, lose its power of invention, and for the
first time show itself inadequate to meet emergencies as
they arise ? Is the future to have all our problems, and
to be without brains of its own ? So also in the case of
the violent revolution apprehended, when the masses share
the scepticism of the educated. Our wode ravens for
get, apparently, that such a change as that cannot be an
isolated one. Is it an enthusiasm to believe that in the
same length of time a thousand other changes will also
occur; that, for instance, the masses must acquire some
of the calmness and self-control of the cultivated along
with their scepticism; and also that the social fabric will
improve, that the state will become nobler, and all
classes possess too much interest in both to handle rashly
any real and healthy institution ?
This whole method of apprehension is treacherous
When Jesus said, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil

CONSEQ UENCES.

thereof ; to-morrow will take care of to-morrow's affairs,"
— he uttered a thought pregnant with philosophy as with
faith. The plan of prognosticating practical evil has now
become a favourite method of trying to intimidate free
thought and free speech. This plan has been earned to
its extreme by the present Bishop of Peterborough, who
said that he would not stop to inquire whether the tidings
of science were true or not ; he only asked whether they
were glad tidings. Not finding them glad tidings — and
they certainly are not promising for bishops— his lordship
unhesitatingly rejects them, irrespective of their truth or
untruth. The Bishop only caricatures a way of dealing
with new truth which is being more plausibly used by many
others than by this prelate, who has so well merited the
thanks of scientific men by his naive utterance.
Most of us, whose memories run back towards the
beginning of this generation, must recognise a marked
change in the tone of orthodoxy concerning rationalism.
In place of the old intolerance, we now find a tone of
apology, and meet with numbers of people* who are
eager to persuade us that they are not so orthodox as
they seem. Again, we are as often appealed to to
exercise charity as, in earlier times, we have had to
appeal for it ourselves. It is to be hoped we shall all
cultivate that virtue, but heretics cannot shut their eyes
to the novelty of the situation. When cremation was
lately proposed, and was bitterly denounced by the
Catholic clergy in Belgium, a paper in that country
remarked that it was a pity the Church which so
opposed burning the bodies of the dead had not always

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

manifested an equal repugnance to burn the bodies*
of the living ; similarly, it is an instance of the irony of
history that successors of the religionists who so long
ruled England by reign of terror should now appeal for
charity. Even Protestantism, when it followed Romanism.
in power, did not break its terrible weapons; it used
them until they become dull. Reduced at last to battle
in, an Age of Reason, and to answer argument with
argument instead of with prisons and persecutions, it
calls for the toleration it so long denied. Very well,
let us have it, — charity for all ! We may doubt whether
we should have heard so much about it had Superstition
continued as strong as of old, — but still the high rule of
reason is to speak the truth in love.
At the same time, long experience should make us
prudent. The more valuable a coin the more dan
gerous is its counterfeit, and the more attractive a virtue
the more necessary that its garb shall not be con
ceded to its opposite. Charity is due to every sincere
man, but not to proven error. If a man be in error,
the more I love him the more will I hate the falsity
that misleads him. When the wolf pleaded for com
passion, the shepherd replied, "Mercy to you were
cruelty to the lamb." It is difficult to see how it can
be consistent with love to. our fellow-beings that we
should be tender to the errors that afflict them, or to the
superstition that devours them. Clemency becomes
cruelty when it parts from common sense.
All this is too plain to require argument. But of late
its force has been escaped by another plea. We are

CONSEQUENCES.

now told that in the progress of the world the old beliefs
have lost their darker features. The old talons of
persecution have been pared away; fanaticism has
become unfashionable ; hell has been spiritualised ; and
creeds that once roused agony, fear, and consequent
intolerance are now softened into unrealised words or
mystical meanings. Superstitions may remain, but they
are now pretty superstitions, like a child's belief in fairies.
And we are asked, Is it not unnecessary, nay cruel, to take
away such sweet illusions, when they are so harmless ?
A gentleman who takes his family to church regularly,
said to me, " I know as well as any one that the clergy
man preaches fables, but I do not care to worry my
children by telling them so. When I take them to the
pantomime, I don't tell them, All that scenery is only
daubed pasteboard, the fairy there is merely a painted
woman, and her jewels only glass, bought for a penny.
Whether at church or theatre I prefer to humour their
pleasant illusions, and let them remain happy in them as
long as they can.'' It appeared to me strange that this
gentleman should not see the great difference between
transient illusion and permanent delusion. He humours
the illusions of the pantomime, because he knows very well
that his child will outgrow them. It would distress himvery
much if he thought that, when his child grew to be twenty
years of age, it would still believe in the reality of
feiries. But, in encouraging the pulpit fables, he is
fostering things that, from being the illusions of child
hood, harden into the delusions of the whole life.
Mr. Tennyson has put this common notion into rhyme,.

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

and his verses are the favourite quotation of the school
we are considering. They were recently offered by the
Athenaum as a rebuke to Mr. Morley for his excellent
work " On Compromise,'' and again by a plausible writer
in censure of the plainrspeaking of ceriain pulpits. The
verses run thus :
" O thou that after toil and storm
May'st seem to have reach'd a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form.
" Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early heaven, her happy views,
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days."
These verses are nearly the only ones which the poet
and his friends might wish obliterated from his fair pages,
as representing (one must believe) his first timorous and
unsteady step on a path which we may hope has since
led to heights that shame their faithless fears. Passing
their undertone of contempt for the female intellect, of
which the poet was probably unconscious, let us consider
what our duty is to that praying sister, or brother either,
whose illusions we are called upon to spare. If our
sister is praying in earnest, if doubt has not crept into
her heart— we must not call it her intellect, I suppose-
then her faith does not merely include
" Her early heaven, her happy views,"
but also her early hell, and some most unhappy views.
If her prayer be not a mere attitude, she is probably
imploring an angry God not to send her children

CONSEQUENCES.

brothers, or friends into everlasting anguish and despair.
If that be her creed, she can hardly be leading such
melodious days that it should be cruel to hint that her
apprehensions may be unfounded.
But the poet might remind us that he asks us to leave
her the pleasing side of her creed only — to remove her
fears, but humour her hopes though they be false. Out
sister must be feeble indeed if this be possible; her
powers must be very weak if she does not perceive that
her Bible and her Prayer-Book tell her as much of God's
wrath as of his love, correlate hell and heaven, and that,
from such source, she has no better authority for her hopes
than for her fears. But granting that the process be
possible, and that we find her living in an atmosphere
of rosy delusions, the question arises, ought we to avoid
disturbing them? Do not let us confuse that question
with any other. It is not whether we should obtrude
our opinions on others, but whether we should sanction
their opinions when we believe them false ; it is not
whether we should be rude, but whether we should be
sincere. One who loves truth will not need exhortation
to try and make it attractive instead of repulsive. The
danger is the other way, that truth will be so smooth and
polite as not to be recognised for what it really is. The
real question is whether truth should be concealed and
suppressed out of consideration for any one's pleasant
prejudices. It is perfectly easy to show on general principles that
such tampering with truth is disloyal and more dangerous
than honest error itself. It is easy to show that to sup-

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

press truth is to suggest falsehood ; that it is to foster
a malarious atmosphere which brings forth not only
pretty superstitions bmt ugly ones, and leaves the mind
to be overgrown not only with gay weeds but rank poisons ;
that where a pleasant fiction finds shelter a dangerous
error may nestle at its side ; and that if the great souls
of history had smoothed over falsehood because it was
agreeable, and remained silent before the pet prejudices
of weak minds, we should all be worshipping to-day the
painted fetish dolls of the world's infancy.
But I propose at present to look at the matter from
another and somewhat lower point of view. This theory
of suppression is not only immoral, but rests upon an
essential delusion. That delusion is that truth is hard,
cold, unlovely, and that all the beauty rests with the
illusions. The prevalence of this notion is easily ex
plained. It is the natural tendency of an existing dog
matic system, when it finds some of its points coming
into collision with common sentiment, to smooth and
explain them away, cover them with velvet, so as to make
itself as attractive as possibte ; and one of the oldest
tricks of dogmatic art is to paint the opposing view in as
dark colours as possible to make itself more pleasing by
the contrast. The early Christians, painted their own
saints with beautiful tints on church windows^, but the
saints of other 'religions they painted as demons with
terrible horns and flaming eyes; and the descendants of
those early Christians have not lost their art. We know
their skill in theologie gargoyles, — the infidel on his death
bed surrounded by horrors, the materialist given up to

CONSEQUENCES. 13
sensuality, the man of science living in an Arcric sea of
negation, perishing without hope. It is no wonder that
with these forbidding chimseras in the distance so many
are frightened back from the search for truth, and beg
that the realm of delusions may be spared.
But there is one suspicious circumstance about all ithese
pictures of the results of beliefs so invested with horrors ;
they are depicted by those who have never held those
beliefs, who have no experience of their real bearings,
and who must therefore have drawn upon their imagina
tion for their facts. We do not hear the actual mate
rialist complaining that his belief is hopeless, nor the
real heretic crying out that he is in icy despair. They
seem about as hearty and cheerful as other people. In
one of our popular dramas, a rigidly righteous old lady
is troubled because a certain bliad youth is constantly
cheerful ; regarding blindness as sent by an afflicting pro
vidence she shakes her head at the young man's happiness,
and says that when tribulation is sent to us we ought to
tabulate. This old lady, who, never having been blind,
knew nothing of its resources, seems to have written a
good deal of modern theology. I do not deny that there
is a certain naturalness about her inferences concerning
things she knows nothing about. When she appears in
the guise of a popular preacher or a doctor of divinity,
he sits down to consider what he would be and do if he
(otherwise, of course, retaining his present views) were a
materialist, or a sceptic, and how Paine and Voltaire
must have died — if they died logically. But having never
tried it, he is compelled to, evolve each result out of his

14 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
inner consciousness. The image so evolved must sooner
or istter be brought face to face with the fact, and the
contrast between the two is sometimes astonishing. Let
us review a few examples.
In former times, theologians could not imagine that
any man could have anTactual and conscientious disbelief
of their dogmas. They attributed all scepticism to an
evil heart, or to a desire to forget and hide the truth lest
it might check their evil propensities. This being their
premiss, it was but a natural inference that all sceptics
must be wicked men. Thus Thomas Paine was branded
as a drunkard— a pure fabrication — and Voltaire stigma
tised for immoralities of which he was innocent. But
there was another inference. These men being only
pretended unbelievers, it was but natural that when the
hour of death arrived, the disguise should fall, the truth
come out, and the terrors it was impossible really to dis
believe then come so close that they would cry for mercy
and die in the agonies of remorse. To suit that theory
fictitious scenes were invented for the deathbed of Paine
who died most peacefully, and that of Voltaire, whose
only trouble in his closing hours was that the priests hung
about him like vultures.
But that old theory broke down. The upright lives
of such men as Hume, and Herbert of Cherbury, and
Bolingbroke, and their peaceful deaths, reduced it to
absurdity. There has succeeded to it another  that
unless a man believe in immortality, his life must be
selfish, and he must have an excessive horror of death ¦
while, on the other hand, the believer in heaven sacrifices

CONSEQUENCES. 15

present for future happiness, and dies with joyful hope.
But thra theory breaks down under the facts just like the
other. The sceptical philosophers around us are apparently
no more selfish than other people. If they were devoted
to self, they would take care first of all not to express
their scepticism. There are eminent men of science
around us, unbelievers in Animism, whose abilities might
have made them bishops, but whose self-sacrificing devo
tion to what they believe true, causes them to live in
poverty, and under the denunciation of the comfortable
souls who find godliness to be great gain. Nor do we
find that heretics have any greater dread of death than
believers in a future life. The orthodox man for whom
the grave is a gate to Paradise, sends for the doctor just
as fast as the sceptic, arid never seems in any hurry to
enjoy his future bliss. On the other hand, no martyrs
have ever marched more fearlessly to death than the
revolutionists of France and Germany, whor in nine cases
out of ten, were unbelievers in any future life. The
unbeliever in a future life has not, indeed, much reason
for the gloom commonly ascribed to him. If he has lost
expectation of future joys, he has equally lost all apprehen
sion of future woes ; and, so far as the natural desire for
continued existence is concerned, he knows that, if it is
to be, he will attain it just as much as any believer in it
with the advantage that it will not have for a part of it
the torture of some of his friends.
Let us take another case, — the common idea of what it
is to be a fatalist or necessitarian. The believer in Free
will sits down and evolves from his inner consciousness,

16 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
the typical believer in Necessity. As the fatalist believes
that what will be will be ; that nothing can be altered by
the will of man ; so., he must assuredly be a man who sits
passive and allows things to take their own course. But
when ouT-speculative believer in Free-will comes to examine
the facts, helwids that the most active figures in history
have been those sSJrje believers in fate. They are such
men as the heroes df Greece ; as Paul and Mahomet ;
Luther, Calvin, and John Knox ; as .Cromwell and his
soldiers ; as the Puritans who founded the American
Commonwealth ;/men, aggressive, powerful, irresistible,
who have left therXimpress on the world in epochs ; men,
too, who, instead oy finding in their election to divine
favour, a reason jior self-indulgence, felt in it an inspira
tion to surrender their every power to what they conceived
to be thejrtill of God.
As^ppffiu example, we have before us the ordinary
confcdJPon of a materialist. Very few people are com
petent to pursue those philosophical studies which
uTiderlie the various conclusions called nominalism,
realism, intuitionalism, utilitarianism, idealism, material
ism. But the latter word has a familiar sound :
materialism is related to matter, and matter plainly means
the earth, and flesh and blood, food and drink ; conse
quently a materialist must mean a gross, fleshly character,
a man who believes in nothing he cannot bite, and, as
opposed to the idealist, he must be a man without ideas.
This popular notion of a materialist recalls the sad fate
of one of our artists, who made a sea-side picture, and
among the common objects of the sea-side which he

CONSEQUENCES. 17

painted on the sands was a blood-red lobster. He had
never seen a lobster, except as boiled for the table,
and he supposed it had the same colour when washed
up from the sea. He painted in accordance with his
experience; and his surprising work so added to his
experience, that he is now, I believe, a respectable mer
chant. And so the average orthodox man bestows on the
materialist his own experience of matter, and boils him
in the hot water of his catechetic consciousness very red.
But when we come to consider the materialists as they
are, we find them quite the reverse. It would be difficult
— I might almost say impossible — to find in the long list
of eminent materialists a single gross or sensual character.
English materialists have been known to us as men
especially consecrated to ideas. They have been such
men as Shelley, in whose poems of Nature Robert
Browning found a high correspondency with the divine ;
or Robert Owen, and his fellow socialists, giving up life
and fortune in the pursuit of an ideal society ; and such
men are fairly followed to-day by the men of science, and
the positivists, and the secularists — men of plain living
and high thinking, almost ascetic in their self-denial, and
ever dreaming of higher education, of co-operation, and
of other schemes for the moral, intellectual, or social
advancement of mankind. Such are the men for whom
Christian prelates in their palaces sigh, deploring amid
their luxury, the gross materialism of the times !
Now, let me. not be misunderstood. The fact that
believers in these several doctrines have contradicted by
their lives and characters the & priori theories formed

18 IDOLS AND IDEALS. ,
about them, does not prove their doctrines true. The
fact that Thomas Paine, when the Americans offered him.
money for his writings, refused to take it, poor as he was,
but devoted it to the cause of liberty, refutes the idea
that an infidel must be selfish ; but it does not prove
Paine's belief to be true. Nor does the life of Paul prove
the truth of predestination, nor that of Shelley the truth
of materialism. As little do such facts show that there is
no connection between intellectual convictions and
practical life. What such facts dp show, is just this :
that the implied method of dealing with questions is
treacherous. Truth is not to be tested by anyone's
speculative apprehensions as to its results. It is as if a
painter should sit down at the base of a hill he has never
ascended, to sketch the landscape which he supposes to be
seen from its Summit. The height may command out
looks he cannot imagine until he has climbed it. If the
orthodox believer really occupied the point of view reached
by the thinker seen only from his own, he might find him
surrounded by prospects, forces, influences, which alter
the case materially. Every liberal thinker's experience
must confirm this. The free-thinker knows well that it is
the sign of an embryonic phase of inquiry, to dread its
consequences upon the character or happiness of any man
woman, or child. It has not brought gloom to himself'
nor demoralization ; he does not find his life a discord iii
contrast with any " melodious days '' when he believed
in a jealous God and a yawning hell; he knows that
truthfulness is the sustaining thing, and the ardent pursuit
of truth able to fill heart and brain with enthusiasm and

CONSEQUENCES. 19

hope. Why should he imagine that what has brought to
himself liberation and light should bring a shadow on the
life of his " praying sister," whom he can only regard as
a victim on whom Superstition, like a ghoul, is preying ?
The free inquirer will discover full soon that the only
" saving faith " is a perfect trust in truth, and that the
only real infidelity is the belief that a lie can do better
work than truth. He will take to heart Montaigne's
advice, and fear only Fear. No alarms about the con
sequences of the diffusion of truth can shake his nerves
or cause the balance to tremble in his hand. Truth has
ever justified herself. She can look back to fair results,
to the noblest triumphs, and in their light see the, chains
that bind all the lions on her path. We pursue our in
quiries, not without experience, not in the infancy of the
world, but amid the mighty shades of heroic forerunners ;
amid a cloud of brave witnesses, who knew that the
children of Truth have nothing to fear, living or dying ;
whose fidelities have built up the temples of Science and
Civilization amid the clamours of cowards ; and they all
cry shame on the fears that would betray our reason and
sap our strength ; they cry Onward ! to the heart that
abandons the flesh-pots of falsehood, even for a wilder
ness where leads the pillar of truth — be it fire, be it
cloud.

II

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. I.
O age is conscious of its own superstitions. It
would no doubt have surprised Socrates very
much if he could have foreseen that his last
words, " We owe a cock to ^Esculapius," would one day
be regarded as a striking instance of how superstition
clings to the very martyrs of reason. With what un
suspecting confidence does Christ speak of the devil and
his angels, at the very moment when he is proclaiming a
deity whose love goes out to all, like the sunshine falling
alike on good and evil. Such survivals of popular
delusion in the greatest minds of the past, along with
great principles of truth, may well turn our eyes
searchingly on ourselves. It is true, that so far as the
detection of hereditary and common errors are concerned,
we have great advantages over even the foremost men of
the far past. We have developed the comparative method,
and the means of applying it to our beliefs. It would
have been impossible for Socrates or Christ to trace the
opinions around them, hunt them back to their origin in
some Indian metaphor or Assyrian fable. Nor did they

24 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
have a long and carefully-kept record of many ages, the
converging experiences of many races, which surround
the man of to-day with mirrors in which he can see his
own age reflected. They had but little chance of study
ing history, — philosophy teaching by example. We
should fall far beneath our opportunities if we did not
detect the familiar fallacies around us to a larger extent
than was possible to the past, now that we are brought
face to face with them as they existed in the past, and
can know the results of them as worked out by inter
vening generations.
It appears to be the one opinion held in common by
men of all shades of opinion that the old order of Christ
endom is going to pieces. It is confessed in the rage of
protestant fanatics against the spread of unbelief, and
equally in the outcries of catholics as they see their
strongest organisations suppressed, and their Pope
abandoned by nations he once controlled. Amid the
confusion brought on by this state of things, the most
hopeful sign is the degree to which leaders of opinion are
studying those eras of history which correspond to this
era. Remarkable studies of this kind have appeared
which merit the closest attention. The new work entitled
" Supernatural Religion," contributes a large amount of
knowledge concerning Christian Mythology. We there
may see how on the breaking up of the old Hebrew
religion, and also the Greek and Egyptian religions, their
fables were saved from the deluge on the Christian ark to
populate the world again with superstitions. Valuable
too is Dr. Draper's " History of the Conflict between

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. 25
Science and Religion," published in the excellent
International series. Sir Henry Maine's histories of our
institutions are invaluable books, showing by what
forces and laws the civilisation around us was built, and
enabling us to detect the same in the evolution which
takes the form of apparent disintegration. Such works
as Michelet's " La Sorcellerie,"' Mr. Tylor's " Primitive
Culture," Sir John Lubbock's " Primitive Man," De
Gubernatis' " Zoological Mythology," Mr.Jlalston's works
on the Folklore of Russia — and all books on Folklore — lay
bare the roots of a thousand superstitions which, in their
polished if not their rude form, we encounter every day.
Not the least important service is that which is done us
by the more scholarly of the magazines. In the month
of May (1875) two articles appeared which bring to a
careful reader a more intimate knowledge of the realities
of Greek religion than any University could teach him
in a year. One of these is a paper on " Hesiod," in the
" Fortnightly Review," and the other is in " Fraser's
Magazine," entitled " Sea Studies."
The latter is especially important, notwithstanding
some very questionable inferences. The fine scholar who
wrote it, Mr. Froude, devoted the main time of a long
voyage to reading the plays of Euripides, and gives us a
profound analysis of the " Bacchae." It is certain that
in the works of that poet are embodied the most real
and salient features of Greek life and thought during the
third and fourth centuries before Christ. Poets and
philosophers there were in that period whose works bring
us their individual feeling and thought ; but the dramatic

26 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
writer embodies the sense of the people, and aims to
place on the stage before them that which shall show the
very age and body of their own time, its form and pres
sure. Euripides was born about 2,350 years ago, and it
is the Greece of that epoch which speaks to us from his
page. Our current impression of Greece, as it existed in
those centuries, is derived from the splendid literature
which the revival of classical learning gave us. We
know Greece by its poetry, its philosophy, and their
gods and goddesses appear to us shining in purple and
gold as the poets idealised them. Time and distance
have destroyed what was trivial. We see the noble forms
of Plato and Socrates in the Academy, but hear not the
noise of the brutal mob dragging one of them to death
and the other into slavery. But the terrible disenchant
ing voice of Euripides comes to tell us that in his time
all those gods and goddesses were to the people demons
and hags. Apollo, Minerva, Venus, Juno, — they were
all devils, thirsting for blood, demanding human victims,
entrapping human beings in horrible crimes for the mere
pleasure of vengeance on mortals for guilt which they
(the gods) wished to monopolise.

II.
Bacchus first appears in Mythology as a beneficent
being, who taught mankind the culture of truits, and the
vine only among others, taught them laws, arts, 'religion.
In the time of Euripides-the great intellectual age of

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. 27
Greece — he appears as a fearful power, inspired only by
intoxication, raging through the world, claiming supreme
worship, and inflicting dire evils on everybody who re
fused him homage. He comes to Thebes, and when the
people refuse to believe on him, he strikes all the women
mad, and transforms them, as it were, to beasts.
Pentheus, the king who ventures to doubt whether
the god of these mad women is a real god, is told by a
priest that even if Bacchus is not a god, it might be as
well to call him so by a pious fraud, as the masses are all
rushing after him ; but Pentheus will do nothing of the
kind. He sends Bacchus to prison : of course the god
laughs him to scorn. Pentheus is led through the streets
amid universal scorn, the thyrsus of Bacchus waving
over his head. Then came the grand finale of the play.
The sceptical king is carried into a forest, where his
own mother and her female attendants, maddened by
Bacchus, take him for a beast, tear him limb from limb,
and the drama ends with the grand tableau of the mother
coming to her senses, holding in her lap the head of her
son slain by herself, while above is the god smiling at
the triumphant proof he has given of his power and
divinity. Such was the divine drama of blood, which the popu
lace of Athens crowded to witness in their Opera
House. Now, go to the Opera House in London, and
you shall see crowds gathered still, to listen to Mr. Moody
preaching the divine drama of blood. You shall find
thousands still listening to the story of a God of terror
and vengeance, exacting blood to appease him, and ready

28 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

to strike dead even English scoffers who doubt the
modern manifestation of his power.
The connection between the two is not imaginary ; it
is strictly historical. The twelve plays of Euripides dis
close, first, that the ancient Greek religion had entirely
passed out of the belief of "intelligent people. It was the
age of great men— Plato, Socrates, Aristophanes, ^Eschylus,
Sophocles ; and amid them the popular religion lay — a
corpse. But how does a religion die? Simply by the
brains going out of it. When cultivated people either
abjure it, or if, for the sake of popularity, they give it lip
service, cease to guide their action by it ; when sensible
men pay no heed to its terrors or its promises ; that is
one symptom of death. Another is that so often por
trayed by Euripides,' — madness. Nervous women es
pecially, made insane by clinging to the old dogmas,
with their terrible threats, divine wrath, instant danger,
infernal torment. And, finally, the most formidable sign
of death, the religion falls completely into the hands of
the gross, the ignorant, the base. That is the setting in
of decay. But it is one thing for a thing to decay, another for it
to be buried. The terrible truth is that when a religion
decays every particle of it has a chance of becoming the
seed of a new life,— a life that may be good, but also
may be evil. Now let us turn to our Greek mirror again,
and observe what took place when the old religion
perished, because culture ebbed out of it. Each bit of it
became the centre of a party of vulgar, deluded people,
who raised it into new power. But among the displaced

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. 29
elements one was found to have the chief element of
popularity in it — that which was not native in the
religion, but had come there from the Semitic race.
This idea was that every god demands the sacrifice of
that which is most dear to mortals, that which is without
blemish, most pure and beautiful : in early times it had
been thought sufficient to appease God if first fruits were
offered, but Cain fell into disgrace because Abel offered
something more costly : then it might seem as if the
lamb or the dove might answer; but, as these did not
seem to- change the course of Nature, there was a sug
gestion that human victims were necessary. This idea
was unknown to the early Greeks as to their Aryan
ancestors. It had been caught from Jewish sources.
Jephtha's daughter reappears, even to her name, as the
Greek Iphigenia, who was nearly sacrificed because of
her youth and beauty, but saved as Isaac was in the
Semitic story. But this idea, which had barely tinged
the old religion of Greece, on its decay became' the
leading thing. Six of the plays of Euripides were written
to present to the people this new idea in all its tragical
varieties. The once beautiful gods now appear devastating
countries, and only becoming pacified when a virgin or
beautiful youth is sacrificed. When the heroic Macaria
is sacrificed her highest consolation is that she is passing
to eternal sleep, annihilation : to dwell with such gods as
demanded her sacrifice offered no attractions. " O that
there may be nothing !" she cries ; " to die is of all ills the
surest remedy." On the other hand this horrible idea
which Judea had sent to Greece had died out of Judea

30 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
itself. Only animals had for ages been there sacrificed.
Christ was innocent of any such idea as remission
through a human victim. But when his name was carried
to Greece as founder of a new religion, it was found that
this idea of human sacrifice had grown to enormous pro
portions. And when, some centuries after Christ, priests
manufactured a religion and called it Christianity, the
main parts of the machinery were a vindictive God, a
fearful hell, and the offering up of a pure and perfect
being as the only nieans of pacifying the deity and
escaping hell.
The theory of atonement by human sacrifice thus
gained a new lease of life in Christianity. Fortunately,
in one sense, it was mystical and not practical — at least
not literal — in its application ; the blood of Christ was
declared efficacious without further slaughter of human
victims. Nevertheless the principle and spirit were there,
and had to work themselves out in Christian history.
They became logically embodied in the superstition that
the natural powers of man were to be sacrificed — his
reason, love, affection, to be offered up by vows of
celibacy, renunciation of all joys. God was best pleased
when men and women became mendicants, hermits,
monks and nuns. People were taught that they could
win a smile to the stern countenance of the deity by
rolling themselves in thorns or by tortures of flagellation.
The Catholic Church gradually outgrew that idea, when
it had drawn within itself the learning and excellence of
Europe ; it became, on the other hand, the church of
festivities, of the arts, and even of indulgences. Friar

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. 31
Lombez preached " God is joy. You destroy the
divine image in your soul by sadness." St. Gregory
reckoned " sorrow " among the seven capital sins. St.
Francis d'Assisi brought roses to plant in place of the
thorns with which St. Benedict had torn himself seven
centuries before. But the old sacrificial idea was still
strong in the sombre North Germany, and England still
held to the ascetic view. God was appeased by the
sacrifice of the most perfect virginal being in the uni
verse, but no one could enjoy the vicarious benefit with
out an individual sacrifice of carnal reason and all worldly
pleasures. That was the doctrine of the Reformation,
which was a sword of two edges ; while one cut through
sacerdotal chains, the other mutilated the fair proportions
of human life. And it is thus that the human sacrifices
of Israel, of Assyria, of Egypt, of Greece, are traceable
through history till they appear in Mr. Moody's sermon
on "The Blood." III.
Looking into the period of Greece when its galaxy of
great men stood aloof from the popular religion, and
gave it over to the Athenian Moodys and Sankeys to
make it completely into their own image, we see point
for point the features of our own time. The deities of
Greece were born as beautiful idealisations of sun, cloud,
star ; under theology they hardened to self-willed omni
potent men and women devastating heaven and earth
with their passions ; at last relegated to popular ignorance,

32 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
they were deformed to demons, and each that had been
a poet's metaphor in the beginning, before it perished,
cost its holocaust of human victims. How goes on the
process with us ? When Francis Galton of the Royal
Society questions the chief scientific men as to their re
ligion and finds ninety-nine in one hundred repudiating
orthodoxy ; when literature and art have become com
pletely secularised, the age of Euripides has reappeared.
The brains are out and the dogmatic body dies. And the
worst symptoms of its decay begin to appear. The putre
scent particles find a congenial soil in prevailing ignorance
and sprout up with new vigour. The decay of superstition
among the educated is answered by its growth among the
vulgar. As the rites of Bacchus drove the Thebans mad,
the doctrine of " The Blood " is increasing English in
sanity. This insanity is not only visible in the increase
of lunatics in hospitals — seventy per cent, increase during
the year 1874-5 in Scotland alone through the revival;
but it is visible in the agonisings of ritualists before their
altars, in pilgrimages to mediseval shrines, the canon
isation of deluded nuns, " fasting girls '' in Wales and
Belgium, the appearance of the stigmata of Christ on
morbid women. In a yet lower class it appears in the
growth of fanaticism. We can hardly realise in a city so
civilised as this, what is the reign of dogmatic terror in
some other regions. Take Lancashire, for example.
Lancashire, once famed for its witches, has preserved a
mass of superstitions unsurpassed perhaps by any other
English county. The swarming populations still believe
in boggarts, bargeists and ghosts, and cower when they

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS.

33

hear a dog howl at night All the commerce of Liver
pool and Manchester have not availed to dispel these
phantasms. When Mr. Moody was holding his meetings
in Manchester, he found a popular feeling strong enough
to support his wildest utterances. The crowds seemed to
gloat on his horrors to an extent which encouraged him in
strange extravagances. He had heard of a lady who had
prevented her daughter from going to his inquiry meeting,
and to a vast crowd in Free Trade Hall he depicted that
lady and her daughter in hell undergoing punishments so
foul and frightful — depicted this in such gross and vulgar
language — that none but an audience paralysed by super
stition would have tolerated it for a moment. Precisely
such punishments were depicted on the Grecian stage as
overtaking all who refused to join in with the wild rites
of Bacchus. A lady who had gone from curiosity with
her son, wrote a protest against such scandalous proceed
ings. But no paper would print her letter. The editors
said that the popular feeling was such that they were
compelled to refuse all communications either for or
against the revivalists. These men preach no new
doctrines. They simply quicken and restore the two or
three worst dogmas — divine wrath, original sin, blood-
atonement, which had been quietly abandoned by the
intelligent. Even in the time of King James the notion
of a personal devil had become so vulgar that the trans
lators of our version had modified several utterances of
Christ — one in the Lord's Prayer — which sanctioned
belief in Satan. But all that is revived ; the ministers of
.. religion have generally aided in its revival ; and the
3

34 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
popular success of the renewed terrors promise to lead to
a growth of those superstitions whose term seemed to"
have been reached.

IV.

In another direction there has germinated out of the
decay of the old faith a formidable growth of ghostly and
ghastly marvels. When Romanism died in England, its
remains sprang up in witchcraft : the decay of Christian
supernaturalism has now scattered the seeds of ghost-
craft. There can be little doubt of the sincerity of the great
mass of believers in the alleged spirit manifestations.
There is no call for indignation towards them, nor con
tempt. They are usually persons of sensitive, or morbid,
nervous organisation, who bear in their hearts the wounds
which once were healed for such by priestly consolations
no longer available. Emotional, warm-hearted, they are
at the same time morally alienated from the discredited
creeds around them, and have gone forth seeking rest
and hitherto finding none. The support which culture,
poetry, and art bring to exceptional minds amid the
suspense of faith which has followed the exposure of
sacerdotal imposture and traditional error, is not avail
able for them, and they especially can not bear the
doubts and misgivings with which, since the disappear
ance of animistic creeds, the future of their loved and
lost is enveloped. They are to be respected also for the

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. 35
veracity and simplicity with which they reject the theo-
* logical casuistry, which declares to be absurd and im
possible in the present age events precisely similar to
those on which, as occurring in the past, the entire
fabric of religious authority rests ! To this it may be
added, to the credit of spiritualists, that, in the gentle
and kindly characteristics of their belief, are reflected not
only their own fine qualities, but not less the progress of
the race. As compared with witchcraft we find instead
of dark and deadly diabolisms and malicious spells, the
belief in good angels; and the spirits of the dead, whose
return was once believed to be fraught with danger, are
now invoked as guardians of the living.
The many virtues and warm affections which char
acterise the sincere believers in spiritualism can not fail
to increase our exasperation against those who try to
turn such sacred feelings and qualities into a means of
pecuniary gain. But even against the miserable vagrant
mediums who play upon the morbid nerves of sorrowing
women, and profess to call up their dead at so much per
ghost, it would seem that an honest and thoughtful man
can not spare too much of his indignation. For behind
the unctuous impostor and his victim there stands in the
shadow that fatal established hypocrisy which has pre
pared the way for the tragedy, and still steadily paralyses
every arm that would prevent its recurrence.
It is not the Messrs. " Sludge " who have drilled into
the people their belief in witches, sorceries, miracles;
it is not they who have carefully taught every English
child that it is infidelity to believe in the uniformity of

36 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

natural laws ; nor is it they who have enforced by ages
of argument the credulity which meekly . accepts the
weakest testimony of ignorant people against the ac
cumulated and demonstrated knowledge of the human
race. This 'miserable work has been done not by
mediums, but by theologians sent out among the people
by great universities. It is they who put the Bible into
the hands of every man, woman, and child ; declare it
the word of God by Act of Parliament ; and then, when
any one professes to Call up Saul, declare that what is
an infallible fact in Endor is a palpable imposture in
London ! They now find that it is easier to prevent any
standard of reason from being set up in simple minds
than to give them the double tongue. The masses have
accepted the principle of unreason so carefully drilled
into them by Church and State ; they accept all the
witchcraft and thaumaturgy of the " Word of God : "
what they have not accepted is the sacerdotal art of
affecting to believe what they really reject. The spiritu
alists boast that they number millions in England and
America. Why not? Every vulgar church and chapel
has prepared the soil for the tares they sow. Every child
is taught in its school that the air swarms with imps and
angels. It is so written in the Bible, in the Catechism,
in every body of divinity. The common people are not
sophisticated enough to understand that all this is only
to be taught and said, not to be really believed and acted
upon. They take it to heart. The child who has been
always taught that Matthew, Mark, Luke,.and John stand
at its bed-posts, will not think it very wonderful if they

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. 37
should occasionally signify their presence by raps. Why
should not angels manifest themselves? Why should
the dead re-appear only among Jews, and the far past
monopolise miracles and the secrets of the grave ?

V.
Wherever spiritualism goes in Christendom its basis
in the Christian religion is revealed by the ease with
which it is adapted to the prevailing notions of the
populace. It is too much, perhaps, to anticipate that
Christians generally will acknowledge the legitimacy of
this newest offspring of their system ; but honest Pro-?
testants may be enabled to, realise the fact to some extent
as it is indicated in connection with Catholicism.
As I write a man named Etienne Geoffre, a gardener,
is imprisoned at Narbonne, in France, for having " ex
ercised the art of healing without certificate, diploma, or
letters of recommendation, by means of water lotions,
spiritualistic practices, and the sale of spiritualistic
books." A large crowd is said to have attended the
trial, made up of spiritualists and those who believed
themselves to have been healed by Geoffre. The pri
soner's counsel argued that to heal in the manner made
use of by his client was not trenching on the field of
science and art, but was a religious act, similar to the
cures wrought by holy water, or to the sacred fountains
at Lourdes and La Salette ; and he further argued that
to condemn a man on such grounds would arraign many
holy things countenanced by the Church, and expose

38 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
to a penalty all who believed themselves able to attain
by prayer and the ardent love of God what is unattainable
by science. The argument was very strong, and may
remind us of one used by a French prosecutor in the
days of witch-trials, when, in answer to one who denied
the power of the devil on earth, he exclaimed, — " Then
all this ecclesiastical machinery is a pretence : Heaven
itself is equally a dream : the pillars of the Church
and of Paradise rest upon the floors of the Pit." The
argument which could burn a man then was not able to
save a man the other day at Narbonne : Etienne Geoffre
was sentenced to pay a fine of five hundred francs, and
in default of payment was sent to prison.
The means employed by this French spiritualist for
healing were lotions or draughts of water from the river
Aude, the laying on of hands, and prayer. Every
Saturday the gardener's cottage was besieged by sick
people, and it was stated in court that on one occasion
fifty carts and carriages were seen collected near his house.
Etienne pronounced a prayer over each, causing the
sufferer to repeat it after him ; he was also careful to pay
his homage to the Church by stating that the cures were
wrought by the late Curd d'Ars.
In passing sentence on Geoffre the court was careful
not to deny the reality of the curative effects, which
indeed might have led to popular scepticism as to the
genuineness of similar effects produced at the holy
fountains where the healing mediums wear cowls. The
court naively endorses spiritualism as a fact, but punishes
it for poaching on the ecclesiastical preserves. It will be

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS.

39

obvious to every Protestant that the agitation at Narbonne
is part of a general excitement in France related to the
popular religion. In old catholic times Scotland was
especially noted for the number of its holy springs which
the Virgin Mary or other saints had rendered curative.
But although Scotland has now many spiritualistic
"circles " and " mediums,'' none of them ever send invalids
to the springs which Puritanism declared unholy. On
the other hand, in Ireland, where the holy wells and pools
are still believed in, spiritualism makes but little headway.
Spiritualism finds its stronghold among the Protestants
of America and England, because among them Science
and Protestantism have cleared away the Virgin, the
saints, holy wells and priestly marvels, but, having done
so much, have not yet been able to alter the mental
atmosphere in which they flourished; they are conse
quently compelled to see a new growth of saints and
miracles under new names. This is evident from the
readiness with which spiritualists believe contemporary
catholic miracles. Lately, when Professor Lankester
wrote to the London Times his exposure of an eminent
medium, that journal printed it side by side with a letter
it had received from Monsignor Capel declaring his faith
in a miraculous cure at Lourdes. The Times commenting
on the Catholic's letter said : "The whole story must be
regarded with much the same feeling as is a tale of
wonders achieved by a medium." Whereupon the
"Spiritualist" newspaper wrote: — "Just so; there is
indeed an essential homogeneity throughout the multiform
phenomena of the spiritual realm. All are evidently due

40 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
to the same unknown agency, the influence of which has
ever been powerful on mankind."
To the eye of Comparative Mythology the spiritualised
lbtion of the Narbonne gardener, the Lourdes fountain,
the holy water at the church door, the baptismal font of
Protestantism, all represent diminished forms of the sacred
Ganges and the diluvial purification of the earth in the
traditions of the Ark. The dove, as the first voice of
Spring, symbolised in early ages renovation, whether sent
out from the ark to hover over a baptised world, or
descending on a baptised Christ, or appearing still to the
Hindu devotee emerging from the stream of immortality
which the god Siva created at Ambah-Naut, where the
pilgrim meets that deity in the form of a dove, in whose
flight an omen is discerned. Now, in warm and sunny
France and other Southern climes, the stream and
bathing part of these ancient symbols have been preserved
in degrees varying with the climate, from the dipping in
fountains in France and Spain to some regions of the
Eastern Church, where no man or woman will enter
church on Sunday unless they have been bodily under
water within the previous twenty-four hours. But in cold
and clammy England, by a process of natural selection,
the symbolical watery condition of renewal or healing has
gradually subsided ; and as the cross remains after the
crucified form has been removed, so the dove remains
after the renovating water, has ceased to be of importance
except to a few sects. These facts will show the signifi
cance of the following : A distinguished female medium
in. London states that one night when she was in a trance

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. 41
the Holy Ghost came to her in the form of a dove. When
she recovered from her trance she observed that there was
an actual dove in her room. She procured a large cage
for the bird, and fed it with the utmost care-. One day
the dove, having shed a feather, the medium took it, and",
folding it in an envelope, gave it to a sick friend, who was
immediately benefited in health by receiving it. Since
then she has carefully treasured every feather cast by the
dove; divides up each, puts the bits into separate small
wrappers shaped like a heart, marks on each the words
" Holy Ghost," and these are to-day considered by their
spiritualistic- owners as possessing the talismanic power to
save them from many dangers. The female medium who
got up, or was the subject of this remarkable and elaborated
vision and scheme, is quite ignorant ; she is no- Catholic;
and probably never saw an Agnus dei in her life. Her
learning in ancient symbolism probably amounts to
having sung in early life the Methodist hymn, " Come,
Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove, with all Thy quickening
powers." Yet in the superstition just related, we have
the very accent of the dove legend, which has persisted
through thousands of years. The little drama is organised
after the Protestant form — i. e., without the lavatory
associations which are preponderant in the spiritualistic
symbolism of the French mediums, who have to deal with
a peasantry confirmed in their faith in holy water. But
what subtlety and elaboration is here manifested ! No
solar myth found in our classical dictionaries can be more.
complete..

42 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

' VI.
It is obvious that science can do nothing directly
against superstitions that grow within their natural habitat
of ignorance. Science has fairy tales of its own. and
marvels which shame the poor miracles of sorcery ; but
science has got to proceed as slowly to its decorated
temples as ever did the religion which began with a fish-
boat for its pulpit, and a handful of working men for its
clergy. " The present promoters of spiritual phenomena,"
says Professor Tyndall, "divide themselves into two
classes, one of which needs no demonstration, while the
other is beyond the reach of proof. The victims like to
believe, and they do not like to be undeceived. Science
is perfectly powerless in the presence of this frame of
mind. It is, moreover, a state perfectly compatible with
extreme intellectual subtlety, and a capacity for devising
hypotheses, which only require the hardihood engendered
by strong conviction, or by callous mendacity, to render
them impregnable. The logical feebleness of science is
not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the need
of superstition, not by logic, but by slowly rendering the
mental soil unfit for its cultivation. When science appeals
to uniform experience, the spiritualist will retort ' how do
you know that a uniform experience will continue uni
form ? You tell me that the sun has risen for six
thousand years : that is no proof that it will rise to-morrow ;
within- the next twelve hours it may be puffed out by the'

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS.

43

Almighty.' Taking this ground, a man may maintain the
story of ' Jack and the Beanstalk ' in the face of all the
science in the world. We urge, in vain, that science has
given us all the knowledge of the universe which we now
possess, while spiritualism has added nothing to that
knowledge. The drugged soul is beyond the reach of
reason. It is in vain that impostors are exposed, and the
special demon cast out ; he has but slightly to change his
shape, return to his house, and find it ' empty, swept and
garnished.' " *
Of one thing, however, science, its representatives and
its believers, may now be fully aware, namely, that the
established and prevailing religion of Europe and America
is systematically fostering the mental soil out of which
alone this superstition can grow. Its Christ is a great
spirit medium, its credentials are thaumaturgic phenomena,
the thing it most discourages is necessarily that faith in
the uniformity of nature which were fatal to its authority
and influence.
Rational men and women may also take note of the
stupendous fact, that in the presence of a new and vast
superstition, Christianity has shown itself utterly powerless
to check or control it. How can the churches impugn
the belief in witches, ghosts, omens, the power of ignorant
people and their prayers to change the order of nature,
when their own Bible is full of such things, and to deny
them is to assail their own foundation ?
And as it is with spiritualism, so is it with all other

* "Fragments of Science," p. 321.

44 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
superstitions, whether surviving or growing in our time.
As the first Christian missionaries did not dare to deny
the existence of the pagan deities for fear of admitting a
sceptical principle, which would include their own in
visible powers, so now the churches dare not defend the
principles even of common sense and sanity against the
most cruel delusions, because they are, in the like case,
with them ; to deny them is to surrender to the one
enemy alike of ghost-craft and priest-craft — Science.
These delusions (as I must reiterate) will multiply and
increase just so long as the leading nations of the earth
are without a real religion, whose first characteristic must
be to include its best wisdom, its noblest character, and
command the conviction and enthusiasm of its most
virtuous and scholarly men and women. A religion
which has to apologise for its existence to such is already
cumbering the ground.
If the very light offered us be darkness, how great is
that darkness ! The divorce between the culture of a nation
and its religious institutions is, as we have seen, a two-edged
fact : precisely in the ratio of the abandonment of those
institutions by the enlightened, must proceed their
corruption. The day that came to Greece and Rome,
when every fair god and goddess became hag and
demon, has come fearfully upon us. When such a man
as Thomas Carlyle, amid his glowing words of love for a
clergyman, pauses to describe that clergyman's aberration
into orthodox orders, as an entrance on the highway of
dead damnable putrescent cant,* we have come upon a
' Life of Sterling," chap. XV.

* (<

GROWING SUPERSTITIONS. 45
formidable crisis. A religion of England detestable to
Carlyle is virtually disestablished. Before such alienation
of a great heart, a noble genius, a stainless virtue, from
the established religion of a country could occur that
religion must have long been sinking under the control
of its baser elements ; and the process of corruption
must increase. The creeds and observances unrestrained
by the presence and interest of the intelligent and cul
tivated, must be left more and more to ignorance and
vulgarity, to be made into their own wretched image and
likeness. The salt being no longer purchasable, the
savourless semblance of it alone procurable, decay must
go on, poisoning the air more and more with malaria, and
breeding foul things that creep and devour.
Small things, it may be to-day, to-morrow monsters !
indeed we are destined to see the old dragons of bar
barism returning — moral chimseras, fanatic Hydras,
revival of Python phantasms, — let all true souls see to
it that, so far as lay in them, each shall meet his slayer.
Science, education, literature, will be increasingly strong
and brave, as they have a free and earnest constituency
to uphold them in their ascending, extending light,
and we shall find our Apollo, whose arrows shall speed
in splendour through the air, and send this brood of
darkness back, recoiling to the caves of Night.

in.
FAITH, FACT AND FAIRY TALE.

FAITH, FACT, AND FAIRY TALE.

HERE is a current impression that fairies are
not any more believed in, and the booksellers
say that even among children fairy tales are
going out of fashion. I read lately in a volume of
German fairy tales the following lines : —
O the happy, happy season
Ere bright Fancy bent to Reason ;
When the spirit, of our stories
Filled the mind with unseen glories ;
Told of creatures of the air,
Spirits, fairies, goblins rare,
Guarding man with tenderest care ;
When before the blazing hearth,
Listening to the tale of mirth,
Sons and daughters, mpther, sire,
Neighbours, all drew round the fire,
Lending open ear aud faith
To what some learned gossip, saith !
But the fays and all are gone,
Reason, Reason reigns alone ;
Every gtace and charm is fleet,
All by dulness banished ;
Thus we ponder, slow and sad
After Truth the world is mad ;
Ah, believe me, Error too
Hath, its charms nor sad nor few.

50 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
These lines convey well enough a wide-spread feeling
that there is something incongruous between reason
and imagination, and that sentiment is chilled by
science. I could not but note how odd it was that these
•lines should be written in a volume of fairy tales
whose complete recovery from the past was due to
Grimm, a man of science. In folk-lore and fable it is
science and rationalism which are preserving antiquity,
just as they are preserving our ancient monuments. It is
the dull, unreasoning world which would take the dolmens
of Stonehenge to build a fence, and treat our fairy tales as
mere paganism, were it not for the scholar and the man
of science.
It is true that the age of reason, wherever it has
gone, deprives the fairy tale of its realism, so that even
children are hardly deceived by them any more. But
we can hardly deplorethis, when we reflect that the child
Who used to believe in good fairies had also to believe
in demons, dragons, and bloodthirsty ogres — lineal de-
scendents of the hell-hound Orcus. Many a child has
been kept awake at night, trembling in the dark, for fear
of witches riding in at the window on broomsticks. On
the whole, we need hardly mourn over the vanished
fairies any more than over the vanished gods ; that is,
the passing away of literal belief in them. All their
sentiment is preserved as they appear now on the minia
ture stage of childish fancy.
The line says, Blessings brighten as they take their
flight. It is equally true that things not blessings may
look such when they have taken their flight. Just as

FAITH, FACT, AND FAIRY TALE. 51
Schiller mourned that he could not believe in the gods
of Greece, some minds that have not yet given heart
and hand to the recognised truth of reason, may bemoan
their lost beliefs. But what they remember fondly is
only a few rosy features of their orthodoxy, — a Provi
dence to pet them, and prospect of a luxurious Paradise.
Just set such minds genuinely back into orthodoxy, the
whole system of it, with sulphur smoke coming up to
wither all their Paradise, and a jealous god angry every
day, and they would be glad to get out of it again.
People do not always remember the implications of what
they sigh. for. They are like the man who sighed for his
boyhood again, until the fairy proceeded to grant his wish
by taking away his wife and children, whereupon he
decided that if he couldn't be a boy and have his wife
and children too he would prefer to go on in the old way.
There is a great deal of mistaken sentiment about
the early days of childlike faith, and their alleged superior
beauty to the age of reason. Now, the truth is, the age
of reason represents a small spot on the map of the
world, and even at this day the belts surrounding it are
shaded off in varying degrees -until we find a very large
one in which the dark ages still reign. There are places
and people enough that still devoutly believe in a religion
of fairy tales, and it is by no means difficult to estimate
their advantages and disadvantages as compared with
those who hold rational opinions. •
On the 9th day of October, 1876, the chief London
journal contained two very remarkable letters. The one
came from Spain, the other from America : by notable

52 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
coincidence they appeared on the same day. The letter
from Spain gave an account of a Catholic pilgrimage to
certain sacred places at Montserrat. Among others the
pilgrims devoutly visited a cavern called Juan Garin.
They implicitly believe the legend that once there dwelt
in that cave a prayerful monk, named Juan Garin, who,
however, committed a sin. For that one sin he was
transformed into a wild beast, and roamed the forest as
such until he was at last restored to humanity by the
voice of a child five months old.
The other letter, that from , America, related how a
huge rock in the bed of a sea was skilfully honey
combed, filled with explosive materials. On a bright
Sunday morning — albeit the potent Sabbatarian fairy
protested, against the desecration; — the engineer lifted his
little daughter two years of age in his arms, bade her
touch a shining button of metal; the dimpled finger
touched the metali : that touch exploded 52,000 pounds
of powder, and ploughed clear and made safe the chief
highway of ships, on the eastern coast of America.
What connection is there between the splendid fact
from America and the weird legend from Spain ? One is
a dream of which the other is fulfilment. Not without a
certain dim significance of its own is that story of the
monk in his. cave, sunk by sin to a beast, restored to
humanity by a baby's voice. Since that ancient Hebrew
vision of the happy era when the earth shall be swayed
by gentleness, and the lion and the lamb together be led
by a little child, there has been a half-conscious dream in
the hearts of the lowly of a day when the pride and violence

, FAITH, FACT, AND FAIRY TALE. 53
of the world shall be brought down, and the child's
innocence be stronger than the warrior's ferocity. The
wild beast transformed to humanity by a child's voice is
but one of innumerable fables that report this pious
aspiration of the simple and lowly.
In the American event the dream is realised. Fifty-
two thousand pounds represents a force which used
destructively might have laid New York in ruins. That
is the same power which to-day is desolating Eastern
provinces, — the power as wielded by fanaticism sitting
in its cavern of superstition, till transformed to a wild
beast. It is the power which sleeps to-day in the arsenals
and magazines of more civilised Europe, but, unless the
voice of peace can master the beast of selfishness, may
soon leap forth to make Europe a hell of unchained
passions. But lo ! across the ocean, science is seen binding all
that wild power to a baby's finger ; enables the gentlest
touch, guided by pure intelligence, to wield the lightning
of fabled Jove, dart it to the heart of a barrier of rock in
the sea's depth, there waking an earthquake and directing
it to a beneficent aim, — all without harm to a human
being ! That is the way in which science enables a child
to transform and humanise the ferocities of nature.
Now these two stories, which reached here on the
same day, remind us that past and present may be, and
surely are, morally contemporary. The Spanish belief
about Juan Garin is a fairy tale ; it is devoutly believed
by Catholics, but stories like it were believed in the
far East some thousands of years ago. Nay, in North-

54 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
umbrian folklore there is a legend of a fair princess
transformed by witchcraft to a dragon, but restored by
the kiss of lave to her proper shape. It stands as a
landmark behind the age of England, and indicating the
believers in such .^ends. as still dwelling in the dusk of
an, epoch here declined. The brave work in America
which broke the Sabbath so splendidly stands out as a
type of the romance and beauty which are. to take the
place of fairy tales in human belief. It stands. out in the
tinted dawn of a coming time, when children and aged
people shall have unlearned the foolish notion that
reason is cold and science dry, and found that all the
fairy tales of the world are poor beside the romance of
the force that curves the planet and the sea-shell, the
story of the sunbeam that paints the star and the dew-
drop ; the divine mystery of mind which measures the force,
tracks the sunbeam, and "dismounts the highest star."
Between those two landmarks— the fairy tale and the
fact of science — the faith of millions is now hovering.
They whose faith rests upon, su^xnatural signs and
wonders are not all so far, sunk thaf^hey can accept the
gross superstitions of a Catholic peasantry- On the
other hand they who rest their faith so far as they can on
reason do not, generally accept the full results of science.
But this we may remark,. that men give up the super
natural just so fast and so far as they can take in the
natural. If you, can once get a man to really know a
thing in nature, which means to know its laws, he can
never again. associate anything, lawless.or monstrous with
it, nor desire to do so..

FAITH, FACT, AND FAIRY TALE. 55
You may begin with what is most universally known
among mankind and pass to the less and less known
phenomena of nature, and precisely in the ratio of de
creasing knowledge is increasing superstition.
Thus no man in England could be found willing to
pray that the sun might rise an hour earlier or set an
hour later say for the getting in. of his. harvest- The
devout believer in prayer may read with full faith the
Hebrew fairy tale which tells how the sun did stand still
and lengthen the day at a mortal's petition, and yet he
or she would never dream that such an effect- could now
be produced. The uniformities of the sun's apparent
motion have been too patent, too familiar, for superstition
to connect itself with that motion. Nor would any
one ever turn from the Christian fairy tales to pray that
their water tank might yield pure wine, or that a fish
just purchased might hold a coin large enough to pay
their tax. But when we pass to things of which the laws
are not so familiar, we at once observe the tendency of
fancy to, enter and M up with phantasms the margin left
by knowledge. The shifting clouds, the movements of
wind and storm seem so irregular that an arbitrary power
is more easily associated with them. And. although the
fairy tale of Joshua and the sun is as authentic as that of
Elijah praying for the rain, yet in all the world nobody
prays for a change in the day's course, while some do
pray for a change in the weather. However, com
paratively few pray for weather, for experience has shown
that meteorology also is a science. More pray for health
or recovery from sickness, this seeming to. be less, fixed

56 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
in conditions ; arid, yet nobody ever prays to have the
dead raised up. Notwithstanding the many Hebrew and
Christian fairy tales which relate the resurrection of the
dead, the necessary laws of deathWe loo well known for
any one to try and secure any alteration.
This proportionate decrease of ajelief in the super
natural with the extent of knowledge <Sloes not mean that
.the knowledge has eradicated superstition as a principle.
Many who do not believe that any power can change the
course of sun or seasons or weather, jfafc*fiiily believe in
miracles. • Really, it means that />jmerever nature is ap
preciated, super-nature is n,/E/t "wanted. What mankind
hate and dread is a blin/u, soulless, purposeless world.
Where they seeuio law, tftiey see no beauty; where there
is only hard and\ heartless matter, human nature cannot
bear it, and must neecVs people it with goddesses, nymphs,
fairies, angels, or sven imps. These are mere make
shifts to fill the awful vacancy which knowledge has not
yet come to fill up with fact and order. Carlyle exclaims,'
" Shams are burnt out, the realites have not come."
Whenever the realities have come, they are always satis
factory, and the fictions easily pass away. Wherever
knowledge goes, it liberates man from mere matter; it
abolishes the gross object by showing it to be a trans
parency of beautiful laws, reflecting the glory of the
universe. Every Protestant can see this in the case of other
fictions than his own.
I have just been reading a French book, by Paul Parfait,
entitled "L'arsenal de Devotion," in which the author

FAITH, FACT, AND FAIRY TALE. 57
gives a detailed account of all the miracles wrought in
France by holy fountains, such as Lourdes and La Salette,
and by holy images. He gives them as represented by
the priests and devotees in their own language. This
list of contemporary miracles fills a considerable volume.
They are authenticated by the highest church authority.
No one reading these narratives can fail to see that fairies
are believed in just as much as ever by the French
peasantry ; though they are baptised fairies. The queen
of the fairies is the Virgin Mary. Precisely in the style
of the old fairy tales, she appears to some poor little child
wandering in the woods, and loads her with favours. But
she is not to be trifled with, this potent fairy. Thus, in one
instance a mother has a very ill child ; the physicians
confess they cannot save it. The mother takes her child
to the fountain of Lourdes, sprinkles on it a little of that
water which gushed up where the Virgin appeared, and
lo ! the child is in perfect health. But mark the sequel.
When the mother took her child home, she again trusted
to the physicians, and again the child sank to the point
oi death. So she had to hurry off once more to the
fountain, and the child was again well. The Virgin
Mary is so jealous of medical science, that she must
have caused her first benefit to cease, and the child to
sink a second time, knowing that the mother would
again call in a doctor, and again all skill would fail but
that of her fountain ; and all in order that her triumph
over science might be doubly marked 1 There are
hundreds of stories like this, and the swarms of pilgrims
who visit such places show how genuine is the faith and

58 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
satisfaction they yield to the Catholic peasantry. The
time was when Scotland was the great place for such
healing fountains, yet it would be hard now to find any
Scotchman who has the least interest in them. No Pro
testant desires any such fountains or fables. Once they
were cherished as dearly in this country as in France.
The Catholics pity the poor Protestants, who are without
such supernatural aid and comfort when they are suffer
ing. The Protestant laughs at it as all childish nonsense-
Read them in the Bible — read how Naaman the leper.
was healed in a holy stream, or the miraculous cures
wrought by the pool of Bethesda, where an angel ap
peared — and there it is divine revelation ; so at least
the Protestant says, but reveals, that it has become to
him a fairy tale, so often as he ridicules the Bethesdas of
France. And these things have passed away, not merely
because they were disproved, or rested on insufficient
evidence,, but because, under increasing knowledge, they
ceased to be lovely or loveable ; they paled before the
grandeurs revealed by Kepler, Linnaeus, Newton. As the
Scandinavian gods diminished into pixies and goblins, so
shrank the Christian apparitions that followed them.
They were no longer beautiful to eyes which had caught
sight of things higher and holier.
Just as little satisfaction can a mind find in Protestant
fairies and fairy tales when it has out-grown belief in
their reality. They must pass away just as Catholic fables
have passed, and it will then be seen that there was no
genuine comfort in them, such as the truth of nature can
give. They who fancy there is more warmth, support,

FAITH, FACT, AND FAIRY TALE. 59
joy in the old superstitions, and would be glad to believe
them, are they who have not yet given their faith where
their intellects have pointed. They stand between the old
temple and. the new, shivering in the cold, without the
joy of either. But Truth is as jealous as our fabulous Lady
of LourdeSj and will by no means bestow her favours on
those who trust themselves still to the dogmatic doctors.
We must give a living and whole heart to our faith what
ever it may be, if we would get from it a warm heart in
return. I do not. say that all ought to. become, scientific
in a technical sense ; but I do say that all should study
to know more of nature. Every child should be brought
up to know that there is a wonderland all around it.
Each should know that every leaf has a story to tell, and
every insect, and that a secret is written on every pebble.
Every family should try to have a microscope to unlock
the door which opens to rarer treasures than any
"Sesame" of fable. The heart and mind cannot be fed on
dust ; but only by that living thought under whose breath
the dust floats up into golden galaxies.
There is one respect in which the believers in the fairy
tale religion may be our models ; childish as may be their
beliefs, they are alive. They will not rest upon a mere
historic religion wrapped in fossil language,, they will
have their saints, virgin, spirits, angels all around them,
and as many miracles as antiquity. Again the divine
command comes to our age — " Seek not the living among
the dead." I respect all that fermentation going on in
our own time and nation, which indicates a striving for a
divine life here and, now, even, though it may show itself

''6b IDOLS AND IDEALS.
in the spiritualistic or the ritualistic real presence ot o'ther
credulities. What that spirit craves is destined to be
satisfied by deeper study of nature, which shall show every
atom mystical, — instinct with law, life, purpose ; by pro-
founder insight into the hea'ft of man, revealing in it all
marvels, all the past and present alive and at work in it,
there calmly throned all vanished gods and angels, — there
towering Iran, Sinai, and Olympus ; there Eden, and the
Bethlehem stars that lead with holy light to new Edens,
illumining the universe with love and immortal hope.

IV.

THE PRAYING MACHINE.

THE PRAYING MACHINE.

jlOMEtime ago I had the good fortune to receive
two interesting presents.- One was from an
anonymous benefactor, and consisted of a
Buddhist book, beautifully written on leaves of bark, from
a Burmese temple. The other present was sent me by an
Anglo-Indian officer, and consisted of a Praying Machine
such as is commonly used in Thibet. The two things
came from widely different quarters, but they are strangely
connected. The book consists of the first teachings of
Buddha. It opens with what is traditionally his very first
discourse to some Brahmins who had begun to follow
him, but were afterwards offended and forsook him.
These Brahmins had clung to Buddha while at the outset
of his religious career he was undergoing those terrible
self-mortifications by which he was brought to the last
degree of attenuation. This was a kind of sanctity tra
ditional with the Brahmins, and which they could under
stand. But when Buddha, after his vision of the angel
with the guitar of three strings — the loosely-drawn which
gave no music, the too tightly-drawn which gave an un-

, 64 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
pleasant sound, the moderately-drawn which yielded
sweet sounds — learned the lesson of moderation,, and
began to eat and drink, the Brahmins abandoned him
for their ascetic priests. But Buddha, who had recovered
his vigour and beauty, sought and found them, in the city
of Benares. Then he addressed to them the discourse
with which the Burmese scripture opens ; as follows r —
" O priests ! these two extremes should be avoided —
an attachment to sensual gratifications, which are degrad
ing and profitless ; and severe penances which cause pain,
but are equally degrading and profitless.
" O priests ! avoiding both these extremes I have
perceived a middle path for the attainment of mental
vision, true knowledge, subdued passions, and insight
into the paths leading to the supreme good
" O priests ! this middle path (consists of) correct
doctrines, right apprehension of these doctrines, speaking
the truth, purity of conduct, an innocent calling, persever
ance in duty, holy meditation, and mental tranquillity."
Such were the noble thoughts that choired the birth of
Buddhism into the world. Behold in the praying ma
chine, the little metallic barrel four inches long, three in
diameter, what Buddhism has ended in for a large pro
portion of the rnillions who believe in it, or think they
do. In many regions where Buddhism reigns the masses
hope to obtain perfection and final bliss by whirling it
around at the end of a string as they walk. When stand
ing still they insert a handle in each end and turn it
faster. It is packed full of paper, on each particle of which is

THE PRAYING MACHINE. 65
written some sacred charm, mantra or sentence, — packed
until the mass is quite solid. Nearly every sentence is
this : " Om mani padme huom." The chief sanctity of
these words is that nobody on earth knows just what
they mean. They are transmitted probably from a
Sanskrit older than the Sanskrit known to scholars, or,
as some conjecture, from an early and lost form of Pali.
Their first and last words, however, " Om " and " Huom,"
may possibly be cognate to that word " Amen " which is so
often used by Christians with as little knowledge of its
meaning. Now, this praying barrel, every revolution of which is
supposed to influence spirits, angels, genii, or even
Buddha himself to the advantage of the devotee, is in
singular contrast with the religion of Buddha, who did not
even teach the existence of a God, much less the notion
of prayer. His whole method of religion was inward, silent
meditation, and outward benevolence. That his religion
should be overlaid by such trivial forms and practices as
now represent it is a remarkable instance of the help
lessness of devout emotion and religious enthusiasm to
prevail against hereditary superstitions, unless assisted by
mental culture among the people. Every great thinker
appearing among ignorant people has been a light shining
amid the darkness that comprehendeth it not — but can
only blindly adore it while it lasts, as if it were some
comet. The praying-machine is itself the last form of a symbol
far older than Buddha, and represents equally the decline
into an unmeaning form of a once significant symbol. 5

66 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

When Buddhism took to praying-machines it was because
of the decay of both— it was ruin mingling with ruin.
One of the first things carved on the ancient monuments
of the world was the foot and wheel. Archaeologists think
that it originally indicated the superior powers of those
who rode in chariots— the foot added to the wheel
denoted fleetness. And there were days when superiority
in fleetness made one a king among men. This secular
symbol gradually became sacred, as with ignorance things
commonly do, when their meaning is gone. The human
imagination got hold of it just as it has taken up the
cross and twined it with a thousand exotic meanings.
The wheel became the circle of the universe — its motion
became the symbol of ascending and descending life —
it was the sun, — the moon, — all manner of glorious
things. Even our British ancestors became possessed
in some mysterious way of this symbol, and used to
roll a burning wheel down a hill-side at the Solstice,
as an image of the solar movement.
When Buddhism was preached among the nations
which had this wheel-symbol, it followed the plan of
all missionary religions ; it borrowed the sacred emblems
among the people to whom it went. It is doubtful
whether Buddha himself knew anything about the wheel •
but, in nearly all the countries into which his religion
was carried, it became represented at an early period
by what is called the Wheel of the Law. The holy wheel
from being a sort of fetish long ago became spiritualised.
First, it was interpreted to mean a system of morals,—
every spoke a virtue, and the circumference complete

THE PRAYING MACHINE. 67
and rounded moral life. Next, it was taken up by
philosophy, and made to represent a great circle of
transmigration. And finally it became the form of a
cosmogony, — the holy mountain Meru being the centre
of the earth, and around it wheels within wheels revolving
— such as the belt of oceans, the belt of the world's
crystal walls, and the great circles of stars and of angels.
The sacred wheel from being all this became an
amulet, inscribed with sacred texts. Gradually, as is
likely, it was made hollow, and the texts written on paper
were stuffed into it. In that way, probably, was developed
the little praying barrel, or hollow metallic wheel, whose
circular movement has in its time represented the rising
and setting stars, the birth and death of man, and even
the pure circle of graces and virtues.
The best use we can make of it would seem to be to
make of it a mirror, and find whether there may not be
in our own Christendom much that corresponds to this
miserable form into which a great soul and movement
have been dwarfed. There is no difficulty in finding
praying-machines in Europe. The Rosary, for instance,
is directly borrowed from the Buddhists, who string nuts
together to count their prayers by, and regard so many
rounds of their rosary as reaching a certain advantage,
just the same as so many revolutions of the praying-
machine. The simple-hearted Jesuit Father Rubruquis,
who went to Thibet just six centuries ago, wrote home,
" They (Buddhists) have with them also,, whithersoever
they go, a certain string, with 100 or 200 nutshells
thereupon, much like our beads, and they do always

68 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
mutter these words, ' Om mani hactam, — God thou
knowest,' as one of them expounded it to me. And so
often do they expect a reward at God's hands as they
pronounce these words in remembrance of God." If the
old man had gone more deeply into the matter, he would
have found many more resemblances. For instance, he
would have found Buddhists repeating litanies like this : —
i adore the Tat&gata, the universally radiant sun !
I adore the Tatagata, the moral wisdom !
I adore the Tatagata, the chief lamp of all the regions of space !
and so on for 137 verses. It might have recalled to
Rubruquis the many verses in his own litany.
Heart of Mary, full of grace, pray for us !
Heart of Mary, sanctuary of the Holy Trinity, &c,
Heart of Mary, tabernacle of the Incarnate Word, &c,
Heart of Mary, illustrious throne of glory, &c.
What is it in the praying-machine which strikes us as
grossly superstitious and barbarous? Several things.
First of all, there are in it those vain repetitions which
Jesus rebuked in the formulas of his time. These
deteriorated Buddhists think they shall be heard for their
much rolling of barrels. Does that idle notion survive in
Christendom? What shall be said of the oft-recurring
" Good Lord deliver us ! " and " We beseech thee to
hear us, Good Lord," of the prayer-book and its feeble
imitations ? Then we have the vain repetitions-
Lord have mercy upon us !
Christ have mercy upon us !
Lord have mercy upon us !
Christ have mercy upon us J
Son of God, we beseech thee to hear us !
Lamb of God, we beseech thee to hear as!

THE PR A YING MACHINE. 69
And there are other instances of the same sort which
compel every clergyman to be a praying-machine. We all
know what is the result of such repetitions. The formula
uttered in such routine loses reality—degenerates into an
incantation among the ignorant, into cant among the
educated. But there are many Christians around us who have
rejected these formulas and repetitions of the Church.
They are not indeed entirely guiltless of this great vice of
the Roman and Anglican Churches, however, for they
repeat certain incantations in their prayers, — such as
"Amen," and "through Jesus Christ our Lord," and
other stock phrases which they tell over and over again
like the beads of a rosary. But there is a coarse
superstition embodied in the praying-machine which all
sects share alike ; one which is inherent in the very nature
of prayer. It is the belief implied that the benefits of this
universe are to be secured by the perfunctory lip-service
or barrel-service of human beings. It is impossible to
think of one of those orientals turning his praying
machine otherwise than as some poor fellow in the street
grinding over and over again on his barrel-organ a well-
known stock of dismal tunes in hope of an occasional
penny from the heavenly windows. And the man of the
machine may describe in the same way the tedious routine
of Christian prayers, beseeching God to throw out a mercy
or two from His abundance. Nay, he might well claim
that his plan of doing this sort of thing by machinery is
the best of the two, since it leaves the man free to sit in
silent meditation, which is of some value, while his wheel

70 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
is turning. And if the interpretation of the mysterious
phrase so multiplied in the barrel which was given to the
Jesuit father, " God thou knowest," be the popular one —
it is not the right one — why then our popular appeals to
God for this and that thing are by no means so elevated
as the submissive sentence of the Buddhist.
It is not denied that the system of prayer was once real.
The Buddhist wheel was once a great reality. Buddha
himself was once a great reality. But as in the progress
of the world the oriental symbol and the religion have
lost spontaneity, and at last meaning, and now remain
only in fossils — interesting for study, but useless for their
original purpose — so it is certain that the discoveries of
universal law have reduced prayer among us to an
anachronism. It makes no difference whatever whether
the prayer be for a moral, or an intellectual, or a physical
benefit. If it is absurd for a man to set himself to acquire
a fortune by praying for it, it is equally absurd for students
to try and pass their examination by prayer instead of
study — an absurdity which protestants can see when for
such help priests invite students to visit the fountain of
Lourdes ; but neither is more absurd than to pray for
morality, for character, for virtue or religion, all of which
are equally dependent on the invariable laws of cause and
effect. There were high moments in the liVes of the apostles
when they rose above such current superstitions, and
warned men that spiritual were no less certain and in
variable than physical laws. " Be not deceived," said
one, "that which a man soweth he shall reap." "Be

THE PRAYING. MACHINE. 71
not deceived," cried another, " he that doeth righteous
ness is righteous." They who said these things were not
Christians. The term Christianity — which means an
attempt to substitute the virtue of Christ for our virtue,
and the task of the year one for the work of 1877 — that
sectarian term by which a living heart was prisoned in a
machine, creed-machine, praying-machine — was not yet
invented. But that solemn warning, " Be not deceived ! "
was speedily lost. Christianity came, and still is with us,
proclaiming, " That which a man soweth he shall escape
reaping by prayer ; " " he that doeth righteousness is not
righteous, unless he prays ; he will go to hell no matter
what good he does, unless he prays." This idea that the
great moral laws depend on the breath of our lips is a
sad declension from the heights of ancient faith and
knowledge. There is a notion abroad that the percep
tion of the essential superstitiousness of prayer is a
modern opinon. Some people appear to think that the
movement against prayer originated with our English
men of science. But it is nearer the truth to say that
every great religious soul in the far past contributed
something to that profounder reverence, that deeper
sense of the eternal laws, which have shown prayer to be
a presumptuous, albeit unconscious attempt to cajole
the universe. The ancient testimonies of prophets and
sages against the whole theory of prayer, and even its
form, are innumerable — nowhere more so than as re
corded in the Bible. "The Lord said unto Moses,
wherefore criest thou unto Me ? Speak unto the children
of Israel that they go forward."— (Ex. 14.) In all the

72 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
wanderings of Israel in Egypt this seems to have been
the only time Moses prayed, and then his stEong con
science rebuked him for asking a god to do his work.
Among the Ten Commandments he brought down from
Sinai not one commanded men to pray, — though there is
one about taking the name of Jehovah in vain, which
millions of prayers are violating this day. It is true that
Moses is said to have instituted sacrifices, and these are
of the nature of prayers ; it is pretty certain tha| the
sacrifices which his name labelled are the invention of a
late priesthood, and that Moses never commanded people
wandering in a wilderness to offer their god flocks and
herds, doves and lambs, which they did not possess ; but,
even were it so, it would only show that he had not out
grown at all points the superstitions in which he was
trained. But what do we find among the great prophets
who followed him ? Denunciations of sacrifice, burnt-
offerings, and the prayers uttered with them. " Bring no
more vain oblations," — such was the still small voice as
Isaiah heard it ; " incense is an abomination to me ;
even so are your sabbaths ; wh,en you stretch forth your
hands I see not ; when ye pray I hear not. Learn to do
well. Seek justice. Redress wrongs. Help the poor."
Such utterances are to be found in the Bible by hundreds.
Who can ever read without feeling its rebuke to the
ceremonies of Christendom that sublime summing up of
true worship by the prophet Micah, — " What doth the
Lord thy God require of thee, but to deal justly, love
mercy, and walk humbly with thy God ? " Parallel to
those prophetic rebukes, of all formularies was the sweep-

THE PRAYING MACHINE. 73
ing rebuke by Christ of all public prayer whatever, —
prayers in street or synagogue. Jesus may not indeed
have seen that prayer is irrational in itself, though it is
certain he never uttered the prayers put by reporters in
his mouth : he died young, and did not outgrow all
the superstitions around him ; but one thing is clear, he
would respect no prayer uttered outside of the closet,
and that is enough to rebuke all our litanies, kneelings,
grace-mutterings at table, and every other performance
of the European praying machine. If a doubtful
chapter be founded on true tradition, Jesus seemed
indeed to be near to the higher truth when he told his
friends he would not pray for them, since that might imply
that God required some suggestion or intercession in
order to love them. Paul seemed to feel the incon
sistency of prayer when he said, " We know not how to
pray for anything as we ought,'' and that this must be
left to the deep spirit within, whose pleadings cannot, he
says, be uttered in words.
In the great regenerating epochs of other nations, in
which their religions were born, we find a similar repug
nance to- this cheap sentimental way of supplicating
God, when great work is to done. We do not find that
Buddha or Confucius ever prayed, and Zoroaster sang
happy hymns and invocations, but offered no petitions.
Mahomet's terrible Allah did indeed command prayer,
but even Mahomet desired his followers to attend prayer
chiefly during the night, so that the day might be devoted
to- work. All such testimonies against praying are mixed :
these men lived among uncivilised people, amid myriad

74 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
superstitions ; and we must judge them by the tendency
of their teachings. These teachings are sometimes
marvellously clear. The testimony of Isaiah against
prayer is clear. The rebuke of Confucius to those who
try to do service to gods is plain. The great Persian
poet Kali had learned the lesson more clearly than his
prophet when he wrote eight centuries ago, " Only the
low-minded can pray to God for benefits on earth."
Some theoretical defenders of prayer are indeed in
clined to accept the view of Kali, and confine petitions
to such as implore spiritual benefits. But here Cicero
meets them with his rational principle that a man may
rather ask the gods for fortune or a good harvest, which
his unaided powers can not always command, but that it
is base to pray for virtue, whose value consists essentially
in the self-denial and labours of which it is the result.
We can not doubt that Plato represented the best thought
of Greece when he laid down in his Laws that they who
believed the gods could be propitiated by sacrifices and
prayers, or turned from their purpose by bribes and
praises; that they who taught men (I use Plato's own
phrase) " to fawn upon the gods as dogs fawn on their
keepers to get some favour ; " should be kept in confine
ment for five years, and set free then on proof of recovered
sanity. Plato held that to spread the delusion that the
results of human conduct could be escaped by flattering
deities was a danger to the state, and so far he was per
fectly right. Every time this nation executes a criminal,
whom priests say God has fully pardoned — and sends
him from a life of villainy to an eternity of bliss, all

THE PRA YING MACHINE. 75
obtained by his and his priest's prayers,— a license to
every scoundrel is proclaimed, and an indulgence to crime
more demoralising than was ever issued by any Pope.
While it is notorious that crime is aided by the uncer
tainties of human law, we support thousands of pulpits
to proclaim that the laws and penalties of the universe
and of God are all uncertain, — or still worse, that the
criminal may appeal successfully to some heavenly Home
Office against the sentence of his country. The truth is
any belief contrary to the law of cause and effect is
demoralising to the individual or the nation, for that
which can be set aside by priest or prayer is no law at all.
The very meaning of natural law is that which is invari
able and inflexible. Prayer rests upon the wild fancy
that the rule of the universe is variable, flexible — in fact,
that there is no such thing as Law for the moral nature.
If that be true, the revolution of the solar system may
naturally depend on the revolution of a Burmese praying
barrel ; and the moral destinies of Humanity depend on
the screams of revivalists. But let no man fancy he is
any wiser in praying for God's love than he would be in
praying for the sun to shine all night ; nor let any man
fancy that his round of Christian prayers is a whit better
than the revolving litanies of Thibet.
Remembering the greatness of the great, then looking
upon the poor dead signs that conventionalise and stand
for them, — the wheel, the Kaaba stone, the cross, — we
may recall those pathetic legends which of old went
round the world, in which every people held that its
leaders never died, but are only sleeping in some

76 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
enchanted grot or isle whence they will some day return
to fulfil the dreams of their country. In the creed of
Folklore, Jami, St. John, Barbarossa, Charlemagne,
Arthur, Kalewala, Tell, BoabdiL Sebastian, and even the
Hiawathas and Gloscaps of American tribes, did not taste
of death : they will return when some hour of opportunity
shall strike, or when some fortunate mortal shall unsheathe
the sword they wielded, and blow the old bugle that
called their comrades from afar. Corresponding to all
these are the teachers and prophets on whom the hag
Superstition has cast her spell. Their spirit prisoned in
the letter, their thought and heart-pulses arrested, they
stand as the idols of innumerable caves, biding the time
when a courage and inspiration like their own shall lead
them forth into the full glory of their aim and ideal.
When universal Justice holds the sword of power on
earth, then will the sleeping heroes stir and start up I
When pure Reason reigns in the cult and culture of
civilized nations then will the spell-bound sages and
prophets emerge ! At the advent of the last incarnation,—
pure reason organised in humanity,— they shall all come
forth to offer their royal gifts, and shine anew in the
world's transfiguration.

THE PRE-DARWINITE AND POST-
DARWINITE WORLD.

THE PRE-DARWINITE AND POST-
DARWINITE WORLD.

N estimating the general bearings of a purely
scientific statement it is first of all necessary
to know just what that statement is; and,
secondly, it is necessary to translate it into the largest
expression of which it admits.
The doctrine of evolution, as interpreted and applied
by the man whose name is now preeminently associated
with it, is the consummate result to which the great high
ways of discovery had long tended before they converged.
Over one hundred years ago the ancient speculations were
recalled by Buffon, who said, "There is but one
animal." This grew through Buffon's pupil Lamarck
to the theory of an evolution by fits and starts, some
thing like that popularised in England in the book
entitled "The Vestiges of Creation." It gained a more
scientific expression with Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who
affirmed the unity of all parts of the animal body,
and indicated that " balance of organs " by which each
form was shown to be only another transformation of the
common type. That all bones are vertebrae was discovered

80 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
by Oken, who also demonstrated, in 1805, that all animals
are built up out of vesicles or cells. Bichat was engaged
in the work of showing the bearing of these facts upon
the structure of man when unhappily his life terminated
in 17 7 1. Goethe extended the same principle to the mor
phology of plants. In England Dr. Erasmus Darwin struck
the theme somewhat poetically, which his famous grandson
has made into the gr&ki scientific generalisation of our
time. Thus the Darwinian theory of evolution had great
forerunners. It is no empyrical speculation, no isolated
or eccentric fancy. It is the apex of a great pyramid of
facts and researches resting solidly and squarely upon the
graduated formations of knowledge in all time, and built
up by the certain method of science.
Nor, in saying this, do I detract from the just fame of
the man who has summed up and named the great
series of preceding discoveries. The finest genius can do
no greater work for us than that of filtrating, combining,
and organising the mass of facts, and of applying to the
full extent methods which had hitherto been doing but
slight and partial service. That the telegraph was used
in a German lecture-room long before it was known to
society, does not detract from the grandeur of the achieve
ment which has made it flash the thought of man through
sea and mountain round the world. The great man does
not create the laws of nature : he discovers them he
studies them, he applies them, he obeys them. Nor is
he less a discoverer who discerns where a principle may
be truly applied, and so recovers from chaos a realm of
knowledge, than he who originally discovered the prin-

FRE-DAR WINITE AND POST-DARWINITE WORLD. 81
ciple. Darwin inherited the principle of evolution, but
he discovered that form of it through which alone it could
simplify, revise, and harmonise every branch of human
knowledge. He merits, therefore, the acknowledgment I
once heard expressed by a distinguished American, that
he had restored to England the intellectual sceptre of
Europe. That sceptre had passed to the hand of Germany,
but now every civilised nation looks again to England, as
it looked in the days of Bacon and in those of Newton.
II.
What, then, is the Darwinian theory? It is that all
the organic forms around us, from lowest to highest, have
been evolved the one from the other by means of the
principle of natural selection. Natural selection is the
obvious law that every power or trait which better adapts
an animal to live amid its surroundings enables that
animal to survive another which has not the same power
or trait. The fit outlive the unfit And because they
outlive their inferiors they will propagate their species
more freely. Their offspring will inherit their advantages ;
by the laws of heredity will still further improve upon
them ; and thus there will be a cumulative storing up of
such advantages established. Each form less furnished
with resources to maintain itself is crowded out before
the increase of forms which are better supplied with
hereditary abilities. A sufficient accumulation of slight
advantages amount in the end to a new form or species.
An accumulation of specific advantages will be summed
up in a new genus. 6

82 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

And thus, as Emerson has said —
" Striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.'r
Now, to the merely scientific mind evolution is simply
a scientific generalisation. In its light he beholds the
sprouting leaf hardening to a stem, unpacking itself to a
blossom, swelling again to the pulpy leaf, called fruit.
He inspects the crustacean egg ; sees the trilobite in the
embryo stretching into a tiny lobster, shortening into a
crab ; and says, trilobite, lobster and crab pass from one
to the other in this little egg-world, as the new theory
shows they did in the big world. He will be interested
to find out the intervening steps of improvement between
one form and another, and will fix upon this or that
animal as the one from which a consummate species
budded. But, as I have stated, a truth in any one
department of knowledge is capable of being translated
into every other. We are already familiar with a popular
translation of the Darwin theory in the phrase which
explains it as meaning that men are descended from
monkeys. And by this common interpretation many
conclude that it implies a degradation of the human
species. But that phrase does not convey the truth of
the theory any more than if a rough pediment in the
museum were declared to be the splendid temple of Diana
of Ephesus. For behind each one of the forms evolving
higher, there stretch the endless lines and processions of
the forms which combined to produce it. The ape may
appear ugly seen as he is among us, detached from his
environment, when contrasted with man ; but he is royal

PRE-DAR WINITE AND POSTDAR WINITE WORLD. 83
when contrasted with a worm in the mud. But neither
worm nor ape can be truly seen when detached from the
cosmical order and beauty. It matters little what rude
form sheathed the first glory of a human brain. It does
not rob the opal of its beauty that its matrix was common
flint, nor does it dim the diamond's lustre that it crystal
lised out of charcoal. The ape may be the jest of the
ignorant, but the thinker will see behind him the myriad
beautiful forms which made him possible. What wondrous
forests of fern and vine grew in voiceless ages, clothing
the hard primaeval rock, what flowers rich and rare
broidered the raiment of the earth ! What bright insects
flashed through their green bowers, what gorgeous birds
lit up the deep solitudes with torch-like plumage !
Through a thousand ages the shining swimmers darted
through pool or air ; for unnumbered generations star-
gemmed creatures, lithe and beautiful, sprang through
jungle and forest : they browse peacefully on hill and
meadow ; they slake their thirst at crystal streams ; they
pursue their savage loves in wood and vale ; with mighty
roar, with sweetest melody, they chant the music by
which the world marches onward and upward, — onward
and upward for ever ! Millions pass away — millions
advance : from every realm of nature they come to add
their fibre of strength or tint of beauty to the rising
form ; beneath every touch, with every tribute it ascends,
— till at last, lodged for a moment in some rugged human
like form for combination, the selected concentred powers
expand into man— the sum of every creature's best !
The right translation of this theory for us is, then

84 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
that it shows man to be the offspring, not of an ape, but
of the animated universe ; the heir of its richest bounties ;
the consummate work of a matchless Artist, a figure of
which all preceding forms were but sketches and studies.
Admitting — though it is an extreme and questionable
concession — that the theory has not yet fortified itself
completely by demonstrations in detail of the connecting
links between species, yel it has certainly shown such an
immense balance of probabilities in its favour as to com
mand the adhesion of the scientific world to a greater
extent than the Newtonian theory of gravitation did
within -the same time after its discovery. It may be
affirmed that there is now not a single great man of
science in the world who does not maintain that in one
way or another species were continuously evolved.
III.
But what effect has this theory on religion or moral
philosophy? We all know that it has awakened earnest
controversies. There are several ways in which it has
been regarded. One class of religious teachers, seeing
that the verdict of the scientific world in its favour is
beyond appeal, have been assuring us that it can have no
effect upon religion whatever. Dean Stanley, too liberal and
scholarly not to recognise the facts, recently admonished
an audience that it mattered nothing at all to them whether
it should turn out that man is descended from the animal
world, or lower still, as the Bible said, from the inanimate
dust of the earth, for right would stiU be right, and

PRE-DARWINITE AND POST-DARWINITE WORLD. 85
wrong, wrong; and we should still feel that we are
individual souls. What he said was true, but the tone
of his remark was that this is a question quite aside from
the great religious problems of our time.
They who indulge this hope will very soon find it
delusive. It has never been the case that a great
scientific generalisation has failed to be reflected in the
religious and moral convictions of mankind. The
instinctive horror which priesthoods have of science
has been developed by a long experience of the certainty
with which theological changes have followed scientific
discoveries. If any one will study the conditions of
religious thought in this country before and after the
discoveries of Newton, he will see that by those dis
coveries the whole controversy was shifted, theology was
revolutionised ; old questions died, new problems arose ;
nay, theology itself declined in England from that day.
When I have had the pleasure of sitting in the historic
Abbey of Westminster and listening to such rationalism
from its Dean as would have sent a preacher in old times
to the stake, I have reflected that beneath that floor lies
the dust of Isaac Newton. And when England had
advanced sufficiently to bury in the shrine of her best
and greatest that scientific revolutioniser of thought, him
self a Unitarian (Sir Charles Lyell), there was planted
another of the seeds that have flowered into the rational
ism which inspires her most venerable and powerful
pulpit The Dean himself is the- best answer to his own
suggestion, that religion can stand still, while science
moves. It cannot stand still. And the reason is plain :

86 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
that which represents religion in Europe is a set of dog
mas based upon the Bible, and the Bible is not only a
religious but a scientific book ; it contains a system of
theories as to the origin and the facts of nature. This
system was the speculation of an ignorant tribe in an
ignorant age of the world. Yet theology blended its
religious dogmas with these scientific speculations ; and
as, in the progress of knowledge, these crude fancies of
the infant world about nature are necessarily set aside by
successive discoveries, the dogmas must go with them.
Insensibly men feel that a tribe so mistaken about visible
nature, must naturally have been mistaken about invisible
nature. The people find that they have been deceived
by their religious teachers, — deceived about the sky,
about the earth, and their own origin, — and they imbibe
a suspicion of those teachers. An atmosphere of sus
picion settles around every church and priest. Universal
scepticism prevails. It is that scepticism which in
England has quenched the fires of Smithfield, abolished
titheS, opened Universities to heresy, and which steadily
severs Church from State.

IV.
On the other hand there are theologians who instead
of indulging the dream that the Darwinian theory will
leave religion just where it was before, announce that it
is cutting the faith of man up by the roots. They declare
that it abolishes God, destroys the hope of inmortality,
and resolves morality itself into a mere mechanic force.'

PRE-DARWINITE AND POST-DARWINITE WORLD. 87
Such phantoms are familiar, but they become more
thin with each reappearance. Our fathers heard that the
pillars of the universe had fallen again and again, when
it only turned out that somebody's little idol had col
lapsed. " The giving up of the sun's motion is giving up
the foundation of religion," said they who burned the
book of Copernicus and the body of Bruno. "The
giving up of witchcraft is giving up the Bible," said Sir
Matthew Hale. We have grown accustomed to such
alarms, and can consider such things with the assured
calmness of long experience.
Unquestionably a revolution has occurred. No one
can peruse the common literature of the day without
recognising that the theory of Darwin has given the
world new eyes with which to look at nearly everything.
Each truth is a mother-truth, and brings forth a family
of other truths. The faculties of man, too, are a fra
ternity, and what comes to one passes to all the rest If
we examine the mental condition of the world before this
theory was impressed upon it, we shall find even advanced
and liberal men taking views of the nature of things which
now seem antiquarian. Take the pre-Darwinice ration
alist ; what did he believe? He did not believe the
miracles of the Bible, nor modern superstitions ; but the
supernatuialist could easily press him into a corner by
compelling him to admit that the world began by a
miracle, that man began by a miracle, and that each star
in the sky, each animal on earth, was formed from nothing
by the creative fiat of the deity. The theist repeated as
often as the orthodox the words — " God said, Let there

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

be light, and there was light ;" " God made man in his;
own image." Then the pre-Darwinite rationalist easily
conceded that Milton's version was true, — and that the
first man and woman sprang from the hand of God in all
perfection of intelligence and beauty, and able to speak
a perfect language. There were, of course, exceptions.
Some did not believe in any God at all ; but the average
rationalist of our memory, who still held to a God, thus
conceived of him as an Almighty Mechanic and Contriver:
Upon the moral world he looked with awe, seeing in it a
chaos over which the principles — Good and Evil — per
petually struggled. His great problem was as to free will
or necessity ; his hope, that by the divine will good would
finally triumph over evil.
Then Darwinism came and gave every department of
inquiry a new point of departure, and a new theorem.
It was found that even the blind elements had shaped'
themselves in accordance with principles of adaptation to-
necessary circumstances ;: that life had begun everywhere
in the feeblest and lowest forms ; that the first man and
woman were savages but little raised above the brute-;
that there was no evidence whatever of any such Creation--
as was represented in the old belief in an original! vacuum ;
but, on the contrary, every .probability that the substance
©f things had always existed*1, and would exist. The
philologists proved that- language,' instead of being a*
miraculous gift, had grown up like^0l'Srhaps out of— the
cries of animals. In a word, ti^dea of a Mighty
Mechanic, a Supreme^onJwr-workL, was driven out of.
the conception of the rationahsr.\^

PRE-DARWINITE AND POST-DARWINITE WORLD.. 8c«

V-
And what has thereby been lost ? Nothing whatever,.
I contend, which could be of the slightest advantage to
the religious nature of man, but much that hampered and
misdirected it For this conception of an arbitrary Creator
involved the notion of a gigantic man, — a will like our
own, though much more powerful. And this notion in
volved the darkest of problems — why this Omnipotent
Maker did not make things better ? Why did he create
a world full of imperfections and bitter pains and evils ?
The orthodox could explain these evils by declaring all
nature to be under a curse, but the rationalist was simply
left in a cloud.
But does the doctrine of natural selection, then, expel
God from the universe ? Does it imply that in all these
fair worlds, araid all this beauty, there is no intimation of
a divine Being? By no means. It has simply broken
up an old belief as to the relation of that Being to the
universe. As theology had in the far past narrowed
him to the seven-planet theory, or again fancied that the
sun rose every morning because God waked it up, and
declared in each case that God was driven from the
universe whenever a law was substituted for his imme
diate action, so now we see the infirmity of mind which
can see no God except as prisoned in its crude notion.
Darwinism simply says to the human mind — Once more
you have been found wrong in your speculations as to
God's relation to this universe. Once more you are

go IDOLS AND IDEALS.

proved unable to comprehend the Incomprehensible.
Once more you are taught to abstain from dogmatising
where you cannot know, and to learn humility !
'"" But ^Ajatis^^pL dSttjnt>led creeds and vanished
speculations the ancient li^a^^eclare^a divine glory;
still day speaketh unto day, and nrf lrf'unt0 niSht showeth
knowledge ; and man may still reveK^ty raise his reason
to contemplate order and beauty in the\umverse- Out of
decay and death springs the flower with lts breath of loye,
and over earthly ruin bends the tendfr S^J- There is
nothing whatever in this theoryj^H^" veils t0 man a
single expression of wisdom, 1^°ve shining through
the mystery around him.
Nay, on the contrary, I ,lH maintain that this theory
has added fresh tints^jf 'jve> br%nter beams of reason
to the universe by" g our eyes t0 new aspects of it
rrffthas ill.u|minat^for the first time the dreary track of
Wm>rmS*mmg. The pre-Darwinite might say to the
suffering, «I hope and trust your pain is for some good
end;" but the post-Darwinite can say with confidence,
I know and see that pain is a beneficent agent. Pain
has been the spur under which the whole world has pro
gressed. To escape danger, to survive pain, every form
has gamed its fleetness, its skill, its power : the hardships
of nature gave man his arts to conquer it; the cruel
elements built his home; and in the black ink of sin
were written the laws of morality and civilisation »
And if this theory has for the first time taught man the
nature6 T:frU' D°ne the l6SS haS harmonised
nature with the laws of his reason. For in their best

PRE-DAR WINITE AND POST-DAR WINITE WORLD. 91
statement the old pre-Darwinite views of nature made it
discordant with the intellectual history of man. History
shows us a continuous moral, mental, and religious deve
lopment of humanity. The theories, the philosophies,
the creeds of mankind have not been distinct and isolated
creations ; they have been.an unbroken series of religions,
schools, ideas, each growing out of one preceding, giving
birth to another, so that step by step we trace philosophy
back from Huxley to Moses, or religion from Christendom
to Assyria and India. This unbroken evolution of thought
in human history we find repeated in the unfolding
intellect of every individual being. We do not think one
thing, and then a totally different thing, and feel that there
is no link binding our days and our purposes together
into a life that'represents an individuality. Yet we had
long been looking out into nature and seeing it as a
set of distinct creations ; one form made, then another.
We may well reverence the great men who have found
in the universe one theme with endless variations.
They have enabled us to hear a grand music such as
Plato dreamed of as the harmony to which the planets
moved. Finding now that his moral and intellectual
history have in their development repeated in higher
series the growth of the physical world that bore him,
man takes his own brain as his standpoint, and from the
summit of his own thought sees the immeasurable thought
reflected in nature so far as his intelligence can reach.
Nor has the post-Darwinite world lost any rational hope
held by the pre-Darwinite,— neither for the present or for
the future. For rational men, emancipated from fables,

92 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
immortality has long been a high hope; and a high hope
it will remain, untouched by the fact of his birth out of
the' organic world. So far as that hope rested upon the
dignity of the human being, it is increased by a theory
which shows that for millions of ages the forms and forces
of the world were all employed in preparing and working
out the marvel of a human brain. He may well argue
that nature will fitly cherish the gem which it cost aeons
to produce, and myriads of busy hands to polish.
And as to this world, the new theory has caused a hope
to dawn over us so dazzling that our eyes can hardly yet
bear it. It has- revealed that the force which has built
up from a zoophyte the wondrous frame of man, remains
still in our hands, ready to lay hold on man himself and
build him into a nobler race; to fossilize deformity and
liberate every power; ready to apply the omnipotent
universe for the culture of man and his dwelling-place,
causing social deserts to rejoice and blossom like the rose..

VI.
The history of the world shows that the dreaded" dis
coveries of one age become the cherished beliefs of
another. Few men aroused more alarm by discoveries
than Newton, yet few other men's names are now oftener
uttered with reverence by theologians, and pulpits illus
trate by his theories that divine existence they once
seemed to imperil. But that is not a healthy moral con
dition of the world in which truth is always dealt with as
an. enemy when it first appears, and only treated as a

PRE-DARWINITE AND POST-DARWINITE WORLD.

93

friend after he who discovered it is dead. That is very
disheartening to the intellectual world. We shall never
have the really great progress in knowledge so long as
every youth sees that the prosaic world regards with
wrath the messengers that bring tidings of newly-
discovered laws and truths.
It is not at all certain that the fault of such a state of
things rests exclusively with the world at large. There
would seem to be a fault with the men of science also.
It may be that it was the long ages of persecution which
has driven science into a sort of scholarly hermitage,
from which it sends out works so full of hard technical
words derived from the dead tongues once made com
pulsory lest the people should understand them ; and it
may have been the old theological monopoly of the
speculative moral and emotional realms of human interest
which originally relegated the savant to that hard,
unpoetical aspect of his facts from which he so rarely
ventures, and even now, it must be admitted, only with
risk of stern remand to the valley of dry bones. What
ever may be the reason, it is plain that for lack of more
general " scientific use of the imagination," or other
cause, some of the most important discoveries are still
lingering in fragmentary isolation, — stones of stumbling,
because left in the way instead of being fitted into the wall.
I was conversing with some gentlemen on the subject
of evolution in its purely scientific aspects. A lady sat
listening, and when the others had gone, she remarked
to me, " It is a most horrible doctrine." I was startled
by her look — there was on it pallor, and an expression of

94 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
mental suffering. " What is horrible ?" I asked. "Why,
that doctrine you have been all talking about— the sur
vival of the strongest. It may be that it is the law of
nature that the weak should be trampled out by the
strong, but it is dreadful." Her eyes were filled with
tears. I answered, " I believe in no such doctrine as
the survival of the strongest, — nor do those scientific
men believe in it. They believe in the survival of the
fittest ; but mere strength is not fitness. The survival of
the strongest were indeed a horrible doctrine ; but all
nature is against it. Huge monstrous things that were
only strong — moving mountains of force, mammoth and
megalosaurus — have perished because they were merely
strong, and so not fit to survive ; the forms of cruelty and
brute force have had to give way before things much
weaker ; the lions have decreased before the lambs ; and
man, weakest of all animals at birth, has been awarded
the sceptre of the world because he was fittest through his
power to love, to consider, to deny himself for others."
I had the happiness of witnessing the relief of that
young heart when she discovered her mistake,— that the
horrible doctrine of the reign of brute force has been
especially crushed by that of evolution, which proves the
steady triumph of the gentle forces of sympathy and
justice. How much misunderstanding of this kind
envelopes all great truths when they first ascend the
horizon, so that human hearts tremble like the watching
shepherds when they saw their star. " The glory of the
Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid."
'Tis an old poem, but ever repeated.

PRE-DAR WINITE AND POST-DA R WINITE WORLD. 95
It is the very evangel of our time that knowledge is
shadowing out the moral essence of the world. It has
shown mere physical power steadily decreasing, and the
power of thought and love increasing, and it has thus
discov ered for the humane a new basis for their hope, a
new spur for their effort. Ferocity is a weakness ;
fanaticism is feebleness ; selfishness is suicidal : Turkey
feels it ; Spain feels it ; Rome is learning it. Love,
Justice, Knowledge, lead the world, and human hearts
may now sing unto their Lord a new song I
VII.
A new song ! and yet that which is now a matter of
knowledge was of old felt out by the intuition and faith
of great hearts. It was felt out by Christ, who estimated
things by their sentiment — by their spirit — and not by
their outward size and seeming strength. He anticipated
thewhole story of moral evolution. To the lowly, he said, is
given the kingdom of heaven ; humility shall inherit the
earth. He had faith that ideas could level the loftiest
temples stone by stone, and perfect faith move mountains.
He could see a vast property in a widow's mite, and
emptiness in the costliest offering. He valued the sym
pathy of a woman whom others scorned more than the
gifts of the proud. A cup of cold water given for truth's
sake carried with it a- divine virtue. He looked not to the
thing done, whether it were large or little, but to the heart
and worth put into it : nothing could be large that had no
soul in it, nothing could be small which had in it one

96 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
spark of love and truth. Is there no philosophy in all
this ? Why modern knowledge has almost abolished
distinctions of great and small. It reads one law in the
rounding of a- world or a tear ; it sees in the smallest im
provement of plant or animal the essence of a new
kingdom. It discovers the power of leasts.
It recalls us to consider the sages who did not hesitate
to match their heart against the thrones of wrong and
error, because they sought no ends of their own, but
simply the ends of truth and right. None of those sages,
none of their ages, stood in the presence of greater
causes and truths than those amid which we now stand.
There are phantasms of religious terror to be cleared
away ; there is knowledge that can save millions from
disease and pain to be spread abroad ; there are prejudices
which dwarf little children by false training and instructions
in error ; there are others which make it almost impossible
for women to train themselves for service to the world, or
to enter upon any useful career. Talents are hid in
ignorance, buried under prejudice. Very few are allowed
to devote their gift to the task which needs them, as they
need it. Fashion is denying thousands the work they
would love, and uniting them to that they love not.
What can we do amid all these great moral necessities ?
So far as visible force is concerned it is perhaps but a
widow's mite we can give, a cup of water, a little ointment ;
it may be we can bring no alabaster-box, but only the
tear of sympathy to the sacred cause. Little are these in
themselves, but what mean they? Whence have they,
come? Who can tell us how far has come, and out of

PRE-DARWINITE AND POST-DARWINITE WORLD. 97
what depth, the humblest meed of sympathy or aid to a
cause rejected of men? Out of what patience, and
thought, after what temptations resisted ! When all the
world is smiting the unpopular cause, what is implied if
one approaches with hand extended not to smite but to
clasp and bless? Out of all, that one hand alone
represents the divine life and purpose of nature ; that one
alone acts for no selfish end, is guided by no low interest ;
bribed by no mean desire, not terrified by public odium,
that heart which brings its love and devotion to the
true and right has brought with it the might of every law
— the forces of destiny. •
When Dr. Johnson was once loudly defending some
strange principle of his against a company of gainsayers,
all opposed him it seemed, — one man present alone said
to him, "I believe you are right !" The man who said
that was John Wesley. Johnson lowered his voice and
said, " To have convinced such a man as you is all I can
desire." With the one best man on his side Johnson
felt he was in the majority.
That is not weak which has won the faith of the wise,
and the love of the pure in heart : though the wise be
few and poor^ and the lovers able to give but a cup of
cold water, yet the cause so supported is not weak : its
star is in the East, its day will not recede, it moves with
steadfast planets in their courses.

98 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

VIII.
The whole tendency and evolution of the world has
been to the end" of unfolding in man a power to overcome
all the selfishness of brute nature. Through ages, by
self-seeking the animal has been formed; but now by
self-denial the animal reaches a new birth. The impulse
to love that which can give no recompense to the lower
nature ; the power to serve with unwearied devotion the
true and right; these are the last and highest forces;
evolved from nature. They are the first signs of human
freedom. For no man is free who is morally fettered by
his interests, his fears, or his prejudices. He is a slave
to the world. A man is free only when he is able to go
against his interests, his fears, and his prejudices. "He
is free whom the truth makes free"— the man whom
nothing can swerve from that.
Religion— which should be an expression of this con
summate force in nature— the power that frees man from
low motives and makes his action flow straight from
reason and conscience,— must itself be born again.
That which is commonly called religion is not the loving
service, but servility under threat and bribe,— and
these the coarsest. So far the conventional religion is
irreligious. There is a healthy fear— the fear of doing
wrong. There is a noble hope— the hope that rectitude
will bring benefit to all. But that is a base fear, a mean
hope, which look merely to personal consequences of
animal pain and pleasure. How wild is the unreason

PRE-DAR WINITE AND POST-DAR WINITE WORLD. 99
that tries by the tremendous menace and promise of eternal
anguish and bliss — the most powerful appeals to selfish
ness — to make men religious, that is unselfish, acting
purely from motives of reason and right. That such a
religion as this, which has been tried on human nature
for ages, has failed, can be"- matter of surprise to no
thinking man.
True, when it was really believed, its threats and bribes
availed to conquer some of the ordinary outward effects
of selfishness. It led monks and nuns to give up earthly
for future gain. It made fanatics frown on human joys
to secure celestial delights and escape future torment.
For the Puritan it turned the face of nature to stone, like
a Medusa, and blighted the sweetest flowers of life. Such
men gave up much ; but the selfish character remained —
nay, it was intensified. The type of character was also as
self-righteous and cruel as it was joyless and narrow.
The old so-called religion having failed to produce the
perfect love that casteth out fear, the man of perfect truth,
whom no menace of deity or devil can turn from his rec
titude, — where are we to look for the religion which can
lead forth that culminating flower of nature, the perfect
character? Only in the high fruition of a religion whose
God is Love, to whom the highest service is love, whose
law is not sacrifice, but mercifulness. It is a reasonable
service, for that which falling on the heart is love, falling
on the intellect is reason. It knows no hell but false
hood and wrong, it dreams of no heaven but an eternity
of progressive thought and ever-growing harmony. Its
power has been manifested in all time in the great lovers

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

and saviours of men, who have consecrated their lives to
truth, right and humanity, though denounced to flames
on earth and flames in hell. Every rational truth, we
hold, has been planted in the earth and nourished with
the tears of men who gave their service in purity of love
and fidelity to truth. Every divine truth that is to us as a
fragrant flower, is crimsoned with the blood of a brave
man's heart. They who are free from all authority but
truth, are the heirs of their faith and trustees of their
example ; on them mainly depends whether, in the
coming time, the religion of love, reason and right shall
more largely manifest its power to conquer selfishness,
without terror, and stimulate to high action without any
sealed contract for payment in Paradise. To be able to
bear, on their work, to add to it, and transmit in fuller
force to the future, it is not necessary that a man or
woman should be eminent, but only that what power they
possess should be pure. If a man have within, firmly
based, that character which is organised by truth and
love, able to obey them and them only, every thought,
word and deed of that man will further, though in ways
he know not, all right and true things, and his feeble
hand become part of the law that upholds the universe.
More than any Sufi does the believer in evolution feel
himself walking through life on the perilous scimitar-edged
bridge, Al-Sirat ; between vast worlds of happiness and
misery. On the one side the abyss of animalism, on the
other the radiant realm where every aspiring power
within him finds its fruition. How often will he turn
upon himself and ask,- am I yet a real man? Am I

PRE-DARWINITE AND POST-DARWINITE WORLD. 101
acting from high or from low motives ? Am I in any
thing acting from motives of pride, of prejudice, or with
a view to mere personal ends? If so, how can I belong
to that kingdom of pure truth and perfect rectitude,
which is the high and fair religion that the ages have been
building? If impelled by passion, how am I better than
those lower orders whose natural life is passion ? If
acting selfishly, what am I but a higher form, perhaps
therefore more dangerous, of the creature prowling for its
prey ? Why, anybody can do that ! Any creature can be
angry, and obstinate, and forget all but himself ; nature
abounds in horns and stings. It hasn't required a
million ages merely to evolve that type of. man that can
stick to his wrong and injure others. But nature might
well have laboured a myriad ages to produce a man who
would rather be injured than injure another, and who is
great enough when he is wrong to hold his pride under
foot, and say "I have been wrong." That is greatness.^
It is, indeed, a high and steep ladder, that by which a
man must climb out of his lower up to his higher nature ;
one slip towards the false, one backward fall, and he re
lapses in the scale of moral being, and adds his weight to
all the baser forces of the earth. Love and truth alone
can save and uplift us. Let none attempt to deny or
evade the grave necessity. Moral evolution is not only
true, it is a tremendous truth. He who shall realise it
will in that instant fall upon his knees in the awful
presence of conscience, and there make his solemn vow.
To Truth he will appeal,—" Take me, fill me with thy pure
spirit! If to thee I have been at any time disloyal, if I

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

have fostered any conscious error, or practiced any -mean
concealment, or acted on considerations of mere expe
diency, — pardon me, thou one only light of mortals, and
henceforth witness that I speak and live the simple truth !
And thou, spirit of Love, let me come to rest upon thy
gentle breast ! If I fiave -wandered from thee — have
steeled my heart against my brother — forgotten charity —
thought only of myself — forgive -me, sweetest and best —
pardon ine, thou Love which alone can make life worth
living.-'!-and henceforth may my -word and deed be not
mine, but proceed from thy pure and perfect heart ! "
Anew is the commandment given to us — If any
will be great let him serve. Let him seek not to be min-
dstered unto, but to minister. Let him turn his back on
self and its low successes : let him trust himself absolutely
to love that must prevail, and truth that cannot fail —
and then wherever he may stand, beside him stand the
law and the majesty of God.

VI.

FOOTPRINTS OF THE GREAT.

FOOTPRINTS OF THE GREAT.

ARDLY any region of the world is without
certain consecrated footprints, believed to have
been left by some great religious teacher ; over
them temples are built, and around them pious offerings
are suspended. In one place it is the footprint of Indra,
in another of Krishna, in another of Buddha, and there
is a famous footprint of Vishnu in Kashmir. On the
summit of what is called Adam's Peak in Ceylon, there
is a footprint to which all sects lay claim,— Buddhists
calling it Buddha's ; Sivaites, Siva's ; Mahommetans,
Adam's ; Christians, St. Thomas's. This is the Sri-pada,
or " beautiful footstep,' —a natural formation with but a
faint resemblance to a footstep. Suggested by this,
perhaps is the Phrabat (holy footprint) of Siam, which is
artificial but very ancient, is five feet long by two broad,
and on which has been carved nearly every symbol of
oriental religion. It is the reputed footstep of Buddha,
who is believed by his worshippers to have had all these
sacred emblems upon his, blessed feet. This footprint
was a sacred thing before the Christian era (the, toe of it

106 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

was kissed by pilgrims 1,000 years before the Pope's).
There are the artificial footprints on Mount Olivet, said
to have been left by .Christ as he ascended. Near Rome,
in the Church of San Sebastiano outside the city, I saw
in marble alleged . footprints of Christ Jesus is said to
lhave appeared to Peter, who said " Lord, whither goest
thou ?" and Jesus answered, " To Rome, to be crucified
afresh !" The two prints of bare feet are generally
surrounded by worshippers. At Poitiers in France there
are two footprints of Christ in the Church of St. Radi-
gonde, made when he appeared to her there to inform her
of her coming martyrdom. There are even -so-called foot
prints of Jesus in the Mosque of Omar ; though among
Mahommetans the most sacred footprints are on a stone in
the temple of Mecca, said to be those of IsTimael, though
others ascribe them to Abraham.
Now, while the superstition of sacred footprints may
be traced from the East borne to us by Christian legend,
we Can track them in purely pagan survival, as they came
by Indo-Germanic migration. In many parts of Germany
there are formations, somewhat footshaped, which are
attributed to demons, or giants, or sometimes to heroes.
There are two immense natural hollows of this kind in
the Hartz mountains, near the village of Magdesprung,
where a -giantess leaped down from the clouds to save
one of her maidens from danger, and left these two foot
prints 200 feet apart. But it is in the corresponding
folklore of England that we find the oriental accent of
these stories. In this country we rarely find stones of a
similar character called "footprints;" though the footprint

FOOTPRINTS OF THE GREAT. 107
on rock in the isle of Thanet was once very famous.
Where St. Augustine first stepped ashore, when he came
bringing the Christian religion to England, the rock was
said to have received the mark of his foot like wax ; and,
said old Fuller, " the Romanists will cry shame on our
hard hearts if our obstinate unbelief, more stubborn than
stone, will not as pliably receive the impression of this
miracle." But in this country there are many curious
hollowed or round stones which are called the devil's
quoits. There is one I have seen in Dorset, which
the devil pitched from the Portland rocks to Abbots-
bury. Another huge stone in Scotland is said to have
been pitched there from the distant highlands by Robert
Bruce. But that such stones should be -called quoits
connects them with a long line of myths about the
quoit hurled by mighty heroes, at the end of which
line we come to the footstep of Buddha in Siam in
the .centre of which is the sacred quoit, or Chakkra,
now adored above all things by Buddhists as symbol
of the Law. Crossing the ocean you may find on a
rock beside the sea in New England the large hollow
called the Devil's Footstep. The pilgrims escaped
.bishops, but the devil followed them; and so it is that
what began in the East as the track of a descended god,
ends on the other hemisphere as the footstep of the
devil. But if you pass a few hundred miles into the interior of
America you leave behind the last step of the Eastern
superstition only to .come upon its origin — in nature.
In the farthest Alleghanies there is a mountain cleft

108 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
from summit to base, 1,300 feet, by a tributary of the
Ohio river ; and on the brow of that gorge a huge
rock which the early red men carved all over with
, signs. The Indians call it the Cows' Rock : on it are
graved the feet of all manner of .beasts and birds, and
: human feet, and waving serpents, and many other
forms. And what was this rock? Almost certainly it
was an aboriginal newspaper. There the savage carved
for others to recognise , the token of .what herd he
had found, the direction his steps had taken, the
danger to be avoided — whether the serpent or the
special track of some hostile tribe — marked in gigantic
, size. The Indians were long since driven away from that
region ; but, had they been left there, those tracks might
even now— their original use being lost — be worshipped
as the footprints of invisible beings or legendary heroes.
r Peter /Lesley, the American geologist, helps us to put
ourselves in the place of those primitive men. The wild
pioneer swims the stream and rests upon the rock beyond.
The wet mark of his foot is beside him, just the thing to
tell the wanderers who follow with women and children
the point where he landed. The wet footprint would
soon vanish, but with his rude flint he carves it in simple
lithograph, and there it remains. Or, possibly, he may
do this for amusement, while , he, waits for others to ap
proach. If afterward a settlement springs up there the
use of the track will have ceased, its origin and meaning
will be. forgotten; and wherever real meaning is lost
superstitution will always he ready to supply one of its
own. So the footstep is attributed. to god. or demon.

FOOTPRINTS OF THE GREAT

109

When the notion had gained popularity in one spot it
would be copied. There is no patent right in fables. If
the earth retained the footstep of Indra, it will not do
for it to be less plastic for Buddha, for Abraham, or Christ,
as their several sects arise. And then each religion will
try to make its founder's footprint a little larger than that
of the rival, until they outgrow ' belief, and then they
become more natural and realistic, as in the case of the
tracks of Christ Or a higher age arrives which discovers
that a great man cannot be measured by the size of his foot.
Then we reach a phase of progress when the footstep
becomes allegorical. The Hindoo god of destruction
was believed to have two chief forms — the deadly lightning
and the deadly serpent. The cobra snake is adored
through fear as his incarnation. But it was told there
was a saviour who could bruise that serpent's head.
Vishnu descended, and his first step on earth brought
his heel on the cobra's head, where the Vishnite sees the
print of it on every cobra's head to this day. But straight
way the idea floats away into Syria. There, too, we hear
of a serpent incarnation of evil, and of an incarnate
saviour whose heel is set upon his head, as it is now
pictured in scores of Christian churches throughout the
world. Thence come, too, the race of dragon-slaying
heroes from Apollo to St. George. No doubt they all
came from the first brave man who taught and showed
his fellows that courage and skill could control and van
quish the destructive forces of the world. His footprint
is carved on the world for as definite a utility as that
which copied the track of the savage, and it signals the

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

march of the higher man through the wilderness of
ignorance and fear.
But here, again, the origin and Use, will pass away ; the
significance will be sunk in the symbol. With what pain-
would Buddha or Christ, who taught so earnestly the
simplicity and pure spirituality of moral life, .could they
return, behold men and women kneeling around their
alleged visible footprints? Yet even there amid the
darkness hearts have learned to invest with deeper mean
ing the footprints of the great. It may have been from
beside one of them that there rose the chant of the Tamil
poet, Pattanathu :¦ —
In my heart I place the feet,
The golden feet of God'.
Within, beyond man's highest word
My God existeth still :
In sacred books, in darkest night,
In deepest, bluest sky,
In those who know the truth, and in
The faithful few on earth.
And after all we need not bear hard upon the symbol.
If we interpreted alien religions as their believers wish
them interpreted, we should find that every such external
footprint is countersigned by a footprint within. There
are many hundreds of them in the world, but each marks
where a real man has trod. The impress of a life preceded
each impress on the rock. The great man passed there
and the earth felt him,— never lost the trace and imprint
of him. Where he first passed, is now a highway. Un
counted millions of feet have made the high road. But
among them all, and above them, will be distinguished

FOOTPRINTS OF THE GREAT.

the footstep, brave and firm, of him who trod- there when
it was dangerous jungle or jagged rock, and whose steps
were marked with his blood. Such were the great fore
runners of thought, of knowledge and virtue. They
broke a path for man through the wilds of error, the fero
cities of wrong. They manfully pressed on — aye, every
one of them whose symbolic footprint is honoured
this day — with undaunted faith on ways where
poverty and grief were their gaunt companions, where
terror, crucifixion, death took their toll at the end.
Millions have since walked the same path in safety and
happiness. The path of flint and thorn, where trod the
martyr's bleeding feet, becomes at last a fair street of the
Beautiful City. But out of all the footsteps that have
beaten the highways of humanity, we select those early
ones — so tried, so true — not ashamed to clasp, to kiss the
blessed feet that were pierced in leading the way to our
freedom and our joy. I will fain hope that around the
visible footprints hover the solemn influences of those of
whom they are memorials. I will trust that deep in the
hearts of those who climb on their knees that stairway at
Rome by which they believe a great and true man des
cended from a judgment-seat of power to his death, — there
is some love and reverence, and a struggling onward to
what little beam of light may so mingle with the darkness
of their dungeon. There is always a germ of nobleness
in the mind that has reverence ; and though that germ
can never spring to flower and fruit if bound in the shell
of formalism, it is something that it is there; springtide
is searching for it

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

At any rate, if we have lost sight of these external
symbolic footprints, it were little gain if we did not all
the more realise the moral impress which a great soul
leaves upon the world, and upon every true heart in the
world. How many people around us who adore the
outward ancient footprint of Christ — his cross it may be,
or his pierced hands and feet — are able to recognise his
living footsteps, felt in their daily history ? More alive is he
to-day than many we meet on the street. Who hears his
footfall as he moves invisibly through the world, and
burns through its hard forms with the fiery passion of a heart
in pain to seek and save men ? Hark ! Do you know
that voice of righteous wrath against those who count
their gains, or weigh their party schemes, while men
are perishing, that cry of anguish from a soul which
feels the suffering of men and women he never saw, as
if they were his own children ? When perfunctory first
lords fail, there are First Lords of the Treasury of a
nation's heart who start forth and issue commands
that must and will be obeyed. The footprints of the
saviours of men in all time are the hearts that are saving
men now. They that left kings' courts for wildernesses, and
they who perished between the altar and the temple/he
who drank hemlock and he that was crucified, they are all
moving on with every true man; they have moulded his
brain, transfused his every vein with their blood, and
through him still carry on their work of mercy and justice. *
It is a proverbial saying in the East that the foot
prints of prophets can never be covered by any pavement.
No conventional customs, no decorous routine, be it laid

FOOTPRINTS OF THE GREAT. 113
with marble or with gold, can hide those footprints of the
great which have sunk deep into human souls. And if our
own hearts are worth anything, they will be footprints of
those same saviours. Any other Buddhism, any other
Christianity than this is mere worship of fictitious foot
prints in mouldy stone ; not totally worthless perhaps, but
quite fruitless of real benefit to ourselves or others. But let
us know that no true step or stand of a true man — how
ever lowly or limited his lot — ever yet failed to leave a
lasting impress on this earth. Indistinguishable it may
¦ be amid the multitude that press along the pathways,
they still do their part to make those pathways wider
and firmer. Happy indeed shall they be if to them fall
the high privilege of leading the way to regions not yet
trodden by the many ! Happy if theirs be the splendid
opportunity of advancing where reason and rectitude
point, even though the people warn of danger and refuse
to follow, and resist ! It is sometimes good to serve
mankind as they desire ; it is great to serve them in ways
they like not, ways unpopular and unrewarded. Even so
did the saviours and prophets who were before us ; and
great is their reward. What is greater than to be
numbered with those who extended the boundaries of
human freedom and thought, who enlarged the hope and
the vision of mankind ? If we could but so advance the
world but by an inch — a hair's-breath — that hair's-breath
were worth to us more than all the wealth and honours'
that crown any other earthly success. And that high
possibility of influence is not far from anv one of us.
Unattainable by any force of personal ambition or self-

114 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
centred aim whatever, it is open to all who can see how
self-devotion and pure principle can make the smallest
things sublime. He need not envy any lot, however
seeming high and happy, who knows the secret of living
and working where he is, in accord with his own highest
standard. The universal law of gravitation is just as
much present where a pebble rolls as where a world
moves ; and every life obedient to right, ruled by justice
and by love, is caught up into the great order and borne
on to ends higher than its happiest dreams.
For Nature and Events will generally shape our ends
better than we can do it ourselves. It is far better to live
by principle' than by plan. I sometimes marvel, reading
the lives of men who made epochs, how little they knew of
the kind of service they were doing the world. There was
simple-hearted John Wesley, who to his dying day thought
himself a Church clergyman and wore his gown. He too
has left his footprints deep. John Wesley once went to
the little town of Epworth where he was born, hoping to
preach in the parish church where from his own father's
lips he had learned what the Church preached, but he
meant to practise. When he arrived at the church door
he found it barred against him. Followed by the crowd
he went out into the graveyard, and taking his father's
tombstone for a pulpit uttered there the prophecy which
the Church refused to hear. He departed, but to this
day the people of Epworth will show you on that grave
stone marks of the feet of John Wesley. Those little
hollows represent nearly all that many of his own fol
lowers, as well as of the Church, can see of the great and

FOOTPRINTS OF THE GREAT.

"5

good man ; a dent in the old Church, a superstition in
the new. But the revolution which Wesley wrought, and
one that can never go backward, is > what neither he nor
they appreciated, — he showed that a better life could be
built up outside the church than in it. He proved that
the forces of virtue, of character, love, moral beauty,
were out there in the churchyard ; the church could bar
them out, but not bar them in — no more than it could
imprison the sunshine. So unconsciously Wesley broke
the church charm forever, and liberation has gone on
ever since. That is a thing no man could plan. But if
we will get the real footprint of Wesley, and not the
fancied one at Epworth, it will be in like him building
up the very best lives and characters outside the proud
pale of superstition. The heaviest blow man or woman
can strike at dogma is to render a better life than dogma
can produce. When Romanism fell in England it was
because the best heart and head were doing such work
outside of it that its rites became paltry; and when
protestant superstition dies it will be for the same reason.
So every honest, true life that is lived apart from those
fables and creeds is setting upon the human heart
another sign and seal of liberation.
Ah yes, my friend, it is yours too to make on earth the
footprint of a man. The timid shall see it and gain
courage. They shall say — " See, there stood, there
moved a man — a real man. He bowed to no idols,
abased his soul to no prejudices, yet was he humble ; he
was not restrained by fear, and yet he was restrained ; he
was no Christian, but what Christian was more faithful

116 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
and self-sacrificing ? " That is the footprint to make.
Time will not efface it ; nature will adopt it.
In our childhood we have pored over the story of
that footprint which Crusoe found in the sand. It filled
him with terror. Seeing none to make it he fancied it a
demon's track. If a man's, it was that of one larger than
himself. He built him a stronghold for defence. The
tide came up and effaced the footstep. The man who
made it was found,-and effaced the terror. What remained
to Crusoe from the footprint was a better house, a new
friend, a larger experience. And so shall the visible
footprints of great and small be obliterated by time and
tide ; but yet invisibly shall such as are true remain for
ever. The name of him who made it may be remembered
no more, but the service he did shall abide. The terror
awakened by the bold step for truth shall pass away, the
dreaded innovation turn to a friend. Firm and fearless
then, let us move on ; let every step of thought or work
be based on truth, friendship, justice ; so shall we leave
footsteps on the sands of time-
Footsteps that perhaps another
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother
Seeing, shall take heart again.

VII.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. (1876.)

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. (1876.)
Father of All, in every age.
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage —
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord.!

T is afair sign of our, time, that Pope's brave verses,
of which the above is, one,, have become a
favourite hymn in many liberal societies. They
represent that dawning catholicity with which, ascends the
best and brightest hope of the world — the Religion of
Humanity. May the tongues that sing it multiply, and
the burden of it swell and roll onward, till nations
hear it from, afar and begin the- choriis which shall
celebrate the falling of the last wall imprisoning the hearts
of men, and, dividing the moral forces which, united, can
conquer every evil of the world- !
That " Jehovah, Jove, or Lord" should run together so
smoothly in a verse, and cause no discord in a musical
theme, is one more sign of the extent to which the
religious sentiment has been able to conquer the ancient
watch-words of war, and blend them into its own divine

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

harmonies. For those three names of deities, and many
more that might he added to them, historically represent
past and separate continents of thought and belief. It is
a popular fallacy that the various deities of races were
evoked purely by the religious sentiment, and originally
represented its conceptions and emotions. Really those
names were the crude generalisations of a primitive
Science. They were names for natural forces and pheno
mena which gradually acquired personification as causal
or ruling powers. They were next caught up by
Philosophy and made'centres of cosmogonies devised by
the speculative mind. Dreaded at first, no doubt, by
superstitious feeling as much as Evolution now, they
gradually took their place in human belief, and religious
sentiment grew around them, — even as in later times it has
grown around, and may yet turn into dogmas, the once
denounced theories of Newton. Widely different from
each other were the ethnical dreams which deified the
phenomena of nature, and equally different the philo
sophical schools that adopted them as their various bases:
the religious sentiment, though essentially the same
throughout the world, took the several shapes of the
cosmogonies around which they grew, and their anta
gonisms are due to their non-religious accidents, — namely
to their personifications, now known as deities.
The God in which most of us have been taught to believe
was at first the name, afterwards the personification, of a
group of natural phenomena ; then it became the figure
head of an ancient cosmogony ; and thence it was
translated into a related theological system. Being the

ANTHROPOMORPHISM.

most important factor of that theological system, it has
naturally survived the crumbling of the rest of the system ;
but, however strong it may be, if that God be really a
survival, one fragment of a system whose other parts have
become discredited, its own disappearance is only a
question of time.
The world has had a long experience in this matter.
In the theology of our Hindoo ancestors there is inti
mation of a supreme deity anterior even to Brahm, but
now Brahm himself has been so superseded that he is at
most an honorary deity. Scholars have often remarked
on the fact that there exists no temple to Brahm, but
they have not so generally noted the parallel fact that
there is no Christian Church specially dedicated to God,
none to Jehovah, none, I believe, even to the Father.
The later deities supersede the old.
A friend of mine residing in a French town told me
this story. The festival of the Sacrament is called there
the Fete de Dieu — the Feast of God (our Corpus Christi).
My friend having asked a sempstress if she could come
and work on that day, the woman replied, " Ah no ; it is the
Feast of God, and he ought to have one day in the year for
himself, poor dear!" We have in that compassionate
"poor dear !" the probable explanation of the absence of
any temple either in India or Europe named for the first
person in the Trinity of either.
Each of them was an original tribal deity. He reflected
the local environment, the ideas, the particular hopes of
a people. Political changes, migrations, the union of
provinces, bring together such .tribal deities. They come

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

to a compromise sharing an equal dignity ; so forming a
triad, a trinity, an Olympian circle, of which each indi
vidual can be traced back to its provincial origin. But
real equality is as impossible among gods us among races.
The earlier, the more barbarian deity, representing a less
advanced race, may preserve the most ancient and
honoured title ; but the growing, the more modern world,
will be represented by deities more adapted to new ideas
and circumstances. This newer from may, indeed, be at
first a mediator between the old and the new, an adapter, '
an intercessor, but he — or she —will gradually supersede
the original deity. So Vishnu and Siva superseded Brahm ;
Zeus superseded Saturn, and Bacchus, Zeus ; Thor super
seded Odin ; the Father superseded Jehovah, Jesus the
Father, and in some countries Mary has almost superseded
Jesus. And all this despite the utmost efforts of each
tribe or race to modify and adapt its deity to the new
circumstances and improved ideas.
The difficulty that proved fatal to their god in each
case was precisely the difficulty which besets the like
efforts now. , Their god was born out of a certain set of
circumstances, reflected a system of beliefs ; when these
crumbled away he survived, but could not survive for
ever. The system of belief was the- habitat of its god
whose limits he could not overpass. Like Tithenos who
received the gift of immortality, the primitive- god
received not the gift of perpetual1 youth : Tithonos-,
shrivelled with age, was at last compassionately changed
to a grasshopper ; and of many ancient deities all we now
hear is a tithonic chirp.

ANTHR OPOMORPHISM.

The growth, maturity, old age, and dotage of the
ancient gods represents the opening and closing of one
great epoch of anthropomorphism,— an epoch in whose
deities were reflected not only the passions and powers of
men, but even, to alarge extent, their physical conformation.
Even after they ceased to be thought of as occasionally
visible, the beautiful brow of one, the eyes of another
the hair of a third, were pictured in poetry and art.

II..
But the world entered on an age of philosophy. Thought
set itself to the' task of comprehending and explaining
the universe, and generalising its phenomena to an order
for the intellect. This new age expressed itself in a theism
which selected from the previous theisms so much as
seemed to be required to account for the origin and
existence of Nature. It ended, of course, in negation.
Lucretius saw its weakness as clearly as Tyndall. It lay
in the assumption that there had been a creation. Nobody
had any right to assume that there ever was a period when
nothing existed. And even if that were granted the
demand for a cause was interminable : each cause when
reached requiring reference to a further cause, ad infini
tum. The deity first ealled up by the vain effort to reach a
final cause for the universe was an anthropomorphic deity.
That is, it was- based upon the notion of an immense
exertion of power of the kind that man puts forth in a
small way, whenever he produces anything. Nor was the

124 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
First Cause less anthropomorphic, or manlike, if it were
said that the universe was begotten by God or emanated
frtM'"ft#n?%^Pl£se a]so were human analogies.
Then arose the philosophical theism which based itself
upon contrivance in nature^, the evidences of intelligence
and skill. This indeed underlay the earliest theism, but
it was then able to con*mand belief, because there was
not yet that craving for»unity which is the soul of phi
losophy. Nature is soffull of apparent contradictions
that various contrivery(»d to be imagined, and that was
easy to the polyth^Kts ; but philosophy rebelling against
the idea of a,s«\varm of deities with contrarious powers and
aims^petssoon puzzled to reconcile good and evil designs.
inhere is a story of a clergyman who, walking with his son,
pointed out the goodness and wisdom of God as illustrated
in a crane wading near them, the soft folding and unfold
ing of its long legs without causing a ripple to startle the
fish, and its long slender bill so admirably shaped for
fishing. The lad recognised the goodness of God to the
crane ; " but, father," he said, " isn't the arrangeipent a
little tough on the fish ? " The clergyman told his son
that his difficulty was a suggestion of the devil. In one
sense it certainly was : the mental growth of a child
repeats in an embryonic way the mental history of the
race, and it was precisely in that boy's difficulty that the
notion of a devil was born. The crane side of the pro
ceeding showed the good contriver, the fish side the bad
contriver. The presence of pain in the world was fatal
to the argument from design : if it proved any deity at all
it proved two at least. And there it has logically ended

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 125
in the great theologies of the world, while, on the other
hand, Science and Philosophy abandon the problem
altogether as relating to supposed matters for whose
verification the human mind has no corresponding
faculties. So perished the anthropomorphic deities of philosophy,
— the first-cause god, the contriving god,— following their
Olympian predecessors.

III.

Monotheism, in a strict sense, has never been the creed
of any popular or historical religion. The reduction of
supernatural powers to subordination under three persons,
whose several tasks imply the duality of god and devil,
has simplified the problem of theism but has not ma
terially advanced it towards solution. So far as this is
concerned we are very much in the same position as
were the rationalists under whose scepticism the gods
and goddesses of Greece vanished eighteen hundred years
ago, when the popular divinities, like those of our own
time, could only be defended by denunciations of those
who denied them.
In Fraser's Magazine (October, 1876), Mr. James
Anthony Froude has written an admirable paper on
Lucian, in whose works he finds reflected "The Twilight of
the Gods '' of Paganism, which is a mirror wherein most of
.our nineteenth century theology may behold its own
features. Lucian was born near Antioch and wrote in
the latter part of the second century after Christ. He

126 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
looked upon the decaying superstitions of the Greek and
Roman pantheon, and the growing superstitions of
Christians, pretty much as our philosophic thinkers now
look upon the dogmas of orthodoxy on the one hand, and
the theories of spiritualism on the other. In his Zeus
TpaymSos the scene opens in heaven, where the deities,
finding their chief, Zeus, in grief and agitation, question
him as to the cause. Zeus relates sadly that he had been
listening to a controversy in Athens between two dis
putants, Damis the Epicurean, and Timocles the Stoic,
before a large and distinguished audience, on the nature
of Providence. Damis affirmed that the gods had no
existence, or at any rate no influence on human affairs :
and though Timocles pleaded for the gods furiously,
Zeus declared his arguments were weak, the listeners
generally on the side of Damis, and, unless something
were done, they (the gods) would become mere names
and their altars ruins.
Upon these grave tidings the deities hold solemn
conclave, and among others who give their opinion is
Momus, who frankly avows that he cannot blame the philo
sophers who pick holes in them. " What other conclusions
could they arrive at," he asks, " when they saw the con
fusion around them? Good men neglected, perishing in
penury or slavery; and profligate wretches wealthy,
honoured, and powerful. Let us be candid. All that we
have really cared for has been a steady altar-service.
All else has been left to chance. And now men are
opening their eyes. They perceive that whether they
pray or don't pray, go to church or don't go to church,

ANTHROPOMORPHISM.

127

makes no difference to them." Momus is rebuked for
his rudeness, but the question remains, what is to be
done? In the end they all repair to the place where
Damis and Timocles have engaged to renew their
contest. As they arrive, their advocate Timocles says
to Damis —
What ! you blasphemous villain, you ! you don't
believe in the gods and in Providence ?
Damis. — I neither believe nor disbelieve. I wait your
reasons why I should have a positive opinion about it.
Timocles. — I will give you no reasons, you wretch !
Give me your's for your atheism.
Zeus. — Our man is doing well. He has the rudest
manner and the loudest voice. Well done, Timocles !
give him hard words. That is your strong point. Begin
to reason and you will be as dumb as a fish.
But the advocate of the gods is presently compelled to
give his reasons. He argues from design and order in
nature, but Damis tells him he assumes design and order
where there may be none. Timocles next says he
believes in the gods because Homer did. Damis wants
to know whether he also believes as Homer relates, that
Zeus, to reward Thetis, cheated Agamemnon with a false
dream, which led to the destruction of tens of thousands.
Timocles then appeals to the common belief of mankind ;
but Damis reminds him that one tribe worships a bull,
another a crocodile, a third a dog-headed ape, and asks
if these are the foundations of theology. Finally, Timocles
argues that as there are altars there must be gods.
Whereupon Damis laughs and says that they can contend

128 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
no longer, since he hangs the existence of gods on the
existence of altars. " You have taken refuge at the
altar as men do in extremities."
Timocles. — Oh, oh ! you are sarcastic, are you ! you
gravedigger ! you wretch ! you abomination ! you gaol
bird ! you cesspool ! we know where you come from ;
your mother was a whore ; and you killed your brother
and seduced your friend's wife ; you are an adulterer, a
Sodomite, a glutton and a beast. Stay till I can thrash
you. Stay, I say, villain, abhorred villain !
Zeus.— One has gone off laughing, and the other follows
railing and throwing tiles at him. Well, what are we to
do? Hermes.— The old play says, "You are not hurt if
you don't acknowledge it." Suppose a few people have
gone away believing in Damis, what then? A great
many more believe the reverse; the whole mass of
ignorant Greeks and the barbarians everywhere.
Zeus. — True, Hermes, but that was a good thing which
Darius said about Zopyrus, " I had rather have one
Zopyrus than a thousand Baby Ions."
In this ancient fragment we find all the arguments for the
existence of a deity stated with which we are familiar,— de
sign, authority of the ancients, authority of great men, the
common beliefs of mankind. And when all these are met
and refuted as they have been in our day by the precise
arguments of Damis, we are unhappily still familiar with
the final argument— taking refuge at the altar and hurling
epithets and slanders against the man who denies its
authority over reason. How was Voltaire answered?

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 129.
Accused of vices. How was Thomas Paine answered?
Charged with all manner of wickednesses. Have our
theologians got any better argument to-day ? In some
enlightened centres those who disbelieve the popular
idols may escape slander and abuse if they keep well to,
their own audiences, or write in a high philosophical way
that does not reach the masses ; but if they come into the
popular arena the argument is still apt to end as it has.
against Mr. Bradlaugh, who has had to defend himself
several times in the courts against the personal charges
heaped upon him, and of which he has proved himself
innocent, — slanders like those against Damis, resorted to
in lieu of any real arguments to prove the existence of the
traditional and conventional deities.
But all such wrath directed against a man in reply to
honestly-reasoned convictions are signs and confessions,
of a dying or dead belief. Personalities never rise till
arguments fail. Thinking men who have listened to the
denunciations heaped upon such men as Tyndall can
only echo the thought attributed to Zeus when Hermes
would console him by the reflection that the great ignorant
mass still believed in him though Damis did not : " I
had rather have one Zopyrus than ten thousand Babylons."
It would be worth more to the religion of England to
possess the confidence of one Tyndall than that of ten
thousand ignorant believers, and the retained advocates
interested to foster their blindness and encourage their
superstition.

130 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

IV.

As philosophy surrenders the problem of the divine
existence, religious sentiment has taken it up. What we
have for some years been calling " pure theism '' was the
first result.- It accepted the verdict of philosophy in large
part; that is, it met the problem of pain and evil in
the world by pronouncing the word "unknown," if
not "unknowable." But on the* other hand it'eagerly
seized on all the beauty and joy of the world, arid
recognised in these the presence of wisdom and love.
Its very heart was optimism. It said, so far as we
know all is well; when we know more of what now
seems evil, no doubt we shall find that to be also
good. It was not the necessity of this moral theism to
affirm a beginning of the universe, nor -a creator or great
heavenly mechanic ; all it wanted was a moral being,' a
sacred living ideal to be loved and adored. This marks
an enormous distance of our present theism from any
theology of the past. In all history we do not find an
instance where any one has been persecuted for attributing
wickedness to any god or gods. Tens of thousands have
suffered for denying their existence, or for novel defini
tions concerning their form, essence, and mode of exist
ence ; but the gods have been freely associated with every
baseness, from murder and lust to jealousy and wrath, and
no one was ever troubled for holding such opinions about
them. Perhaps it would be too much to say our modern
theism has entirely reversed this, for it is to be feared that

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 131
many theists would even yet fraternise with a clergyman
who believes God capable of torturing human beings in
hell, rather than with a man who denies God's existence.
But though, for a time yet, the atheist may hardly fare so
well among theists as the Calvinist, the tendency is to give
up even so much anthropomorphism as lies in that feeling.
It is not difficult to perceive that any god who personally
cares what men think of him, or who is concerned whether
his existence is believed in or not by mortals, is only a
man, — and rather a narrow-minded man too; for a sensible
man would hardly feel insulted if he' heard that some one
doubted his existence. A deity personally interested in
such things belongs to a theology whose tomb he must
ultimately share. At the same time it is perfectly con
sistent for one to oppose atheism as an evil without fancying
it a sin. We may regard it as injurious to man without
dreaming that it is an offence either to man or God.

V.
The ascription of personality to the deity also represents
a lingering anthropomorphism : to what degree, depends
upon the exactness or vagueness with which the term
" personality " is conceived. Of course man can not have
an idea of any personality but his own, however this may be
idealised. All modern theists divest this personality of its
coarser attributes, when ascribing it to a deity. Nay,
even barbarians have not called any god by a personal
name. The names of ancient gods are those of the
elements, the day, the sun, time, the sky, or space ; and no

132 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
tribe seems to be so low as to give personal names to their
gods — as it might be William or Henry. But individual
names are symbols of personal interests ; it seems of the
very essence of our personality that we should have a
private history distinguishing us from all others. No
theist can think of the deity as personal in that way, — as
having a pedigree and private interests, concerns separate
from the universe. Doubtless the vast majority of
educated theists have eliminated these main elements of
a human personality, and have taken its higher manifesta
tions as attributes of the deity, — Power, Will, Intelligence,
Consciousness, Love. Now these things are, in their
obvious sense, known to us only as qualities of man,
and as reflecting the limitations of man. We can conceive
of power and will only as overcoming resistance, and to
personify them in a good god implies the recognition of
a power opposing him. Intelligence is the perpetual
contrivance of an imperfect being to adapt itself to its
environment. Consciousness is the result of an apparatus
connecting a limited nature through senses with external
objects, and possible only under changes in the relation
to those objects. (We are not conscious of the weight
of the atmosphere, vast as it is, because it is unchanging,
nor of the motion of our earth, swift as it is : we become
conscious of a thing by comparing it with a different
thing, as if the earth's motion should cease we would
become conscious of it by comparison of its stillness with
the previous motion.) If we attribute such sensations to
God we invest him with our own imperfections : his con
sciousness, for instance, would mean that he becomes '

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 133

aware of something he did not know before. Shall we say
"God loves us?" Love, in that sense, is a human attribute:
it represents the longing of a limited nature for something
it lacks ; or the cleaving to another needed for its own
completeness. These facts confirm the words of Spinoza : " To define
God is to deny him." Every personification of the deity
is an attempt to define him. It has been tried through
many thousands of years, and with one result. The
personification of one age represents the highest con
ception of that age, but becomes a low conception to
following ages. If the loyalty of that earlier age had
gathered about an impersonal ideal, that ideal might grow
with the intellectual and moral growth of the world. But
when the ideal is personified, popular loyalty is divided
between the moral quality and the person : the personality
inspires awe and fear — which the abstract ideal does not —
and he continues to receive allegiance after his character
represents only a discredited ideal. Many a kind woman
and just man now worships a being neither just nor kind,
an image inferior to themselves. Their loyalty is divided
between the moral ideal alone worthy of worship, and an
ancient personification of what once seemed moral but is
now immoral, — simply because that personification was
girt about with will, power, self-esteem and other mena
cing characteristics essential to personality.
Have we reason to hope more for our own personifica
tions ? Can we be sure that any personality imagined to
day will give our descendents less trouble than Jehovah
has given us ? Will it not bind the growing ideal if in the

134 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
future great institutions, churches, property are under
tenure of the Theos of our present theism, who will so
be enabled to fortify himself against the more enlightened
views of our own liberal brothers and sisters of the future ?
It was the old argument of Liberalism that the acceptance
of a mediator made him a veil between the soul and God ;
can anything else be said of any personality that is brought
between the soul and the pure ideal ?
VI.
Now, I do not think that the word " God" necessarily
.carries with it the idea of personality, any more than
gravitation personifies what it stands for. There are in
nature certain facts beyond which we cannot get, —
electricity, attraction, motion. We must have words for
them, but no such word is- explanatory. Electricity
names a phenomenon, but does not pretend to account
for it. There are phenomena, which to me appear to
represent a principle in nature quite as definite as
electricity, and I call it "God." I may be told that most
people associate a personality with the word " God ; " well
for a long time men personified Electron, and yet we
have to use it. The use of language is to be understood.
Words are conventional; they are not substitutes for
philosophical definition. If I speak of" sunset" no one
has a right to suppose I believe the sun sits down. Now,
it may be that what Carlyle once spoke of to a friend, as
" the long paraphrase which we shorten in the word God,"
will some day be better expressed. But at present I do

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 135
not know any other word which can make us understood
when we mean that sacred influence which is the main
fact of our inward life. Eyery experience must seek its
expression, and, thus far, of all the terms for the ideal
elements within and without us which denote their reality,
the word " God " appears to me the least daring, the least
descriptive, while popularly it suggests the Good.
Moreover, as no sect can monopolise the word " religion,"
none can so degrade the word " God : " even , when
personalised it must be in a generic sense, and can not,
—like Jehovah, Vishnu, Trinity, Allah, — be made the
figure-head , of any cosmogony, sect, or special set of
superstitions., It must become an increasingly impersonal
expression by the very necessity of being detached from
the several personified patron-deities of the various races.
When the great Religion of Man has come this term, will
necessarily stand — as it stands now in the pages of
Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and many poets— for the in
definable but majestic supremacy of perfect and eternal,
principles ; for their unity, universality, and harmpny ;
for their superlative glory in all things fair and grand,
and the passionate love and longing they awaken in the
breast of man.
Though the meaning of the word " God " is lost in
antiquity, its survival confesses that not one step has
been gained towards explanation since that word was
coined in the immemorial past. In. that great: lapse
of time the religious aspiration of man has survived
the decay of many personal deities : men thought it could
not continue without a visible deity with quite as much

136 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
reason as some now think it must perish Without some
personification ; but they did then, they do now, under
estimate the imperishable vitality of the moral and
religious nature of man. It is precisely that which cannot
fail with any form or formula : it grows by their decay.
It outsoars all definitions. It comprehends all beautiful
things and is comprehended by and in none of them.
And when all our speculations are forgotten, or have
become subjects of archaeological interest, like those of
Ptolemy or Hermes, those who come after us will still be
chanting with the Persian Sadi, "O thou that towerest
above the heights of imagination, thought, or conjecture,
surpassing all that we have heard or read, the banquet is
ended, the assembly dismissed, and life draws to a close,
and we still rest in our first encomium of thee ! "
But here I may be reminded that in speaking of " in
fluence " I am using an anthropomorphic expression. It
is indeed a word of human associations, and it is conceded
that if we report anything in language at all it must be
in terms derived from human experience. But it is not
against any word, but against a thing that I contend. If
one speaks of the deity as " Father," it may be a simple ex
pression of the heart, as if he had said " Love ; " but if
the same individual shrinks from varying the phrase to
" Mother" it can only be because the word " Father "
has become representative of some anthropomorphic
conception. If we mean anything whatever by the word
" God " it must at least be what is most exalted in our
own human conception, but it may be without the limi
tations of that conception. Thus, it is anthropomorphic

ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 137
to say " God loves," for to love is the act of man ; not so
to say " God is Love," for We can have no idea of a man
who is love. To say " God knows " is anthropomorphic ;
not so to say " God is Wisdom." When Jesus said " God
is a spirit " — in his own sense of a viewless influence,
Whose effect we feel as we do the breath of the wind,
while we cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it
goeth — he raised the mind above every anthropomorphic
conception, to the pure elemental realm of ideal and
moral existence.
It has become the custom to label everybody with a
party-name, and they who refuse to personify God are
called Agnostics, — a word meaning one who does not
know, but often held to designate one who worships
the Unknowable. But for myself I decline to affirm
that anything is unknowable. Nor do I worship the
Unknown. What I worship is my ideal, as perfect as T
can make it. Love, Reason, Right, Beauty are blended
and consummate in it. In what mode or modes these
subsist in the universe none can know, but it is not my
ignorance that I worship ; it is the ideal which I do
know, though knowing not the metaphysics of it.
But is all this real ? Is there in the universe any reason
apart from the brain of man, or any principle of love
beyond that manifested in the human heart ? For myself
I cannot doubt that there are in nature these supreme
elements, which make and mould us rather than we
them. There is in nature an evolutional order, a geometry, a
mathematical uniformity, by which are built the worlds

138" IDOLS AND IDEALS.-
and the cells of bees, and which make possible the
sciences of man. Upon man the universal laws are
compulsory: no vote of majorities can alter them, no,
individual will set them aside. Human culture means ,
their (recognition, and human wisdom means instinctive
obedience f o them. In the wilds of Africa and in the
Bank. of England alike, two and two make four; and
though the interests of a nation might conceivably lead
it to enact that two and two make. five the laws of
number and relation would crush them. Reason is a ,
principle in nature which reaches consciousness in man, .
but it .does not grow into . existence through man; for
man's growth is .an ascension to an . inward harmony.
with it, in place of that coercion by it which, in his lower.
condition, he shares with plant and animal.
Love exists in nature. It is the principle of progress,
and to believe in progress is to believe in God.. Recog
nising as highest within us the attraction of the best, and
individual growth as its expression,, we look forth upon .
the world and discern a like law operative there. Life
has journeyed from the zoophyte to Shakspere. Art has
journeyed from a naked savage swimming across his river,
on a log to a civilised man crossing the ocean in a
floating palace ; from the scrawled picture-letter to the
cartoon of Raphael. Humanity has journeyed from the
normal war of nomadic savages to courts of law,,
arbitration, and social comity. Honesty has become
the best policy. The peaceful more and more inherit
the earth; animal and human ferocities pass away,
gentleness and benefit survive and increase. Evermore..

ANTHR OPOMORPHISM. ) 39
a progress towards the better ! Why is this movement
not backward ? Why has not there been a steady
survival of -the morally unfittest? Why should there not
have gone on a steady growth of the slave-trade, a multi
plication of slaves, an advance in Russia to double the
extent of that serfdom which has been abolished ? Why
has not dishonesty become the best policy ? Why this
phenomenon of a totality ever moving onward not back
ward, even the decays of this or that fragmentary and
partial civilisation followed invariably by a finer com
bination, and so contributing to swell the general impulse
upward ?
Some theological theists appear inclined to smile at
Mr. Matthew Arnold's reverential homage to a " stream
of tendency," nevertheless it is in that ark that Faith is
to float past the deluge of scepticism and denial.,. For that
stream of tendency is a stream of love, and it must needs
pass through mysteries of iniquity, pain, seeming chaos.
As we stand on its banks we look forth and see the
cyclone in India with its two hundred thousand mortals
cut down in a moment, as it were mere weeds under a
scythe. What recourse has Faith, but to believe the
Ages against the Hour as they attest the power that
makes for righteousness, abandoning the whole problem
of the Why which a discredited metaphysic has foisted
upon the religious sentiment ?
It is perfectly true that if we could certainly discern
in nature or in history any stream of tendency which :
makes for evil or wrong, it would be impossible to
believe in any deity worthy our reverence. But in.

¦140 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
•contradiction to the established demon-worship around
us with its plain antitheistical dogmas of a personal devil,
or an evil principle in the universe, with an eternity
equal to the good, Science itself has come to prove that
every pang in nature has been a spur of improvement
and progress. It shows untold myriads of struggles and
"agonies, ferocities, efforts of pursuit and escape, summed
up into all the forms of use and beauty -which sur
round us.
I decline to theorise about the ultimate causes and
absolute nature of things, because I find no powers in
myself adequate to the task. But it is not theory that
tells me Love exists in this universe, and Reason, and in
an ideal perfection which neither individual men -nor all
mankind have attained. We cannot tell how they
originated, or 'whether they originated, or their mode
and relation, or why they do not prevail over the evils of
the world instantly,— if they do not ! We cannot com
prehend the mystery of Love and Thought in our own
nature. No Franklin has yet snatched from the air that
finer flame which spiritually awakens and renews the
universe. To try and analyse ourselves to find a soul is
like digging into a stone to discover its electricity. We
feel— and why shall feeling be denied its weight ?— that
these onward-drawing forces, these longings for a com
pleter life, are-the profoundest realities of our existence
and correspond to their like reality in the universe.
There is an influence beneath which mankind must
bend as trees beneath the invisible wind. Sacred ideals
arise and overawe our lower nature, We can not— we

ANTHR OPOMORPHISM. 141
will not — endure the thought that the intimations of our
immortality mean nothing, because they mean not the
egotism of the vulgar, and that the promise of our
heart is false. While we muse the fire burns. Emotions
ascend' and life struggles to ascend with them. From the
fair Kosmos whence we have derived a life — how strange,
undreamable ! — that is real, equally have we derived
ideals and cravings that seek their satisfaction in. things
invisible — in moral beauty, self-forgetting love, the
harmony of the inward and outer worlds : and even as a
seed in its sod may feel the warm quickening touch of
the sun it has never seen, so amid the darkness of the
earth the heart may feel stirring within the mystical
attraction whose nature it cannot dream, whose sweetness
seems to promise a far-off flowering into joy.

VIII.
THE DREAM OF SOCRATES.

THE DREAM OF SOCRATES.

ANY years ago I went to hear a lecture in
America by a celebrated spiritualist. In this
lecture he gave what he saw, as he said, in a
certain trance, the geography of the spiritual world. He
described a realm of shining ether, populous with aerial
and luminous forms which had once been human beings
on earth. These passed hither and thither along path
ways, which apparently consisted of electrical currents.
Many of these bright beings were gathered around the
forms of men and women who, having died on earth,
were gradually awakening in this higher world ; and this
realm above stretched out from the confines of the earth,
becoming most distinct as the atmosphere was left
behind. Some of its electrical highroads did indeed
intersect the air and impinge upon this lower earth, and
by these the spiritual beings were enabled here and there
to descend and communicate with mortals.
As we left the building where this address had been
delivered by the famous spiritualist — Andrew Jackson
Davis — I well remember the comments which many of

146 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
the assembly made upon it. Nearly all said that the
lecturer was quite deranged, that he certainly ought to be
in a lunatic asylum. Others regarded him as inspired.
The vision was a (perhaps unconscious) travesty of
another seen by one of the wisest of men. Nearly 2,500
years before him, Socrates, while waiting for the hour in
which he was to drink the fatal hemlock, related to his
friends his dream of the upper world to which he believed
himself about to pass. Socrates thought of the universe
as one great realm, of which this lower earth was a mere
floor. He said the higher world was an extension of this.
There are, according to Socrates, many and wonderful
places in the earth, and it is itself neither of such a kind
nor magnitude as is supposed. We who here inhabit some
small portion of it, dwell as frogs in a marsh. But the
pure earth is situated in the pure heaven, and what we
call the world is but the sediment at the bottom of it.
As any creature dwelling at the bottom of the sea may
imagine itself on the surface of the earth, ignorant of
the higher forms residing on continents, so we imagine
ourselves on the surface, apd are equally ignorant of the
forms dwelling on islands and continents of the etherial
world. As fishes behold the sun and moon through the
water, we behold them through the atmosphere. We are
weighed down and bound to the bottom of this atmo
spheric sea by our grossness. We see here forms which
are larger than those at the bottom of the sea, more
beautiful, and yet similar,— for in the sea there are hills
and trees and flowers, all dwarfed; but ours also are
dwarfs corresponding to the fairer and larger growths and

THE DREAM OF SOCRATES. i47
scenes of the real surface where our luminous forms
dwell. Man is indeed a form climbing slowly from the
lower to .the higher ; he has got a first foothold on the
more real earth ; and by the study of philosophy and
purity of life he is to refine his senses, evolve higher
organs, which will fit him to ascend at death to the purer
realm. There he shall find seasons of a purer temper,
admitting of no disease. He shall no longer as here
dwell in illusions, but see things as they are.
When the sage had finished his discourse Orito said,
" How shall we bury you ? " " Just as you please if
you can only get hold of me," answered Socrates, with a
smile. " I shall not remain with you, but depart." At
sunset he enjoined his children and pupils ito follow virtue
as the path which led upward to the immortals. Then
the officer proffered the poison and he drank it. The
rest of his moments he employed in trying to .console his
friends who were far more sorrowful than he, and as he
died his last words were — " Crito, we owe a cock to
^Esculapius." It is to be feared that these last words
show that superstition survived even in that great mind,
though one would fain rationalise it, and find therein only
an expression of his obligation to the genius of health,
the divine physician. The dying tribute of Socrates
might well be to Health. Thought had not come out
malformed ; ideas had not been diseased ; iEsculapius,
son of perfect-formed Apollo, may have been the symbol
of the man who so well represented the sound mind in a
sound body.
And yet the high speculation of this sound mind,

148 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
detached from his age, wrested from the past, and laid
¦before an American audience, had the effect of an actual
sacrifice to the ^Esculapius of superstition, a relapse
through twenty-five centuries : it had the sound of in
sanity. The fair dream, of Socrates had become the
raving of a spirit medium. Such is the necessity laid
upon the- world to grow, that the wisdom of one age
becomes the folly of another. The child's conception
of the stars as angel-eyes may denote a clever imagina
tion ; let him retain that idea when he becomes a man
and it denotes idiocy.
A. great man in the past must be credited not with his
bare idea, but with all that has grown out of it An idea
if healthy will show itself such by budding into new
ideas, blossoming in related brains, and, if they are
truthful ideas, their fruit must be gathered far away, as
they ripen into schools of thought. The greatness of
this dream of Socrates is not to be found in its testimony
to individual immortality. After so many ages we find
ourselves on that point still in ignorance, — aspiring with
a fair hope, trusting ourselves to a sense of Wisdom
and Love in the Universe. But the greatness of the
vision of the Greek sage is found in the perception it
embodies of an all-pervading unity in Nature. Since
then Science has discovered the innumerable worlds ruled
by one law ; it has discovered planet bound with planet ;
and detects a medium stretching between our little world
and the largest, a medium through which are transmitted
the light of the most distant star and its attractive
energy. In one sense Science- has made our familiar

THE DREAM OF SOCRATES. 149
earth seem as small as it appeared to Socrates — a little
nucleus deposited amid the infinitude of that space which
is peopled with worlds. But, in another sense, Science
has aggrandised our world ; it has shown it to belong to
a magnificent system, and thereby made us citizens of a
Universe. And it is not too much to claim for Socrates
that he vaguely anticipated all this. He had mentally
allied this earth with a more universal sphere. He out
lined in imagination an all-inclusive realm of which this
outer earth was but a large group of molecules. His
dream of that nobler grander universe was especially
splendid because he saw it related to the inward and
intellectual nature of man. This was pure idealism :
when man had reached a cosmical development through
philosophy he would find himself dwelling in a new
earth,— he would find himself no longer creeping about
in a little hole and corner of his earth, but residing in a
grand and large realm, full of beauty and freedom, with
all its growths and heights enlarged. All the air would
be refined ; it would be the luminiferous ether of virtue
and wisdom. Its inhabitants would be not gross forms
of flesh and blood, but beings purified and ennobled.
To see the. fulfilment of this dream we must withdraw
from it just that which the spiritualist emphasised. in it.
What he made most of was its form ; we must make most
of its substance. He dwelt on the mere localisation of it
in upper space, and beyond the portal of death ; but its
truth cannot be got at by that preservation of the letter.
The essence of the philosophy of Socrates is that, .a
higher nature within implies a higher world without; that

ISO IDOLS AND IDEALS.
things dwarfed to the ignorant are enlarged for the
knowing ; things gross to the unrefined become all pure
to the pure ;. that things poor and ugly to the vulgar,
become significant, beautiful, cosmical to those who have
emerged from animalism and become themselves broad
and largely human. In. a word, the grand stroke of
Socrates was. to- make the highest heaven an expansion
of our own earth; and the path to that heaven a cultiva
tion of our own human faculties. The location of that
exalted region in space was merely incidental ; that- may
pass with his age to which it belonged. When Columbus
and his fellow sailors were voyaging westward, they saw
in the morning twilight a long bank, of flushed and rosy
cloud — as they supposed it. The rosy cloud proved to
be the North American continent. Many men have
similarly projected into- the heavens, things that really
were outlying and unexplored continents of their own
minds. Socrates projected' entirely into the ether above
the atmosphere,, that fair realm which increasing know
ledge shows, to be the most salient and glorious fact of
this world, whatever may be discovered respecting super-
terrestrial, regions.
The royal sensualist, surrounded, by his- concubines,
and jaded with luxury, exclaimed, " There is nothing new
under the sun ! " The seer on Patmos, exiled and lonely,
cried j " I see a new heaven and a new earth ! " What a
man sees around him depends upon what he has- eyes
for seeing. It; is not the same earth that is looked upon
by the eye of ignorance and the eye of science; very
different is the same landscape to the vision of the agri-

THE DREAM OF SOCRATES. 151
cultural labourer and to that of Turner or Wordsworth.
He who has polished his senses> cultivated his taste;
freed himself from base passions; raised mind and heart
into harmony with the spirit of Nature, — that man moves
in a very different world from one who' is imprisoned in
his lower nature. The one walks in the cellar, the other
in the saloon of Nature. The one inhabits a closet of
the earth, the other abides amid its palatial grandeurs)
He sees "the light that never was- on land or sea,"— the
lustre that only the inward vision can bring to land and
sea. The vision of the dying philosopher is a prospect
of all that man shall find in his world,— burgeoning with
its life from flower to star,— when exalted by virtue his
heart throbs with the warm pulses of a universal heart,.
his intellect is united with universal Reason.
I count the highest gain which philosophy has attained
in this age to be the perception that the real way to
reach a better world is to secure a better man. If we
can regenerate man the earth will follow him swiftly
enough. A little more brain added to; one man's head
has often changed the whole face of the world. This is
the truth which such men as Robert Owen were feeling
out — groping after — when they declared that every man.
is the reflection of his circumstances. That was the
stem on which has grown the perception that the better
circumstance is the reflection of a better man. The
author of that remarkable book entitled "Hereditary
Genius" — one of the gospels of our time — sent out
circulars to all the leading men of science now living, in
this country, inquiring of them what kind of people their

152 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
parents and grandparents were; what kind of family
training they had ; how they happened to study science,
—and asking all manner of questions about their health,
habits, and religion. He received about ioo answers to
these questions, all fully giving the facts concerning the
nature and nurture of the most eminent students of
nature in this- country. The results of these curious
inquiries (whose .theological bearings have already been re
ferred to) showed that these great men nearly all had
healthy parents ; that their parents had generally been
vigorous in mind as in body; they had not tied their
children down with too many rules, and had left them free
to follow the bent of their own minds and tastes. Nearly
all of them looked back with pleasure on their home
education, but with regret on their university education.
One wrote, " At the university I spent most of three
years learning Latin and Greek, of which languages I am
entirely ignorant." Another wrote, " My college life was
a blank waste of time on the classics." Another wrote
only the three words " Latin— Latin — Latin," as the sum
of all he got at his university. The responses of all
indicated abounding vitality and health. One had never
had but two aches in his life ; another in thirty years had
never been absent from his profession but two days.
Nearly all avowed themselves heretics in religion. These
accounts of themselves by the average best hundred
heads in the country make it plain that, because they
were fine products, they were also fine producers. As
Shakspere said, " Nature is helped by no mean, but
Nature makes that mean." . But at the same time they

THE DREAM OF SOCRATES. 153
were not products of wild uncultivated Nature ; they are
ripe results of that culture which makes every good
home a conservatory of greatness. They represent
Nature realising herself in mind. They are -rock and
plant crumbling to make brains able to interpret rock
and plant. The world is winged by their thought ; and
the wings are not stuck on from without, but put forth
from within. And yet they are put forth as the result of
a long accord with the laws of the universe into which
they are born. Such families as those which through
generations of study and obedience evolve these men
represent that whole ascent from the lower to the higher
world which :Socrates supposed could be attained only -
through death, and which people who are a few thousand
years behind their time still think is to be gained by
some magical potency of the grave.
Whatever reasons we may have for believing or hoping
that men survive death, we surely have no reason for
believing that any such transformation takes place in the
nature or character as that .often ascribed to the change
at death. Nature is throughout a series of conditions
leading to results. There is no royal road to learning,
and no short cut to character. Those moralexcellencies
and intellectual powers which are here to be obtained
only by patience, self-denial, -fidelity, study, we may be
sure will not be obtained elsewhere at a less cost.
Socrates saw that any higher world must be only a
widening out of this world ; and if science, coming after
him, shows the most distant planet similar to our own in
substance and revolving by the same force that turns

154 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
this, we may be equally sure that we shall never get
beyond the stern laws of thought and virtue any more
than we shall get beyond the law of gravitation.
We may see, then, in the dream of the- Greek philoso
pher our own old world transfigured in the light of its
rational soul. We may see in this dream of heaven the
possibilities of earth. I invoke it from the past" to re
mind us again that the pure earth is situated in the pure
heaven; that it floats in wisdom as it floats- in air ; that
it is bathed in reason as- it is bathed1 in sunlight. By
coarseness and- ignorance we sink to the bottom of it, and
see only the gross and dwarfed things imbedded in its
sediment. We sink by specific gravity of moral dullness
and mental torpor. To ignorance the world naturally
seems accurst. By aspiration, by knowledge we rise to
the height of our world, attain to its ideal grace, realise
its meaning, and amid its pomp of purple and gold, its
fair hopes, its sweet affections, we need not envy the lot
of any angel.
But it may be said; after all this is rather a poor out
come to Socrates' dream of a boundless futurity. What
is the use of so much self-denial, patience, study,
knowledge, if it may all end when we have reached the
end of our stinted term of life on earth ? Much every
way. Apart from all hopes of individual immortality it
is to be considered that by culture and virtue what life we
actually have is immensely prolonged. If, as the Laureate
says, fifty years of England are better than a cycle of
Cathay, we may also say better one year of the thinker
than the immortality of a fool. That man's life cannot

THE DREAM OF SOCRATES. 155
be regarded as brief who* is able to crowd each hour with
high emotions and call about him- past centuries by history,
and future ages by imagination. The educated man of
to-day is able to share the struggles of primitive man with
the early ferocities of nature, to gather with the group
surrounding Plato and Socrates at Athens, to sit at the
feet of ancient sages and prophets, to walk with Christ on
the hillsides- of Palestine ; and, on the other hand, he is
able to note the tendencies of civilization, to observe the
direction of discovery, and realise- a clear vision of the
world as it shall be, — to live ideally in the distant future.
He sees of the travail of his- soul and is satisfied.
Admirable indeed is that wisdom with which Socrates
preserved a lowly reticence with regard to the physical or
metaphysical nature of that self of whose survival he felt
assured ; it is akin to that of his Jewish brother who said,
What is a man profited if he have gained the whole world
but lost himself ? The duality of man's nature to the mind
of Socrates is that of relative moral values, — the duality
of earth and ether, gem and matrix, carbon and diamond.
Like him the man of science to-day believes in the unity
of nature, and is indifferent whether it be said all is
material or all ideal. It is in the marvels which science
is revealing in what is called matter, but whose ultimate
nature no man knows, that we now find increasing room
to admit the idea of individual immortality. It is much
that when these atoms, vulgarly deemed godless, have
from a minute germ-cell built up the brain of Socrates
they have lodged therein a vision of eternal progression ;
that when they ascend from plant and pebble to the brain

156 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
of Goethe, they think " that the destruction of such a
mind as Wieland's is not to be thought of: Nature is not
so prodigal of her jewels ; " that the molecules transfigured
in the mount of Emerson's brain testify that the army of
intellects are uot drilled only to be shot before the action,
and that individual immortality "must ,be proved, if at
alL from ourown activity .and designs, which demand an
interminable future for their play." These are the out
looks of men who fairly filled the measure of their days,
and did not project into the future resources that might
be drawn on in time. It may be, indeed, that the
growth of human knowledge and society may unfold
powers and treasures in the earth adequate to satisfy all
the hopes and give full play to all the faculties of the
largest genius ; but if so that will surely be immortality
and heaven enough. It would fulfil the prophecy of
Margaret Fuller who said, " if imen knew 'how to look
around them, they need not look above." But whatever
maybe the lands of earthly promise to which this vision —
half cloud, half fire — leads us, there is somewhat stirring •
in the greatest hearts that seems related to the whole and
not any fragment of the universe.
Nor is there anything in the actual condition of science,
or in its ideal, inharmonious with the survival, in the
molecules liberated at death, of the principle of thought
and even of memory. Evolution means nature's rigid
economy of all advantages attained ; and there is no
evidence that all improvements may be secured in
dependently of their representative individual minds.
Whatever may be the principle of the individual con-

THE DREAM OF SOCRATES. 157
sciousness, we have the pregnant fact that it is able to
preserve a continuous existence and identity through all
the appreciable changes of form, and to survive the
departure of many bodies. A man of seventy-five has
possessed at least ten different bodies ; these have come
from nature to invest his personality and been successively
yielded back to nature ; yet the man feels himself one and
the same mind that acted in well-remembered scenes
when he was a child. " How," asks Professor Tyndall,*
" is the sense of personal identity maintained across this
flight of molecules? To man, as we know him, matter is
necessary to consciousness ; but the matter of any period
may be all changed,, while consciousness exhibits no
solution of continuity. Like changing sentinels, the
oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon that depart, seem to
whisper their secret to their comrades that arrive, and
thus, while the Non-ego shifts, the Ego remains intact.
Constancy of form in the grouping of the molecules, and
not constancy of the molecules themselves, is the
correlative of this constancy of perception."
But in what does this " constancy of form " lie ? Does
it belong to the brain in its integrity, or inhere in some
subtle quality generated ' in the molecules when they
have been initiated into a certain organisation ; so that
each (molecule), or perhaps some more finely-filtered,
possibly invisible, group of molecules becomes the seat of
the transmitted consciousness ? Some portions of the brain
may be removed and consciousness still remain ; but as yet
no probe has reached its secret residence. The analogies of

' ' Fragments of Science, " p. 462.

iS8 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

nature would seem to indicate that in life's consummate
flower— the brain— there may exist a sacred seed in
which its unbroken history is stored, and which may
remain when decay has overtaken the stem of flesh and
blood, the petals of -expression fallen, the individual
fragrance vanished. Some brains may indeed have no
seed, or such as are only rudimentary ; but others may
sum themselves up in such to float, winged, into the
pure ether in which Socrates and the thinker of to-day
alike feel themselves embosomed, to unfold elsewhere in
higher development, as their influence and thought are
unfolded among men on earth.
May ! As yet indeed it is all a great Perhaps.
Nevertheless the possibilities, if indeed we may not say
probabilities, that our hope may tell true, are sufficient to
make us meet with enthusiastic welcome those trans
cendent discoveries which are unfolding the wondrous
potencies of what ignorant ages once thought only coarse,
and which those ages still survive in some so-called minds
to despise as " mere matter." When we think of the
Alhambra in Spain there rises in the memory or imagina
tion the perfected beauty -of an .entire development of art.
Yet the word " Alhambra " only means " red clay."
That common red clay which the Spaniards modelled
into rude images ascended with the genius of the Moors,
cultured it may be under the Persians, until after putting
forth many leaves and buds it expanded into the matchless
modellings and hues of the immortal building. Nor can
we forget that many scholars find the same significance
in the name of the traditional first man, — Adam, " red

THE DREAM OF SOCRA TES. 159 ,
clay." But in the progress of ages what fine work has
been put on that first mere animate modelling of man !
What evolutional forces have fashioned the complex brain,
what accumulated ages of divine art have frescoed its
interior walls with tints of imagination and the decora
tions of love and virtue ! Behold at last the glorious
shrine of conscience, the temple of Reason !
Our ideas of the ascent of matter may not be limited
by such illustrations as these. The prism which drew so
many colours from the " mere " sunbeam, aaad now wins
from planets their secrets, is but one of the many new
eyes which may Lb around us — some of them as unnoted
as bits of glass — waiting to open before us vistas into un
dreamed realms of the worlds within and without us. As
the low aims and desires, which could alone grow out of a
religion that appealed only to fear and selfishness, pass
away with the dogmas which fosteredithem, letais at least see
that the new hopes that arise are not based upon unreality
nor dependent on enforced compliance with the remnants
of prejudice. By so doing we shall not fail to obtain a
reward far higher than delusion can offer us. Whatever
the future may have in store for us will not be the less
reached, while — if a conscious existence — it will be all
the more enjoyed by our having wasted no resource,
overlooked no opportunity, of the life and the world we
actually possess, made what paradise we can around us,
and overarched each radiant day with its own eternity.

IX.
FLOWER AND THORN.

j t

FLOWER AND THORN.

OHAMMED was a man of deeds rather than
words, yet that is an impressive sentence
which is ascribed to him. — "The Earth is the
cradle of Man.'' The grandeur of our unattained ideals,
the discoveries of science, which with every fact revealed
discloses the larger extent of our infantile ignorance, remind
us- day by day and night by night that we are but babes.
In the most ancient times it was the custom of mothers to
cover the cradles of their children with mysterious figures
and runic charms to protect them against evil spirits ; when
Christianity came, there was substituted for these pagan
devices the images of saints and texts from the Scriptures,
so that even in its cradle the child was surrounded by the
symbols of religion. But that great Love, of which are
the hearts of mothers, has no less covered the sides of
the Earth-cradle with symbols and inscriptions that im
press the growing mind long before it can understand
them, and whose lessons our ripest years cannot outgrow.
Full of significance are those mystical emblems which
surrounded the crude unconscious beginnings of human

164 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
thought. Here is pictured on the cradle-side a beautiful
tree with ripe fruit; but on that tree hangs a subtle, deadly
serpent. So was it in Eden, but not less in other lands.
In the South there was portrayed a garden of Hesperus,
full of golden fruit, but at its entrance laid a fearful dragon.
In the North there was a Tree of the Universe, whose
fruits were stars, but a serpent lay coiled about its roots.
There were many similar fables showing that man
had already felt that in Nature there is no good without
an evil beside it.
But in the course of time we find that the human mind,
having learned so much, made an effort to translate that
co-existence of pain and pleasure into moral meaning.
By what processes it worked on we know but little, but
we know that our ancestors thought it out deeply and
reached some brave results. One of the most striking
indications is the name which the Greeks gave to the
Furies. The Furies were the terrible forms of pain,
scourging and pursuing all evil-doers. Yet the Greeks
called them the Eumenides, the well-meaning. Though
at first, perhaps, euphemistic, the poets couched in that
word their discovery that pain is not without its heart of
good. When we come to the religion of ancient Rome we
find a still further development of the idea of a good in
apparent evil. One of the finest features of Roman
theology was that which it received from Etruria. In
the more ancient mythology it was held that Zeus wielded
the thunderbolts as he pleased, striking whom and what he
would without responsibility. But the Roman theology

FLOWER AND THORN. 165
held that Jupiter was surrounded by a council of the twelve
chief gods and goddesses. These gods and goddesses
were divided into two classes, — one class called the Dii
Consentes (the consenting gods), the others the Dii In-
voluti (or wrapped up gods) ; these being veiled deities
who held their hands against their mouths. Now, Jupiter
was allowed to hurl his thunderbolts freely for mere terror ;
but if he wished to do more than frighten he had to con
sult his cabinet of consenting gods, and only if they
agreed could he strike, and then his bolts hurt but also
healed. If he wished to blast and destroy, he had to
obtain the consent of the Involuti,^those veiled deities,
who were really the Fates.
Here we have the clearly formed idea of a regulation
and a good purpose in evil and pain, instead of chance
or caprice. But we meet with a still higher meaning in
the fact that the statue of the goddess Angerona was
placed in the temple of Volupia. Angerona was the
goddess of anguish ; Volupia was the goddess of delight.
The rites of Angerona were performed in the temple of
Volupia, to denote that sorrow is related to pleasure.
These instances, — which might be multiplied, — suffice
to show how long and patiently the heart and mind of
man have been struggling to harmonise the phenomena
of good and evil, and find them equally representative of
the divine unity in Nature. They have transmitted the
problem to us : they could not altogether solve it ; but
as we receive it from them it is enveloped with a radiant
and perfect faith that in some way or other evil is only
apparent, the bitter rind of sweetness.

1 66 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

It appears to me that under the higher light cast on
Nature in our day, we are able to emerge a step from
this old darkness, and to spell out whole sentences where
our forefathers struggled with the alphabet.
Let us take the rose and the thorn ; if we find out
their relation and meaning we will have explored heaven
and hell. There is no evil in nature which is not repre
sented in a thorn, — no good which may not be typified
in the rose. The pleasure-principle in Nature, and the
pain-principle, are brought together on every bush that
bears both flowers and thorns. Now, why does a bush
or tree bear thorns ? We know precisely why that is.
The thorn is put forth to protect the flower. Flowers do
not all have thorns ; some are protected by having a bad
odour ; some by being poisons or like poisons, which
grazing animals avoid ; others by growing on steep places
inaccessible to those that would harm them. But all
these defences are a kind of thorn, — the poison, the bad
odour, the dangerous precipice, answer to the flower the
same end as a thorn. A child grasps at a rose and its
hand is pierced by a thorn. It forgets all about the
flower in its pain, and wonders why the good God should
make thorns. The real answer would be that the thorn
is put there to pierce children's fingers, and the tongues
and lips of other animals, so as to prevent their killing
off the flowers. If there had been no such thing as a
thorn the child would never have had a rose to tempt him
at all. Another child is stung by a bee, and complains
to the Universe against the existence of stings. Very
well, little friend, let there be no sting and you must get

FLOWER AND THORN. 167
on without honey. A hundred animals would devour the
bees, were it not for their stings, and exterminate these
and all other manufacturers of sweetness from the earth.
In the pain of thorn or sting you may forget the flower
and the honey ; but if the bee or bush be examined it
will appear that the pain they >can inflict is not the end
for which they exist. They exist for beauty and sweet
ness ; their defensive apparatus is hidden beneath, and
only used in an emergency.
Thus we begin with very easy lessons ; but all the ills
of Nature are not so simple. If there be a rose and
thorn on our cradle-sides there is also a deadly serpent
there — moral evil, guilt. There are agonies which it is
difficult to connect with any use at all. The sting of a
bee protects honey ; but what good is protected by that
crawling magazine of death — the cobra snake ? and what
by the venomous reptile when it has climbed to the form
of a man ?
Philosophy has discovered that the method of extend
ing our knowledge is to apply more accurately and widely
principles with which we are already partly familiar. I
suppose it was after the ancients had found out that in
some cases evil was at heart good that they believed all
the Furies' well-meaning. Why may we not consider all
the evils under the sun as thorns?— and why may not
all be doing the good work which thorns do for flowers
and fruits ?
As we have already seen, Evolution shows all the fine
activities of animated Nature produced by danger and suffer
ing. One animal became swift because it was necessary to

168 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
outrun some other animal that was seeking to- destroy it.
Another animal became intelligent because it had to- out
wit some stronger animal that was its enemy. The
velocity, the sagacity, the imitativeness, which we see in
the brute world, came there because there were dangers
to be avoided, pains to be escaped, because they were
environed with destructive forces. Slowness and stupi
dity became fatal ; and so Death gave birth to the various
energies of Life. That horrible serpent helped to give
to, the bird its wings ; for it devoured the bird that
could not soar out of its reach.
Next let us take the naked, savage man. We know
well that his every step in physical improvement was
taken to avoid some danger. To avoid the bad weather
he clothed himself; to escape the flood or the wild beast
he exchanged his rude hut for a good house ; to cope
with foes he invented weapons and implements. Danger
roused his faculties ; evil stimulated his wits and his
energies. It is notorious that where there is the greatest
hardship amid Nature, there man. has become most civi
lised. I say hardship, for there may be regions where
Nature becomes so hard as to be prohibitory ; what I
mean is that, where Nature is so luxuriant as to render
life less difficult, there is never the same advance of skill
and intelligence as in regions where existence and hap*
piness demand perpetual thought and energy. Our
highest powers have thus been developed by what we
call evil, just as the rose has been developed by its briar.
If there had been no danger to escape, no enemy to
conquer, no difficulty to surmount, there is reason to

FLOWER AND THORN. 169
believe that man would have been a witless, stupid,
soulless animal ; in fact, there could have been no such
being as man at all.
And I submit that the same rule may be applied to
what we distinguish as moral evil. All the moral laws
have been written by crimes. The eternal mandates have
been thundered from the Sinai within- us in response to
violations of them. There is good reason why each com
mandment begins " Thou shalt not," — instead of " Thou
shalL" It was because each was brought to light through
some wrong done. Nor can it be said, in reply, that if
there were no evil the great moral laws would be of no
advantage. Far beyond their mere ability to punish
criminals is the use of the moral laws. They mark the
culture of man ; they indicate the ethical structure of the
Universe. The advantage of knowing the laws of elec
tricity does not end with giving us telegraphs ; of much
more value than telegraphs is the growth so added to the
intellect of man. And, similarly, the sentences of courts
are trifles compared with man's discernment of the great
moral and social laws which are the very lineaments of
the Divine Wisdom and Justice organised in Nature.
But in studying this subject there is a point at which
the order of Nature seems reversed, or rather inverted.
We have thus far dealt with pain as the thing which all
beings are seeking most to avoid, and pleasure as that
which all are seeking. But after the animals have been
developed by this perpetual avoidance of pain ; after the
savage man has been clothed, housed, and even civilised,
by the same stimulant ; we come to a phase of human

170 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
life where what we call pain is no longer the most power
ful motive. The man most revered among us was not
crowned with flowers, but with thorns. Around him grew
the lilies and the roses of life, as around others ; but he
gathered the thorns, — the scourge, the hatred, the cross, —
plucking from the Garden of Gethsemane only its agony.
And as he stands in our vision, with him is a great army
of martyrs, of men and women who found life's joy amid
dens, and deserts, and flames. But the contradiction
here is only seeming. For the soul, too, is a mystical
rose, and the thorn that protects it is' the conscience.
When Jesus wears thorns upon his head it is only because
all the roses are blooming in his heart. The sting he
dreads is guilt ; the fang'he avoids is thatenvenomed with
inward falsehood ; and the thorns that tear only his flesh
are pleasant, for each implies a bloom in his deep spirit.
The old law which has raised the world by pain and fear
does not cease when good men seem to welcome what
others dread ; it only passes inward, and becomes the
fear and horror of spiritual evil which protect the purity
of the heart and stimulates the will to put forth its
tremendous energies. Our moral nature has been created
by evil, and the dread of evil. Every virtue marks the
recoil from a sin. Flower and thorn are deep within us ;
and there was never a Heaven which was not rooted in a
Hell.
A thinker once remarked that the -chief puzzle in this
universe was the evil caused by things good. Nothing
causes more mischief than many of our best feelings and
efforts. What agonies and desolations have grown out

FLOWER AND THORN. 171
of human love. What pain has been caused by the
desire of liberty. But really there is no puzzle here. It
is only what we have seen — that Nature is sure to put a
sting where she wishes to secure honey. The more sweet
the product aimed at the sharper the protecting sting. It
is because it is so necessary that human love shall be
pure and secure, that all violations of its laws are so
fiercely punished. It is because liberty is so essential
that all misdirected efforts for it end in sorrow and failure.
Optimi corruptio pessima.
But here, indeed, we pause before the veil which has
never been lifted. Why pain and guilt should be the
method of the Universe we know not ; it is even one of
those problems which to some bear signs that they can
never be solved. It must content us to know that there is
no evil that exists in any sense but as a condition and
method of good. Darkness is not the equivalent of Light.
There is no shawdow but points to the light.
Among the ancient topes recently discovered in India
there is one representing devotees gathered around the
Tree and Serpent, and each worshipper is shown holding
his tongue, literally, between finger and thumb : the
significance of this attitude is lost unless we can find it
in the archives of our own breast, and learn, in presence
of the world's fair growths, to meet its types of pain with
the homage of silence.

REAL AND IDEAL.

REAL AND IDEAL.

L— REALISING THE IDEAL.

N the second part of the drama of Faust, Goethe
has introduced two scenes which, taken to
gether, show the ideals that may, and those
that may not, be realised.
Faust and Mephistopheles appear at the Imperial
Court, where Faust wishes promotion. They find the
emperor on his throne, with the fool on his right hand
and the astrologer on his left, — Frivolity and Luck being
his main dependence, — while the empire is in anarchy
through utter bankruptcy. The great want of everybody,
from the peasant to the prince, is money. Mephisto
pheles is called upon to make the empire rich and happy.
That is precisely what the clever demon is good for.
That is exactly the kind of ideal perfected cunning can
help man to realise, at least seemingly. The art of
printing, which Faust has invented, is brought into requi
sition. Mephistopheles floods the empire with paper
money. Everybody suddenly becomes rich. In court
and street they rush about with joy, hands full of paper
wealth, and the imperial exchequer is full to overflowing.

176 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
The demon, of course, observes cynically the complete
satisfaction so cheaply supplied; and he notes that the
only person who has the least suspicion about this wealth
is the court fool. The emperor has lavished cm his fool
five thousand paper crowns, and the latter asks Mephi
stopheles if it really is money's worth, if it will buy cattle,
house, land ? Mephistopheles assures him that it will ;
and the fool says, then he will spend it all instantly. This
resolution not to wait, but to change the paper for land
as soon as possible, elicits from the devil the only honest
compliment he ever paid to any mortal. As the fool
hastens to spend his money, Mephistopheles says, "Who
can say that fool is without brains ? "
So much for the ideal that is attainable. In the other
scene, Faust, whom the paper money has raised high at
court, is commissioned to get up a tableau to amuse the
emperor, and he now demands of the demon that he shall
raise for the scene the Greek Helena — the ideal of Beauty,
as exalted and purified through the perspective of ages.
Mephistopheles is much annoyed at this demand. It's
easy enough, he says, to raise paper ghosts, but to raise
Greek ideals, he intimates, is not only difficult, but too
heathenish for a Christian devil like himself. However,
he gives Faust a key by which he may visit .the mysterious
Mothers,— the primal laws, I suppose, the conditions that
must be fulfilled before any high thing can be reached, 
and the tableau is thus rendered possible. The emperor
and his court assemble, and there is a sort of seance,
the light being lowered. At length the mist parts at one
end of the room, revealing Paris sleeping. Next, Helen

REAL AND IDEAL.

177

appears — approaches. Faust beholds in that ideal being
what through all his life he has been seeking, and this
glimpse of perfect beauty degrades and deforms other
objects. Mephistopheles seeing his agitation, warns Faust
to be calm, and not break the conditions. But when Paris
is bearing Helen away, Faust, uncontrollable, rushes
forward — seizes her. Then straightway Helen vanishes;
everything vanishes — court, emperor, all ; Faust falls
senseless. When he comes to himself he is in his old
narrow Gothic room — prostrate.
Such was the result of an attempt to grasp the ideal —
to enjoy the perfect by a stroke — to leap to the top of
the stairway, and realise supreme beauty without patiently
climbing the intervening steps. It is only very low aims —
the mere promises-to-pay of life, not life — which, like the
paper money, can be easily secured. Whoso can be satis
fied with the shows of things shall be satisfied. And so far
as any intellectual ideal is to be procured, all wealth, how
ever solid, is but paper, — it is but the promise, not the
reality of life.
In the great poem of Goethe we may see depicted the
struggle of man to fill out the halfness of his nature. First
we see the tragedy of Faust and Margaret : passion madly
clutching visible beauty, to find it turn to ashes : next in
tellect clutching invisible beauty, only to find it also
fading away. It is the allegory of all ages, — especially of
our own age. The nineteenth century has been filled
with feverish dreams, — dreams unfulfilled. We have seen
it animating whole empires. The century opened with
a great military Mephistopheles, raising before France a

178 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
vision of universal empire : twice did that nation grasp at
the wild phantasy, and twice did it find itself hurled to
the ground ; once on the field of Waterloo, once on the
field of Sedan. The Russian empire, the Austrian empire,
the Spanish, the Papal, they have all despised the slow
steps of patience, they have sought to gain by splendid
leaps the rewards of steady progress, and been hurled
back to hard narrow walls, prostrate — with the mocking
devil of delusion at their side.
Not very different has been the fate of those who have
aspired to nobler ideals, — the children of revolution, who
have fought and won so many victories for ideal justice
and right only to find their victories dragged to the
support of oppression and wrong.
Yet a higher horizon of our century is visible, where
shine the poetic hearts who have tried to embody their
visions in perfect societies. The socialist dreamers came
to their several fig-trees, but the time of figs was not
yet : under the breath of the ' hard actual each ideal
withered. There is a small house in Paris before which
I have sometimes paused, and thought of the two great
men who had lived there. The first was a poet—
Moliere — who 200 years ago cherished his gay ideals, —
ideals not too high for a certain realisation, which art
gave them in the mimic life of the stage. But this
terrible century, as it dawned with lurid light, found
seated there a poet resolved that his ideals should be
realised on the stage of the world. It was Saint-Simon.
There it was this French Count— descendant of Charle
magne— set himself to the taskofcreatinganew society, a

REAL AND IDEAL. 179
new Christianity, a new man. There was to be a Parliament
of Industry, a Church of Science and Art, universal educa
tion, universal love. This happy dream was portrayed with
every touch of beauty, every artful tint of picturesqueness,
no argument omitted that sentiment, scholarship and
eloquence could bestow upon it. At the age of sixty the
old man sat there, and before him his divine model, like
the statue carved by Pygmalion, awaiting only a breath
to become a living form and soul. Then he turned from
its fascinating beauty to look around him. He found
himself and his family on the verge of starvation. His
last coin had gone to print books that no publisher
would undertake, and no public would buy. No help
came to him. Nobody was interested in his rainbow
visions, save one or two followers poor and powerless as
himself. So Saint-Simon concluded it was time to die.
He loaded a pistol ; appointed a certain minute at which
to end his life. Then he occupied the remaining time
with finishing touches on the books that represented the
labours of his life. When the hand of the clock reached
the appointed moment he fired at his head. After some
time his two friends Comte and Sarlardiere entered and
found him not yet dead, but awaiting his end with tran
quillity. They applied themselves to his relief, but Saint-
Simon said, " How can a man live and think with seven
slugs in his brain!" Even in his agony he could not think
of life apart from thought Yet live he did, to complete
that philosophy which supplied the framework of Comte's
Positivism, and of the social scheme which others endea
voured to realise in European and American communities.

180 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
The enthusiasm of idealists like these might move the
very stones to admiration. A thousand low successes
around us are worth less than one such pathetically noble
failure. Such lives and tragedies are failures only in the
sense that the cross was a failure ; but for such aims and
failures the earth would lose its halo and float on, a mere
ball of dust. But we must not throw away experience ;
we see how the fruit and grain garner the light of days
and seasons, to reappear in their red flush and golden
ripeness : the lives of the great and true visit us with
intenser rays, and no quickening soul should rise and set
without leaving its glory with us, transmuted to larger
benefit. What we learn^ first of all, is that the ideal never
descends. The divine Word is never made flesh. In
founding themselves upon the theory of Incarnation many
religions, have made a fundamental mistake. The higher
never descends to the lower. It never stoops to con
quer. Not descent but ascent, not incarnation but
apotheosis, is the theme that comes to us from the great
— not least from him who climbed the mountain and
adored the ideal till his face was altered, and his raiment
transfigured, snow-pure in the exceeding brightness. The
perfect cannot help us by bending, by becoming imper
fect : it can help us only by shining on there — the pure
uncompliant Perfect. To embody an ideal were to
destroy it. Every idol was once an ideal. All the gods
have been destroyed by the attempt to embody them.
All the fairies were once ideals ; by being lowered for
vulgar realisation they declined to anthropomorphic gods

REAL AND IDEAL. 181
and goddesses ; in the nurseries, and in the cottages of
peasants, they were diminished for the comprehension of
childhood and ignorance ; and so remained to haunt
field, forest, and hut, as spectres, fairies, and pixies.
Hence it is that genius has learned to adore that only
which for ever soars above actual achievement. Cicero
was alarmed at the representations of the gods in sculp
ture. " Who can say," he asked, " but that the populace
may one day fancy that these statues are the gods them
selves ? " Precisely that did come to pass. The average
man is unimaginative ; his wings are not strong enough
to sustain him in any long flight ; and they can never
grow stronger if he is permitted to drag down to his own
level the beauty to which he must aspire if he would feel
its transforming power. The ideal is essentially that
which cannot be enclosed or shut in, — not more than
you can imprison the dawn. Great religions have tried
to put the soul of man in their creed-closet, and heaven
under their lock and key. But when they are opened
there is a smell of mould as if their prize lacked sunshine
and air. That religion seals- its own doom which binds
itself to a defunct ideal. The childhood of the world
was pleased with pictures of heaven which cannot satisfy
maturer age.
Can any civilised man's nature be conquered and
changed by the prospect of sitting on a rosy cloud and
blowing a golden pipe in a heavenly concert? Why
even in the east, where humanity is more childlike than
here, the paradise of Mohammed — tall beauties in an
endless rose-garden— does not attract so many souls as

1S2 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
the eternal sleep promised by Buddha. And in Christen
dom every ideal, of the future has faded ; its immortality
is shapeless. Nathaniel Hawthorne said, " The future I
hope for is Repose. I trust for at least a thousand years
of unconscious, undreaming rest." A venerable and
eminent woman, who has devoted her life to human
welfare, said to me recently, " I feel death approaching,
but it is no enemy. It will bring me to the end of my
existence in Nature. I have considered the arguments
for immortality, and am convinced they are worthless. I
have no desire for any heaven of which I have heard or
read. But I have my hope, my ideal of a future life : it
is that the particles, of which I am composed, may rise
again in grass, and bloom in flowers, may pass into the
general life of nature, and go on to benefit the world."
Now, dear as the hope of conscious survival beyond the
grave may be to any of us, who can fail to see that this
aged woman's ideal — that every particle of her form
would continue to repeat the charities of her life — is a
more religious, a more unselfish ideal, than the resurrec
tion for an existence of personal bliss represented in the
vulgar heaven? It is. true that the idea of conscious
immortality is not involved in the absurdity of bodily
resurrection. Certainly there may be a very high ideal
which hopes for the renewal of conscious activity of mind
and heart. But whatever, be the dream, the salient fact
stands out that the promises of theology are no longer
equal to the promises of the soul : the human ideal has
soared successively above the Valhalla of Odin, the
heights of Olympus, the rosy cloud with cherubs and

REAL AND IDEAL. 183
trumpets, — far above them all. The old heavens surround
us now, only as the signs of the zodiac, dead because
smitten by the light of a larger hope. And yet we feel
that in each of those forms the best that is in us once
lodged. The progressive life made each for its mansion,
unmade it when it became a prison. No mere part can
hold him who aspires to the whole.
But this, you may say, is to set us moving on a vicious
circle. Warning you by all the extinct heavens, whether
painted on the ether by poets, or planned on earth by
visionaries, that you can never grasp the ideal, I still tell
you man is born to seek it. It is even so. It is a melody
no heart can live without, though so often as we listen,
we must say, " Thou tellest me of things that in all my
life I have not known and shall not know !" For yet
every chord of our being may vibrate in response to it,
and the whole life may be harmonised by the endeavours
after the fuller expression, to which we are drawn by every
intimation of a higher though^ or happier character,
or nobler aim. The better we may reach, though
not the best ; but no one ever found the better
who did not aim at the best. To the mathematician
the perfect circle is always ideal; the truest circle
he can draw is only proximate; yet had he no ideal
circle his actual one would be far more incomplete. Now
the ideal and the actual do not coincide, but they accord;
the lower may be endlessly improved, and every step is
in the direction of the highest; the lines of tendency
which lead up to that highest harmonise with it, as the
sides of a pyramid harmonise with the apex.

184 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
— In human life, therefore, tendency must always be the
main thing. What is the direction of a man's faculties,
his aims ? If you know the angles of convergence of
the sides of the pyramid, the point at which they will
meet if continued may be computed. If the tendencies
of life are in the direction of an ideal the apex may be
equally recognised, though it may not be reached. In
youth our actual and our ideal seem to be not only dis
tinct but hostile to each other. But the main lesson of
life is to learn that they are really friends, and culture
means the raising of the law of our lower nature into
harmony with the firmament of reason that vaults above
our little world of animal power.
In truth, that which may rightly be called the ideal is a
force — the building force in nature. No doubt it was so
from the beginning, and that each of the swarming
myriads of creatures — the zoophyte in its waterdrop,
the moth shriveling in the candle — has followed its little.
pillar of fire, has sought its promised land ; and so seek
ing has put forth its supreme energies, and added its
infinitesimal impulse to the growing world of form.
What kindling passion for the rose tinted the butterfly,
what lowly idolatry of things soaring above it mingled
with the lower, utility by which creeping things gained
their wings, — we know not ; what we know is that along
with the prosaic utilitarian actual life which we have in
herited from the realms beneath us, we have drawn within
us the universal laws that wrought through their uncon
sciousness. By them man may work to universal ends.
The best thing in every noble dream is the dreamer

REAL AND IDEAL. 185
himself. Faust clutching at the perfect ideal of Greece,
to be thrown back on hard actuality ; the poor French
socialist with a fair heaven in his brain and starvation
around him, — represent Man, able to apprehend where
he cannot comprehend. They leave us the same old
earth rolling on as before, but they have outlined a higher
Man, which the ages must fulfil. How sacred are they,
the seekers of the invisible, the wayfarers who will not rest
on anything short of the beautiful idea that has ravished
them ! How they go by — those strange and dreamlike men!
One glance on each, one gleam from out each eye,
And that I never looked upon till now,
Has vanished out of sight as instantly.
Yet in it passed there a whole heart and life,
The only key it gave that transient look;
But for this key its great event in time
Of peace or strife to me a sealed book.
To a human being his ideal represents his individual
existence. One life we each have which is merely here
ditary. We received it from our ancestors, we share it
with others, it is a common property. There is another
life which is our own. There each stands in the pre
sence of his own Sinai, receives the tables of the law of
his individual life. To him there comes a Decalogue of
private interpretation, and the voice commands — "See
that thou do all things after the pattern thou didst see
on the mount ! " So indeed must he work— if the world
is to be better by a feather's weight for his life in it ;— so
must he build, quarrying his hereditary nature, polishing
it for his individual structure. Nor shall he pause to

186 IDOLS AND WEALS.
ask whether the edifice is to be completed and adorned,
and labour give way to happiness. He cannot reach the
great end, because there is no end ; the scale is infinite ;
so have the poets said, who reached the seeming summit,
only to behold a higher height rising before them ever
more. Let it be enough for each that the genius of God
finds no obstruction in him ; that he is part of the organis
ing force of the universe, — as much so as the coral
building in the sea, or the sun that vitalises a world. And
when his day is past and his bit of work is done, the ideal
he has served will whisper a sweet and secret joy — Thou
hast laboured, and others will enter into thy labours.
II.— IDEALISING THE REAL.
We have found " realising the ideal " to be impracti
cable in the proportion that the ideal is raised high. But
" idealising the real," as I shall maintain, is not only
practicable, but the main secret of the art of living.
First I must make my phrase clear. The word
" idealising" is sometimes used to mean the putting into
a thing of what is not in it. People are said to idealise
a character, in the sense of investing a person with
qualities they do not possess. It is sometimes said of a
portrait that it is idealised, by which is meant that the
artist has flattered the subject of it. But this is a loose
way of using a good word. We have words which
directly signify the investment of a thing with fictitious
values,— to exaggerate, to flatter— and we need not
confuse with these the word " idealise," which means to

REAL AND IDEAL. 187
see a thing in the form of pure thought. There is
nothing that has not a real relation to thought, nothing
without its ideal side. Take, for example, the portrait
which an artist is said to have flattered. If he has
flattered it he has connected with his subject something
incongruous with it, as much so as if he had painted a
thistle to make it look partly like a rose. The only true
portrait that artist would have painted would be himself,
and it would show him no true artist. But, on the other
hand, if he idealised the face, it might appear on his
canvas more attractive than the subject seems to an
ordinary eye. That would show that the artist had
looked on his subject with an extraordinary eye, — had
searched into it, seen it in its best light, interpreted its
deeper characteristics. A great portrait-painter was once
asked if, in the large number who sat to him, he did not
find many faces that were totally uninteresting or even
repulsive. He replied, " I never had to paint a face which
did not possess lines and meanings beyond my power
to seize and portray." That artist had cultivated the
power of true idealisation, that is of seeing beneath the
surface and getting at the subtle spirit which requires
interpretation. Another new commandment our age gives unto us—
that we stick to the truth. In no case must we exceed
the simple fact ; but, also, in no case must we fall short
of the fact ; and if we fulfil this rule we shall find that
every fact has its own ideality. If a reality is dry it is
because we see it only in part, detached from its large
relationship. I was one of a company which assembled

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

to hear a favourite lecturer. But we were generally dis
appointed when we learned the subject to which we
were to listen. It was " Whitworth's planes, standard
measures and guns." We were for the most part in
different to ironclads and guns, and had a misgiving that
not even the eloquence of Professor Tyndall could make
them interesting. But we were mistaking the subject.
With breathless interest the gentlemen present, and
ladies as well, followed the story of how an humble
toolmaker had begun in poverty and loneliness the work
of mastering the secrets of iron and steel ; how little by
little he had secured a plane of perfect level ; had made a
measure that would measure the millionth part of an
inch, and enabled the wonderful plexus of nerves in the
finger to appreciate a movement to the extent of that
millionth of an inch; had discovered the method of
reducing steel to a hardness that no force of explosion
could affect, and the exact curves by which a ball would
accumulate the highest attainable propelling power. A
lady remarked that after hearing this lecture it seemed
almost a fine thing to die by one of Whitworth's guns !
The charm was that each dry fact mirrored universal
laws : the stars in their courses attended those iron
balls. The brutal art of war, as the Professor called it,
was hidden out of sight by the splendid play of laws and
forces which showed our age of iron in travail with an
age of light. The audience had thought they knew some
thing about iron, and quite enough about cannon : what
they knew was the mere surface, the dismal dexterities of
slaughter. What had science now done ? Simply trans-

REAL AND IDEAL. 189.
lated the facts to their ideas ; and thereby given us each
a new eye to see what was really there, and what will
remain there to fulfil the possibilities of civilisation when
the poor surface-uses of to-day have passed away, and
nations learn war no more.
Other things equally savage in their original purpose
have already attained a complete translation into thought.
Barbarians took infinite pains to shape weapons of flint
by which to slay each other : their only use now is that
which scholars may find, they are purely anthropolo
gical ; from those once deadly arrows is being read the
story of primitive man. And now again cunning Nature
entices nations to vast outlays of wealth and enterprise
with promise of securing a gun or ship stronger than
their neighbours'. But when all those immediate ends
and uses have passed away, when they have followed
the flints into the museum, the ideas in them, the grand
truths will expand above their shrivelled antiquity to de
corate an era of love and reason.
To idealise the real means to see things as they are;
Coleridge said there is a suggestion of immortality in the
fact that every emotion is greater than that which gives
rise to it. We all know how a slight incident, a small
suggestion, a word, may set in motion large feelings, and
great purposes. This fact shows that each thing — whether
it be visible, as a flower ; or audible, as a word ; or entirely
subjective, as a pain ; or however little it may be — has
an element in it related to the whole of our mind ; an
element of ideality which enables it to awaken the ideality
within us, like a single note sung over the strings of a piano

190 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
to which they all sing back again in the same pitch, but
gathering up related harmonies.
It is an error to think that when any outward thing is
idealised it is simply an individual mind that does the
whole work : no object can be idealised if no idea is in it.
If I speak of intellectual light, is it all a conceit ? Might
the human race have just as properly agreed to call
knowledge darkness, — say, because it brings out the stars ?
This indeed would have been a conceit, a mere fancy.
But when knowledge is called light it is a true imagina
tion : the mind of man has flashed back all the way to its
genuine origin, the actual light of which the thought of
man is the fullest, the only real expression. Or take some
smaller thing, the scarabaus, which the Egyptians con
secrated as a type of earthly and celestial existence. Was
it a mere conceit ? Was there no real connection between
the beetle and the belief in immortality ? The connection
was most real. The beetle deposits its egg in a little round
ball of earth ; buries that ball, and then perishes ; when
the winter has passed, and the earth is renewed, out of
the little grave where the egg was deposited comes a tiny
burnished scarabseus. Now, if you analyse man's belief
in immortality you find that it is simply his dislike of
mortality : he desires to live to-day, to-morrow, as long as
he can, to prolong and reproduce himself in offspring, in
fame and family. Man's sense of immortality expresses
all the variations of the longing for renewal and survival ;
and the same longing may be traced from the conscious
to the unconscious, a principle in nature nowhere more
strikingly illustrated than in the scarabseus whose little

REAL AND IDEAL. 191
life is summed up in the seed it buries with hope of resur
rection. These things are not coincidences in nature;
rather they are correspondences ; the outward world ex
presses the inward because the one grew out of the other.
George Herbert wrote : —
Herbs gladly cure our flesh because that they
Find their acquaintance there.
And he might have gone further than flesh ; he might have
affirmed that the outward world in organising our body,
brains, senses, did even then but climb to its bud ; that
beyond this there was to be — there has been — the ex
pansion of the visible bud to an invisible flower ; but in
that sacred flower — mind — coloured with celestial light,
there is not a tint nor a fragrant character but has been
drawn from the whole universe. And in the mind which
each contributed to constitute each must now find its in
terpretation. Man's mind is an epitome of the universe,
and while his intellect draws universal laws within to make
the order of reason, those very same universal laws are
controlling every outward atom — every leaf, sand-grain,
dewdrop— and are reflected in them as genuinely as in the
mind of man. It is that which makes science possible —
the order of nature answering to the order of thought ;
which Kepler devoutedly realised when, exploring the
heavens, he cried, " Great God ! I think thy thoughts after
thee !" Therefore each thing holds a secret for the mind ;
only when it has passed into thought, has anything told all
that is in it ; only when divested of what is casual, and set
where the collective light of All plays through and through

192 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
it, is it idealised and so seen fitted to its placve in the
Cosmos. Man^Tctream of Heaven, whenever noble, is a transcen
dent vision of tn | world idealised. The proverb says,
familiarity breeds lpntemPt > t0 which one has fairly added
— in the contemptible. Poets have found the law of the
stars at work in th^d daisies. Consider again Socrates'
dream of an ether j^ffHworld inhabited by perfected human
beings. Since Spocrates' time man has ascended to a
higher world -. telescopes have shown us the stars as they
are; we brave measurably abolished the atmospheric
ocean •. we have actually, by science and art, gained the
larger part of Socrates' heaven, and have a fair chance of
ifeaching the rest of it. Certainly we have learned that
the man makes a great mistake who waits for his heaven
until he dies. Whatever world may succeed this, it will
find man or his molecules still environed by laws and
conditions which must be patiently fulfilled ere he or
they can attain unto truth or beauty. If he anywhere
finds a heaven it will be because he can make it. And
he can begin here and now as well as there and then.
Indeed if he can shape .no heaven out of the materials he
has here, there is little reason for hoping he will do any
better elsewhere. All this postponement of joy to a
future life ; all this vain imagination of supreme good
ness to be reached through providential favour instead
of patient moral culture ; of baseness arbitrarily raised to
excellence, and ignorance to divine knowledge ; all this,
and the method of it — bending of knees, movement of
lips, fawning on gods— comes within the category of the

REAL AND IDEAL. I93

vain effort to realise the ideal by snatching at it. It is
an effort to outwit the internal laws that must for ever
fail. When Faust beheld the personification of intellectual
beauty — the Greek Helena — and sought to grasp her,
she instantly faded away. He was hurled back to the
old attic where he started. But then the scholar began
his real quest for that ideal which he had seen in his
highest moment. Through long and patient study, by
learning all the conditions through which Greek art had
evolved that ideal — through sorrow, toil, obedience — he
at last finds Helena again. Then again she fades away ;
but her raiment dissolves into a light cloud which sur
rounds him, and bears him away to a country where the
earth is rich and a race of idlers dwell. Marshes, stag
nant pools, invade the land whose rank luxuriance reveals
its equal potency for good. Here, cries Faust, is my possi
ble Paradise ! He calls to the people to aid. The marsh
shall be drained. The people shall be healthy, happy,
free. He sees free man treading the fair earth. In work
ing for Humanity ends his long search for the ideal. He
claims that as his supreme moment, and sinks in happy
death to the blossoming earth he had found a wilderness.
Mephistopheles calls up all his demons to clutch the
dying man ; but angels pelt the demons with roses. The
roses sting them like flames. They depart baffled. No
powers of evil can reach the man who has found his ideal
and his happiness in the service of Humanity. No demons
of pain or remorse can grasp him whose defence is the
roses he has evoked from thorns. 13 '

194 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
Such, then, was the ripe conclusion of Goethe — the
master-interpreter of the modern world, who had sounded
all the depths and shoals of it : man's life is idealised by
his living for others, in the sense of living for those high
principles by which others may be raised to order and
liberty. Life is idealised by being the organ of ideas.
No man can feel his life to be poor or frivolous when he
is consecrating it to high human aims. Nor is what he
can give poor, however little in the sight of men. It is
given to but few to reform empires, but it is the privilege
of all to do their best. Our little life begins to shine
in that moment when it is directed to a high purpose.
But there must be no ambition, no straining to do more
than we can. A philosopher observed that his neighbour,
a farmer, who went with his waggon to market was ex
tremely anxious not to be cheated, and one day told him
that when he became just as anxious not to cheat any
body else, his market waggon would be as noble as the
chariot of the sun. And no man has a lot in life too
humble if it become ennobled by high principles. If he
have honesty and self-respect and independence, let him
be content ; nobody has anything better.
There is a wise sentence in the otherwise trifling opera
of the " Grand Duchess," which says, " If we can't get
what we set our hearts on, we must set our hearts on
what we can get." If we set true hearts on what is
around us, our life will reflect beauty as a violet raises the
sod to bear the tint of the sky. The good workman
will not quarrel with his tools, if they are the best he can
reach. I fear it is a very common error to overlook

REAL AND IDEAL, i95
attainable resources for the unattainable. Are we making
our lives commonplace by not setting our hearts
thoroughly upon the reality we have ? The proverb says,
¦" Every man thinks his own geese swans ;" but it is oftener
the other way — people are too apt to think their swans
only geese. It is much better to idealise your geese than
to despise your swans. And if a man fully appreciates
his goose he tteed not covet any swan whatever.
Now, let us briefly analyse the operation of a warm
hearted devotion to some high cause or truth in making our
lives beautiful in our own eyes. It raises our interest above
that plane of self-love where most of our wounds are re
ceived; it removes our sources of happiness to high regions
not to be invaded by the disagreeable details that vulga
rise existence. If life seems coarse or ugly it is because we
do not see it with sufficient perspective. We are too close
to its petty details. How beautiful to the aged appear
the days of childhood ! What delight in those hours so
free from care ! What a flower-fringed path through all
that green meadow ! Ah, there you have perspective.
The little worries, the disgraces, the tears of that time
are lost in the distance. And if we could only live long
enough this time through which we are now passing would
appear just so beautiful, — its heaviest cares softened to
mere shadings in the distant dream-like picture. I sub
mit that it is a very serious thing we should see the full
beauty of our lives only when they are past, or in visions
of a possible future. What we most need is to see and
feel the beauty and joy of to-day. Does time alone sup
ply the needed perspective? Does length of days alone

196 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
unmask the moment whose glory is disguised in amass of
miserable worries ? Solomon says No, but- wisdom is as
gray hairs to those who possess- it. Then by what art
can we reach a point from which we shall behold life
clothed in ideal' tints ?
Richard Wagner, the composer,- has devoted his life
and his genius to the work of blending the real and the
ideal in a combination of the arts. He has the happy
fortune of obtaining the means of accomplishing the
utmost that any man can hope for. He built a theatre
such as he requires ; he had true poetry for his opera as
well as true music, and he had the best voices and
musicians, and also scenery painted by artists. Now in
his effort to enchain, his spectators with an illusion, so
that they shall be moved by the emotions portrayed, his
great difficulty had been to contrive some means of
shutting out of sight the mere accidents of his perform
ance, — the incidental means,, the small details. How
can the audience help looking at the conductor, or ad
miring the particular scraping of this or that violinist ?
Or how can they fail to criticise this or that design of the
scenery? The artist aims at producing a general effect
which shall swallow up all these means and minutiae.
And he attained his end by the means devised at
Bayreuth. In the first place he entirely concealed his
orchestra, so that the music should be as a subtle vapour
stealing no one knows whence. In the next place he
placed two proscenia — wide and separate spaces — between
the stage and the front row of seats, which made the
distance seem greater than it really was. The largest of

REAL AND IDEAL. 197
these he called the " Mystic Gulf," as visibly separating
the real from the ideal only to reunite them invisibly.
All these were efforts at perspective — musical and scenic —
contrived to detach the pure artistic effect from entangle
ment with its details and machinery. It was an effort to
show the flame without its smoke, as far as possible.
How wonderful the success, the world now knows. Now
why should we not take equal pains for the perfection of
.life ? The details of life must exist, the cares of the day
be met ; but surely we need not be their victims ; they
should be ours.
When Christ in his dark hour saw of the travail of his
soul and was satisfied, he reduced the crown of thorns to
a mere detail. He was not the victim of the cross ; it
was his victim ; he was wrapped up in a great aim which
caught up the thorn and the cross, and made them good
shades in a grand picture.
The sages teach us that at a certain elevation of the
mind in reason and right the littlenesses of life disappear,
and its unavoidable troubles diminish. The great aim
becomes the centre. It absorbs, more and more, feeling,
heart, brain. 'Tis a star that never recedes. What if
this man deceives us ; seme scheme fails ; poverty over
takes us? That star will climb on. Truth will not
deceive. Reason will not err. No thief will purloin the
treasures of thought, nor moth corrupt thepuritv of love.
All the worth laid up there will stay there. Life will
grow ideal. Commonplace will become uncommon like
the bit of bone or chalk from which a scholar reads a
chapter of Nature. Sorrows will change from poisonous

i?8 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
to healing plants, yielding experience. The gay flowers
of life — mirth, play, relaxation — will leave the fragrance of
wisdom. All this will ensue when life, instead of aiming
merely at getting on, at ostentation, and self, — turning
to ends what should be means, — becomes so identified
with the work of reason and right, that the small round of
affairs is illumined by their light, and every reality unfolds
its ideal.

XII.
THE ANGEL OF DEATH.

THE ANGEL OF DEATH.

|OT long ago there was some agitation in France
concerning the refusal of the authorities to
permit military honours to be paid to deceased
members of the Legion of Honour, unless they were
buried by the Church. A good many of the Legion are
Liberals, and they resented this infraction of their rights.
The Government had to give way. But, in doing so, the
minister said that though many gentlemen had outgrown
their belief in the importance of church ceremonials at
death, the Government must insist on retaining such
ceremonials in the case of the common soldier. For, he
said, faith in the future life promised by the Church is
the soldier's strength ; he could be trusted for readiness
to die only so long as he had perfeet faith in immortality.
No doubt this frank statement is in part true. 'Certainly
in most of the wars in which French soldiers riave been
called on to sacrifice themselves, there has beeai little to
sustain them except the faith in immortality. The old
saying is, " All that a man hath will he give for his life ; "
and they dread death least who believe that they part

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

with it for paradise, or for what they prize as much as
paradise. But nowhere more than in France have been
found examples of how men, believing in no future life,
may be willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause, which
stands to them for paradise. Of all the revolutionists
who there have died, from the great French revolution
to the Commune, probably not one-third believed in any
future life at all. Powerful passions, deep indignation
against wrong, moral enthusiasm, have often shown their
power to conquer the love of life,
The desire to live is natural and healthy. It is a part ¦
of the general preservative force in nature. By natural
selection those organisms live longest which are most
tenacious of life, and their vitality is inherited cumula
tively. But the terror of death is not so easily explained.
For it has been just as long the law of nature that men
shall die as that they shall live ; and it would seem to be
a normal development that the familiar and uniform law
of death should be recognised with calmness and, when
inevitable, with pleasure.
I believe the horror of death, wherever it exceeds the
natural desire to live, has been artificially produced in
our nature, and artificially propagated. We have all
been moulded by the ages that preceded us, and their
notions often survive in our feeling long after they have
passed out of our intellects.
Shakspere has portrayed with tremendous power the
fear of death in " Measure for Measure." Young Claudio
lies in his dungeon, sentenced to a death from which he
can escape only by his sister's dishonour. His own

THE ANGEL OF DEATH. 203
sister must lay before him the alternatives — his and her
dishonour, or his death on the morrow. She would per
suade him that " the sense of death is most in apprehen
sion," but Claudio sighs out " death is a fearful thing."
" And shamed life a hateful," says Isabel. " Ay," says
Claudio, — Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod ; and the de-lighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice ;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with violence round about
The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst
Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling ! — 'tis too horrible !
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
In all these wild apprehensions of Claudio there is no
thought of annihilation. What if he had seen death as
an eternal sleep, — no terrors beyond ? The same great
master has left us his interpretation of what that aspect
of death would be : — s-
To die, — to sleep, —
No more ; and, by a sleep, to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, — 'tis a consummation,
Devoutly to be wished. /
Hamlet concludes that all who are in trouble would

204 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
seek death were it only sleep, and but for the dread that
they may fly from the ills they have to others they know
not of. Euripides' Macaria, about to be sacrificed, hopes
that death will be an eternal repose. To the natural
healthy heart of man there iwould be no horrors about
death in itself. There are painful incidents at which
all would shudder, — untimely death, the cutting short
of happiness, or the accidents of physical suffering ; but
if there were no agonies and no apprehensions, the
dying would look serenely upon death as a friend leading
them to a quiet place where the weary are .at rest
In early ages priests did not find in fear of death a
sufficient sanction for their authority. They might have
proclaimed immortality for the good and annihilation for
the wicked ; but apparently they found numbers who
preferred annihilation. The largest religions have pro
mised individual absorption in -a divine essence .{like
Brahmanism), or the unconscious bliss *of absolute
repose (like Buddhism), or the cup of Lethe. Be
tween the distant ages of such simple faith in death
and ourselves lie a vast series of hells conjured up to
affright mankind with the dread of something heyond
death. Between the shade and gentle Lethe other rivers
were imagined in which it might suffer long — ¦
Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hatej
Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep,;
Cocytus, named of lamentation loud
Heard on the rueful stream : fierce Phlegethon
Whose waves of torrent fire. inflame with rage.
Two other horrors may be named. One is from Egypt,

THE ANGEL OF DEA TH. 205
and has1 just been deciphered from an old tablet in the
British Museum. It is the abode of Nin-ki-gal, the
Queen of Death.
To the house men enter, but can not depart from;.
To the road men go — but cannot return.
The abode of darkness and famine,
Where earth is their food,. — their nourishment clay;
Light is not seen ; in darkness they dwell
Ghosts like birds flutter their wings there
On the door and the gateposts the dust lies-undisturbed^
Now let us turn to the description of the; abode of the
goddess of death as it was believed by our own more
direct ancestors. It is taken from the Edda. " Her
hall is called Elvidnir, the region- of cold, storms : hunger
is her table ; starvation her knife ; delay her man ; slow
ness her maid ; precipice her threshold ; care her bed ;
burning anguish her tapestry. One half of her body is
flesh, the rest that of a livid corpse."
One can feel certain that the human race could not go
on for many ages believing such things as these without
their getting pretty deeply engraved upon the general
protoplasm. But when our fathers left that faith it was only to take
on another nearly as bad, except that there seemed some
chance of final escape. Moreover, it is a comparatively
modern opinion that people go at once to hell or heaven
after death. All except a few saints went into a limbo very
much like that horrid region described on the Egyptian
tablet, and got out of it only by slow and costly means.
So under Christianity death still remained the King of
Terrors. There is a missal at Worms, nearly a thousand

206 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

years old, containing a picture of Christ conquering Death.
Death is a hideous man, he is prostrate under Christ's feet,
he is bound with a chain, the cross is thrust as a spear
into his mouth, which vomits flames. Such was the
picture that succeeded that contest of Siegfried with the
dragon or worm which gave Worms its name. Chris
tianity brought into Europe this type of death — the law
of all organized nature. But this fire-breathing death
may be traced back to his origin in the Assyrian Angel
of Death, Asrael. In the early ages he was by no means
conceived of as a monster to be chained, but as the
faithful messenger of the gods. The first fables speak of
him only as the Inevitable. Thus, when Solomon was
conversing with a friend, Asrael passed by and looked
fixedly upon the man ; who, seeing it was the Angel of
Death, was seized with fear, and asked Solomon to use
his magic power and transport him to India. Solomon
having done so, Asrael drew near and said, " I was
gazing on the man with you in surprise, for I had been
ordered to seek him in India." Asrael was believed to
mingle death in the cup of those he was to slay, from
which came the phrase " to taste of death ;" it was the
cup which Jesus prayed might pass from him, and it sur
vives in the memorial chalice of his death.
But gradually under that development of dualism which
divided up the universe into two hostile camps — God and
Devil — there were imagined two Angels of Death. To
Asrael, or as the Rabbis said, Sammael, was assigned
the work of tearing the souls of the wicked painfully
from their bodies ; while to Gabriel was assigned the

THE ANGEL OF DEATH. 207

work of removing the souls of the righteous tenderly.
Thus we read in the Koran —
By the angels who tear forth the souls of some with violence
And by those who draw forth the souls of others with gentlensss.
From that came the superstition which has surrounded
the death-beds of so-called infidels with fancied horrors.
For the original Angel of Death was swiftly identified
with Satan, and supposed always to come and claim his
own. It is said in the New Testament that to Satan was
given the power of death, whereas in the Book of Job,
Satan was allowed to do all except touch Job's life. So
was gradually built the edifice of superstition crowned at
last with the wild delusion that death is the effect of a
god's deliberate curse !
Death was thus fairly degraded from an angel to a
demon, dwelling in a dark valley, — the valley of the
shadow of Death,- — that "outer darkness" spoken of
by Christ. It seemed hard at first to reconcile this outer
darkness with so much fire as Satan was said to use, but
it was concluded that this abode was a place where heat
and cold alternated — the victims suffering perpetual ague
and fever, now seized with shivering and gnashing
(chattering) of teeth, and now consumed with heat and
begging a drop of water for their parched tongues.
These things may seem antiquarian to many, and in one
sense they are ; but in an important sense they belong to
our own moral constitution. Every one of these various
terrors associated with death are reflected in those
phantoms which besieged Shakspere's Claudio in his
dungeon. He saw his soul flighted — that is unlighted,

208 IDOLS AND IDEALS.
darkened, first bathed in fiery floods, then prisoned in
thick-ribbed ice. These were common English phantasms
but a little time ago, and, although they have been dis
credited by the intelligent, the impress they left on human
nerves still lingers in many a strong man's vague horror
of death. II..
What has been bred into us artificially may be culti
vated out of us. The love of life is meant to preserve
us just so long as life has more happiness than misery in
it. We owe great honour to those reformers and men of
science who wage war against the death which mingles
its cup in the gin-shop, in the murderous adulterations
of food and drink, — cups mingled by the real Asraels of
the land. All honour to those who analyze the air and
the water, that mankind may not prematurely, taste of
death. The combat with disease, pain, and death, is a
holy war. It appears that, to some minds, recent dis
coveries of the laws of heredity have presented a grave
problem, — namely, whether medical science is really
doing a merciful work in prolonging diseased lives, and
thus enabling them to transmit their diseases to others.
But it is not so grave a problem as it looks. Undoubtedly
the transmission of disease is a very great wrong. There
is required a higher morality which will restrain the vic
tims of hereditary disease from defying the plain com
mands of justice and right. When society devotes to its
own affairs more of that zeal which denounces the sins
of the stiff-necked in bygone ages, we shall have laws

THE ANGEL OF DEATH. 209

that shall transfer the ban against certain very proper
though unlevitical intermarriages to marriages which
involve pain and death to the unborn. Such a law
might, indeed, work injustice unless gradually developed
through further knowledge ; but it is an error to think
that the evil could be mastered by ceasing to prolong
invalid lives. It can only be met by a wider diffusion of
knowledge concerning the laws of health and of disease,
especially the laws of morbid inheritance. When such
laws are generally known they will be generally obeyed.
Sentiment will follow them. That old law of nature,
the survival of the healthiest, though apparently checked
by medical science, will recover itself by means of the
very knowledge obtained in prolonging life ; and culture
will be followed by a natural selection of the healthy. In
a perfectly civilised society everybody would die of old
age. And when that time comes death will be robbed
of its last terror. For to a rational mind — haunted by
no fears for the future — the only grief surrounding death
is just that painful tearing of the heart away from all its
joys which the ancients ascribed to a demon, while the
gentle death of old age seemed to them the friendly office
of an angel. There is an old story that when Menippus,
the cynic, passed by suicide into Hades, he recognised
there all the kings by their howling so much louder than
the rest. They howled louder, because they had been
parted from more earthly treasures than the rest. They
who are surrounded by affection, friendship, opportunity,
health, have an estate beyond kings, and to such the
apprehension of death must bring pain. And so far as

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

such are concerned it may be said, in passing, that no
prayer can be more foolish than that which deprecates
" sudden death '' : such death may seem shocking to
priests, who consider their shrivings of importance ; but
reason justifies the feeling of Caesar, approved by Bacon,
that "the suddenest passage is easiest." Still more at
war with human happiness is the miserable priestly plan
of inculcating it as a duty to dwell on the thought of
death. What could be more cruel than the plan of the
\,Rev. Leigh Richmond— editor of the consumptive theo
logy of sickly shepherds and cottagers — who so com
placently describes his custom of collecting the village
children in the graveyard to learn spelling and reading
from the tombstones !
Yet the average duration of human life is a steadfast
consideration in every wise man's life, with reference to
which he will build. And it is a problem of vast moment
to every individual by what means he' shall conquer the
traditional influences by which death is shown as his
enemy, and turn it into a friendly factor of his work and
life on earth. There is something infinitely pathetic in
the solution given to this problem by Buddha : let death
find you already dead to everything from which it can
part you. A sort of slow psychological and passional
suicide has, indeed, been proposed by many re
ligions as the means of removing the sting of death.
But this is mere evasion of the difficulty, not its solu
tion. Nor is there any solution of it possible except in
the utter eradication from the human mind of the ac
cursed superstition that -death is a curse, and the entire

THE ANGEL OF DEATH.

dissociation of it from future dangers. As those miser
able fictions disappear man will set himself to destroy
the incidental evils of death, but will also increasingly
recognise death itself as a beautiful provision of Nature.
The popularity of the German engraving " Death, as^
friend," — representing the skeleton figure, with scythe
laid aside, gently touching the aged man in his sleep, —
suggests that people generally may be wiser in this matter
than their professional intimidators. The feeling which
welcomes death for others when the natural term of life
is reached is true and kind. There are those whom we
may love as much as ourselves ; but when we see that no
further happiness and usefulness await them, we feel that
it would be selfish to wish them to totter on while release
is near ; and though on their serene saintly faces the tears
fall fast, they are out of the sweet depths of memory, not
of despair. And if this be so with those who remain,
much more is it so to those who depart, for they no longer
possess treasures on earth ; their treasures have gone
before them. One by one the old friends have departed,
insensibly the ties worn thin — then broken — that bound
them to earth. Of the garden of joys that once bloomed
around them memory alone remains, like the last rose ;
and that memory would become pain did not death
kindly scatter the petals where the loved ones are
sleeping. Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief,
Laid on it for covering ;
And how sleep seems a goodly thing,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

IDOLS AND IDEALS.

And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf.
Knowest thou not ? and how the chief
Of joys seems not to suffer pain ?
Knows't thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf,
Bound up at last for harvesting ;
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf.*
But even when old age is not reached in years it is
but too often reached, in all but its serenity, by cares and
sufferings. It is not then — it is never — that death
deserves the repute of a demon. Rather it should be
judged by the frequency with which its presence is re
cognised by the cessation of pain. When anguish would
become intolerable death interposes its relief. Not at
the door of the Great Anaesthetic that brings release at
last to all pain, must we lay the ignorance and dis
obedience by which are brought on men the troubles that
need the sweet nepenthe. Until mankind have attained
that higher civilisation which shall render an untimely
death as scandalous as a case of starvation is now, we
can only remember that compensations surround the great
majority even of seemingly premature deaths. And this
not alone because they are generally the result of some
congenital weakness, — developed from within or without,
as by epidemics,— which would probably make prolonged
suffering the alternative of early death ; but also because
in every grave the sorrows and anxieties are put to sleep
* By D. G. Rossetti. An unpublished poem, which the author
kindly permits me to print.

THE ANGEL OF DEATH.

along with the joys. In that final rest how many difficul
ties are settled, how many cares sink for ever ! Forebod
ings, misunderstandings, haunting memories of mistake,
cannot invade that charmed rest.
There is a soft Lethe flowing through all our life,
beside whose still waters we are led that our hearts may
be restored. It is fringed with the flowers of forgetful
ness ; on its margin the lilies of childhood shine above
the wave in which all its mishaps are buried, and youth's
meadow is rich where it has wandered, by reason of the
poppies it has set on the graves of desire and disappoint
ment. How great is our debt to that daily death —
Oblivion ! Let us not fear when the sweet stream from
which we so long drank surcease of sorrow widens with
us to a shoreless sea.
The influence of the good done does not end with
the power to do more, and it is something that the dead
cannot live to undo the good they have done. Lord
Bacon said he did not fear death, but he would rather not
live to go to the funeral of his own reputation. Alas,
that is just what befell. But death softens even that
tragedy. They who have lived to accomplish any
worthy task may solace themselves, even in the presence
of untimely death, by seeing that under the shadow of
death love reawakens. Their virtue rises more pure
from the grave : their faults are sure to be interred with
their bones if they have done even a little work worthy
to live after them.
David Scott designed a picture of the " Procession of
Unknown Powers." A youth, seated on the curve of the

214 IDOLS AND IDEALS.

sphere, gazes upon the awful forms that pass by, each
bearing a star. To his appealing gaze they return no
look : in silent majesty they move on whither their stead
fast eyes are bent. As the youth with anxious face
looks upward, on the earth beside him a lily has bloomed,
and on his shoulder a chrysalid gained its wings. So do
they move before us all, these Unknown Powers ; but even
of them one thing may be known — they are steadfast to
their path and their task. It may be the youth will learn
his lesson presently, and turn to attend with equal
steadfastness to the flower at his side and the winged
creature on his shoulder. It is not by perpetual gazing
upon death with its star, still less by shutting out from
the heart the ephemeral beauty that blooms beside us, that
we can be free from the fear of that inevitable power ; but
it is by coaxing from each seed of opportunity its flower,
and cherishing each faculty till it find wings. Love can
transmute all earthly treasures to eternal life; so shall
they become an imperishable bequest of the dying to the
living ; for self cannot desire to carry away the treasures
gathered for the sake of love.
And when that unanswering power, whose name is
Death, bears away on its path the lives that are dear, the
bereaved may equally derive that same lesson, and turn
to make the most of those who remain, tending more
carefully the flowers of kindness, removing what thorns
they can from the paths of those from whom they must
presently be parted. '

CHRISTIANITY.

ERRATA.
In the Essay on Christianity :—
PJ 7, 1. 22, strike out 'if not later.'
P. ii, 1. 5, for 'David' 'Abraham.'
P. 45, I.9, for 'Christianity' 'Christian.'
P. 53, L 26, f Nicene ' refers to the creed, not the place.
P. 59, 1. 25, insert ' Gentile ' before ' Bishop. '
P. 75, 1, 10, 'original' before 'Nicene.'
P. 75, 1. 19, for 'Nicene' read 'Athanasian.'
P. 103, 1. 22, refers to Tischendorf's new reading of
Col. ii. 2.

CHRISTIANITY.

ITS MORNING STAR.

ITS MORNING STAR.

HE homage paid to. Christ is a high poetic fact in
human history. Even in the Legend of Christ,
with all its fables, there are not wanting in
dications of the profound faith of man in his own higher
nature. The poor victim of his own animalism will fain
believe that somewhere his nature_rose above all that is
low and vile. Standing amid physical laws which are as
hard walls, the ignorant love to think that at his highest
man has been able to master the laws. These are the
ideals of ignorant ages which art, science, and culture can
alone fulfil. Until nature is recognised as divine there
must be a supernature ; and no one will speak lightly of
the myths of humanity, even when he may become old
enough to regard them as childish things.
Priesthoods have gained power over the people through
cunning use of their love for their greatest man. But of
course no priesthood can rest upon a man, or on anything
within the reach of every mind's comprehension ; so they
have made Christ into such a god as is adapted to their

6 CHRISTIANITY.
purposes. The manhood of Christ, though it is the one
thing about him in which all creeds agree, has so far
receded before the Shape bearing his name and contrived
in the interests of Christianity, that it is called infidelity to
speak of Christ as a man. I have no belief that any man
can really be interested in the genius or character of Christ
so long as he is still under the impression that the Christian
scheme embodies him.* That takes him out of the region
of human interest, whatever interest of another kind it may
enlist. It is one of the greatest privileges of freethinkers
that they can study with that calmness which is essential
to research, and which is impossible where other aims than
to find the fact intervene, the lives of those great men who

* As a rule I prefer the title "Christ," to that of "Jesus," for
we cannot be certain that the latter, said to have been the name
assigned by the angel, was really bestowed by his parents in childhood.
The instinct of Catholic and Ritualist recognises "Jesu '' as the more
superstitious name. Even if "Jesus "were the original name, it seems
tome less characteristic than the title which signs the verdict of the
people on the man after his work was done. " Christ " is also a Gentile
word, and better symbolises the effect of a life and teaching which
broke down the wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, and
advanced so far the religion of humanity. Finally, the oriental
custom by which nearly all great religious teachers became known in
history by other than their family names, reflects in this instance especial
honour on human nature to which it is entitled. Those who most
distrust the people have never forgotten that they cried "Give us
Barabbas instead of him," and we who think of the masses with hope
must not forget that when and where the people could give their
suffrage free of priestly demagoguism, they voted the same man their
King, above all the Cassars. For "Christ" represents no priestly
but a royal title, which Jew and Gentile united to bestow on a poor
man whose only claim to kingship was that he bore witness to the
truth.

ITS MORNING STAR.

have been the objects of superstitious veneration. No
prejudice, no compulsory creed, no fear of the results of
inquiry, can prevent our seeking and stating the simple
truth. Jesus, agree all the sects, was a man. They add that
he was more — though what they append generally would
make him less — than a man. We must pardon the
speculation, since so few know what a man is. But it is just
that we are all seeking to know, what a man really is ; and
nothing can better aid us than to learn from the great
manifestations of our humanity in such men as Jesus.
Let us then inquire what manner of man he really was.
II.
The only materials we have for our inquiry are those
supplied by the Four Gospels, with now and then a hint
from the Epistles of Paul. From these we must deduct
all that can be shown to have been written for a theoretical
purpose, or in the interest of any party, school, or sect.
Thus; we can get but little that is descriptive of the
real Christ from such a work as that called " The Gospel
according to John." In the first place it is a very late
work, belonging to the latter part of the second century,
if not later. Its scholastic style of Greek, its frequent
ignorance of local usages and places, and neglect of
notorious Jewish traditions concerning Christ — whose
birth, baptism, and temptation are in it utterly ignored—
indicate the passage of the legend into a new habitat.. In
the anxiety to present a superhuman being all earthly

CHRISTIANITY.

aspects are eliminated. There are also traces in this
Gospel of controversies which were unknown within four
generations after Christ's death. Thus (John viii., 44)
Christ is represented as saying of the Devil, " he is a
liar and so is his father." Though the English version
has tried to cover the meaning by turning the sentence
into bad grammar and worse sense (" a liar and the father
of it ") the original is plain : tyeianty; eori, ko.1 6 iraTrjp avrov.
Now this notion that the Devil had a father was one of the
later phases of the Gnostic philosophy. The Demiurge,
employed to create the world and then setting up a rival
kingdom, was for the" first time associated with the Devil,
and suggested as his creator, by Marcion, who taught in
Rome during the middle of the second century. In
other sentences ascribed to Christ the Marcionite idea of
an " antithesis " — the demiurgic confronting the divjne
kingdom — is reflected, but here it reaches the later
Archonitic development, the Devil being named as the
Son of the Evil Creator (as Christ is of the Good God).
This conception, which Augustine denounces as Mani-
chaen, could only have been stated late in the second
century. But apart from the late date of the fourth gospel, the
writer of it is so absorbed in his main theoretical purpose,
— that of making Christ thjs point of union between the
Hebrew personification of Wisdom and the Greek con
ception of the Logos, — that he does not hesitate to sacri
fice everything, even the moral character of Christ, to his
end. He represents Christ as attitudinising at the grave
of Lazarus. "Jesus wept"; but could those have been

ITS MORNING STAR.

genuine tears of sorrow at the death of a man whom he
knows he can resuscitate by a word ? Then he raises his
eyes and says " Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard
me." And he adds, " I said that because of the people,
that they may believe thou hast sent me ; I know that
thou hearest me always " — an " aside," confessing that
his thanks were meant for effect. This is only a fair ex
ample of how Christ is uniformly adapted to a theory in
the fourth gospel.
It is indeed enough that it entirely omits the Sermon
on the Mount ! The homely every-day virtues of that
sermon were too human, too commonplace, to arrest the
attention of a speculative enthusiast absorbed in the
tremendous work of remodelling the theosophic' schools
of Egypt and Greece, harmonising their divisions, and
solving the problems of ages. Nevertheless, in another
direction, this gospel, however untrustworthy for personal
portraiture of Christ, is of the highest importance by reason
of the spirit of love which it consecrates. It is the very
apotheosis of Love. God is Love. Christ is Love. To
love is the only test, the only creed, the perfect life. So
magnificent is this rapture of love that breathes through
the gospel which, no doubt because of it, was inscribed
with the name of the disciple called "Beloved," that the
warring Jew and Gentile sects seem to have had to touch
it here and there in the interest of what they deemed
orthodoxy. Thus in the noble utterance ascribed to
Christ, speaking to the Samaritan woman, that neither in
her sacred mountain nor yet at Jerusalem should the true
worshippers gather, but everywhere should they worship

10 CHRISTIANITY.
in spirit and in truth, a Jewish sectarian has interpo
lated the words " ye (Samaritans) know not whom ye
worship ; we know whom we worship, for salvation is of
the Jews," — and this bit of bigotry remains there like an
insect in translucent amber.

III.
For our main facts we proceed to what are called the
Synoptical Gospels. Of these we may set aside Mark
except for occasional correction of the other two, because
it is an evident compilation from them. Now these two
Gospels, Matthew and Luke, portray a Christ totally dis
tinct from the mystical Christ of John ; and yet their
disagreement from each other is very significant, showing
very plainly that both are warped — one by a theological,
the other by a polemical purpose — even when recording
the same facts or traditions. To discover how far the
portrait of Christ presented by either was influenced or
tinged by the writer's prejudices, we must for the moment
dismiss from our consideration the truth or falsity of the
narratives, and think only of the colouring given to them.
Taking Luke first, we find pervading his work a
jealousy of the Jews. It is well known that the be
lievers in Christ, from the first generation after his death,
were sharply divided into two parties, — one wishing to
preserve the supremacy of Judaism in the new religion
the other determined that the Gentiles should have an
equal or superior part in it. Now Luke presses every
thing in favour of the Gentiles. The writer addresses

ITS MORNING STAR. u
his work to a Gentile, Theophilus, and begins by admit
ting that he was not an eye-witness, but had carefully
searched into the traditions transmitted from those who
were. At the outset we find Luke tracing the genealogy
of Christ beyond Hebrew kings, beyond David where
Matthew leaves him, back to Adam, — that is, to the father
of all races, Gentiles equally with Jews. And Adam, he
says, was the son of God.
I cannot, at present, go exhaustively into this subject,
but will present some of the more salient instances in
which the Gentile animus of Luke is shown.* Matthew
relates an incident in which Christ is represented as at
first refusing the petition of a woman because she was an
alien, but afterwards granting it because she humbled
herself before the chosen race. " Behold a woman of
Canaan came out from those borders, and cried, saying,
Have mercy on me'Lord, son of David : my daughter is
grievously possessed with a demon. But he answered
her not a word. And his disciples came to him saying,
Send her away ; for she cries after us. He said, I was
not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And
she came and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.
But he answered and said, It is not lawful to take the
children's bread and throw it to the dogs. But she said,
Yea, Lord ; for even the dogs eat of the crumbs which

* An admirable series of articles on this general subject, which I
hope may at some time be reprinted, were contributed by the Rev.
O. B. Frothingham to the " Dial," a magazine edited by myself in
Cincinnati, in i860.

CHRISTIANITY.

fall from their masters' table. Then Jesus answered and
said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith ; be it unto
thee as thou wilt." This is Matthew's account. Mark
represents Christ as following the woman's abject words,
speaking of her race as dogs, with " for this saying go
thy way : the demon is gone out of thy daughter."
Now Luke omits this story altogether ; but he replies to
its insult to the Gentile race, when making up the genea
logy of Christ, by giving him two Cainans among his
ancestors. This Cainan number two is found nowhere in
the Old or New Testaments except in Luke, where it
stands as an intensification, grown to a serious claim, that
the despised race of aliens, whom the Jews conquered
and despised, nevertheless contributed a double supply
of blood to the veins of their Messiah.
Luke also omits the charge to the disciples (Matt.
x, 5) : " Go not into a way of Gentiles, and into a city
of Samaritans enter not ; but go rather to the lost sheep
of the house of Israel." On the other hand Luke replies
to this with a story (ix, 52), unknown in Matthew, of
how Christ himself sent his disciples — and he is careful
to add seventy to the twelve— into a Samaritan village,
where the people would not receive them because they
were on their way to Jerusalem, and how, when they
wished to call down fire upon the villagers, Christ rebuked
them. Luke also has the parable of the good Samaritan,
— where the type of charity is chosen from a despised
alien tribe,— which Matthew has not. On an occasion
when Christ finds unbelief in his own village, he says,
" A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country

ITS MORNING STAR.

'3

and in his own house." With Matthew that is all. But
Luke makes this the very opening of Christ's ministry,
and the occasion of a great manifesto against the Jews
and in favour of aliens. According to him Christ's
rebuke does not include " his own house," but is national :
" No prophet is acceptable in his own country. But I tell
you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days
of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and
six months, when a great famine came upon all the land ;
and unto none of them was Elijah sent save unto Sarepta
of Sidonia, unto a widow. And many lepers were in Israel
in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them
was cleansed, save Naaman, the Syrian." This bold exalta
tion of foreigners was followed, according to Luke, by an
attempt on Christ's life, which he escaped mysteriously,
— " passing through the midst of them." That was
a cutting satire on the Jewish party.
It is evident from this last phrase which seems to
ascribe to Christ the power of rendering himself invisible,
and others of the same character, that in Luke there is a
transitional conception of Jesus,— a germinating Arianism.
Luke cares little if at all for the Messianic idea. Where
Matthew reports the people crying, " Hosanna to the
Son of David," Luke says they cried " Blessed be the
King that cometh in the name of the Lord ! " Luke
i, 35) even interprets the venerable title " Son of God "as
meaning simply that the Holy Ghost was his father. He
is plainly representing Christ as a sort of demigod. It is
remarkable that he alone gives the salutation of the angel
to Mary, and it is nearly in the very words of the seer

i4 CHRISTIANITY.
Tiresias to the mother of Hercules, — " Be of good cheer,
thou mother of a noble offspring : blessed art thou among
Argive women."
„We therefore must read Luke with caution, because of
his polemical attitude towards the Jews, and because of a
slight speculative tendency in the direction of Greek
superstitions. IV.
But how about Matthew ? We find in Matthew, as I
think, the most primitive conception of Christ, and pro
bably the least biassed report of what was really said
and done by him. But this first gospel is also vitiated
by a prepossession on the part of the writer. In his firm
belief that Jesus is the Messiah of the Jews he tries to
make nearly every word and action of his fulfil a pro
phecy. And there is reason to believe that in some cases
he unconsciously stretches Christ's words and recasts his
actions in his desire to show him to the Jews as fulfilling
all the so-called predictions of the conditions under which
the Messiah was to appear and the part he was to enact.
Thus he transports the family of Joseph and Mary from
Bethlehem to Nazareth for no better reason than the
apparent fulfilment of a declaration in the Old Testament
that somebody, whom he supposes to be the Messiah,
would be " called a Nazarene." It is a blunder which
shows the author to have been a judaizing Egyptian-
Greek convert. For the passages alluded to (Judges xiii,
5, i Sam. i, 1 1) speak of " Nazarite," one set apart (from
nazar, to separate) according to Jewish law, and have

ITS MORNING STAR.

15

no reference to the village of Nazareth. In reporting
(Matt, xii, 38) Christ's vigorous rebuke of those who
demanded " a sign," in which he says no sign shall be
given but that of the prophet Jonah, the writer of the
first Gospel at once seizes another opportunity for showing
a correspondence between Christ and a Jewish type, and
makes the teacher add : " for as Jonah was three days and
three nights in the whale's belly, so will the son of man
be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth."
Christ could not of course have known anything of the
legend of his resurrection which was to arise after his
death ; and, if he made any allusion to Jonah at all —
and Mark reports the remark without it — it could only
have been in the simple way mentioned in the third gospel,
that as Jonah warned Nineveh he warned his generation;
The gospel of Matthew carries its hebraism to a.n extreme
in its fanciful account of Christ's entry into Jerusalem,
where he is actually represented as riding on two animals
at once — an ass and a colt — because the prophecy had
said " Thy king comes unto thee, meek, and mounted
Upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass ; " the
writer not knowing enough of the Hebrew idiom to per
ceive that only one animal was meant by Zechariah, — " an
ass, even the foal of an ass."
Taking, then, these two gospels — Matthew and Luke
— divesting them of their mythology, their improbabilities,
and glosses, we are left as best we can to build up for
ourselves a probable picture of Christ and some idea of
his life and teachings.

16 CHRISTIANITY.

V.

In the posthumous work of the late Lord Amberley,
"An Analysis of Religious Belief" — a work which, how
ever incomplete, is so full of information that it must
awaken in us all fresh regret at its author's untimely
death — he lays down a rule which I think is likely to
mislead, even though he qualifies it. It is " that wherever
we can perceive faults or blemishes in the character of
Christ, we may presume them to have actually existed ;
for his biographers were deeply interested in making him
appear perfect, and they would have been anxious,
wherever possible, to conceal his weaknesses." He adds
that this principle must be qualified by the consideration
that they might have failed to recognise the faultiness,
or may have misunderstood him. A perusal of the
gospels leads me to the belief that wherever such blemishes
are recorded they are generally, if not invariably, expres
sions of the bigotry, superstition, or partisan feeling of
the writers, and that the general high tenour of Christ's
mind and character should lead us to give him the
benefit of every doubt, and ascribe the fault rather to his
reporters than to himself.
Another thing should be said. Because we reject
miracles and legends, in themselves), it does not follow
that we must reject all the statements wrapped up in
them. We must remember that valuable ores are con
tained in dross. Nay, the dross itself maly be characteristic
of ores to which it is related. -
This last maxim is of especial value when we consider

ITS MORNING STAR. 17
,  ^ 
such legends as those relating to the birth and infancy
of Christ. When a man has become famous it is natural
that inquiries should be instituted about his family and
his childhood ; and though, in such a case as that of
Christ, it is inevitable that a swarm of legends should
surround the facts, they may nevertheless hint the truth.
Thus it would be very difficult to get up a tradition that
a man was born a poor peasant, when his family con
nection was well known in its own neighbourhood to be
of wealth and rank. The traditions would point to the
notorious fact. There is, therefore, no reason why we
should doubt the indications of the legend in Luke that
Christ was born of parents in good position. If the
traditions occurred only in Matthew we might suspect
he was trying to make out Christ's relationship to
royalty; but Luke shows no interest in Christ's connec
tion with David. The sign named to the shepherds by
which they should recognise the babe was that he would
be found wrapped in swaddling clothes, — a mark, as
Calmet noted, of dignity. We are particularly told that
Christ's birth in the stable was only because the inn was
full. There would appear to be no reason why Joseph
should have taken Mary, so near to her confinement, with
him to Bethlehem to be enrolled or taxed under the im
perial edict, unless she was possessed of some property
requiring her pprtJOTT^^^ggenoe. It is a family which
seems to have leisure to rtavelewn'lNiliyi-s Egypt on
their own beasts of burthen. In Matthew hS& by om"
translation, represented as the son of a carpenteNiJ^
the word is toctw, which may be either a builder ora1
E

18 CHRISTIANITY.

carver in wood, and in any case does not in the least
mean that Christ was of low position.
The probabilities are that Paul stated a well-known
fact when he said that Christ, though rich, for the sake of
the people became poor. His discourses all show him
to have been a man of education, and his conduct ' is
marked by refinement. When he enters the synagogue,
even when a boy, the minister gives him the scriptures
that he may read to the assembly. And it is probable
that the startling effect produced upon the mind of the
half-clad popular prophet John, when Jesus came and
asked to be baptised, was the high rank of his new
convert. " What," he cries, " you come to me ! to a
man unworthy (by position) to tie your shoes !" Of
course, we cannot be sure this was John's meaning, but
we can be certain that no coarse or illiterate man ever
uttered the sermon on the Mount. Like many other
great teachers and radicals,— like Buddha, Zoroaster,
Confucius, Mohammed, Plato, in the past, and like Knox,
Wesley, Wilberforce, Swedenborg, Saint Simon, in more
modern times, — Christ would appear to have been a
highly-educated and well-connected young radical and
enthusiast, who at first aimed to reform the religion of
his country, and, that being too strong for him, fought it
unto death.

VI.

^.^-riat this youth was a convert under the preaching of
the great revivalist of the time, John the Baptist, seems

ITS MORNING STAR.

!9

to me plain. Although the writers of the Gospels
manifest a suspicious anxiety to turn John and his
preaching into a mere preface to Christ and his move
ment, we know from other sources that the wild half-clad
prophet in the' wilderness had awakened a wide-spread
excitement, and it still survives in some Eastern sects,
which care little for Christ, and claim John as their
founder. Under the Roman occupation of the country,
it is probable that a diversion of popular feeling had
occurred, and the people in their hatred of the foreigner
had sunk into the torpor of indifference ' as to their
intimate religious affairs, under which priestly oppressions
and hypocrisies had grown rank. John came laying his
axe at the root of this baleful tree. He turned the popular
mind again upon the need of religious reform at home,
and directed against the priesthood the animosities which
had been gathering against Rome. He called men to
alliance with the Kingdom of Heaven, and in the mouth
of an Essene, as he probably was, that meant something
like the early Puritan movement was in England. By its
Essene wing Judaism was already in connection with
Egypt, and some other foreign regions ; and the greater
universality of John's revival is indicated by his adopting
for all converts the symbol of purification by water which,
under the old law, was used only for proselytes from alien
tribes. This already implied the moral kingdom under
which Jew and Gentile were included. And this meant
a new " cause " and a great agitation, which were sure to
bring their adherents into collision with the priesthood..
"Presume not any more," cried John, "to say within

20 CHRISTIANITY.
yourselves, We have Abraham for our father." He
denounces the Pharisees as a brood of vipers.
Now when Jesus was baptised by John, he adopted
this new cause. He talked in the same vein. " From
that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent, for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand." He also called the
Pharisees a "brood of vipers." Some rationalising
Christians maintain that Jesus was simply a gentle and
good teacher, who went about inculcating a beautiful
morality. But it is plain that he was, with John, warrior
in a revolutionary cause. It is this fact which explains
his demand for a personal following, which has led some
to charge him with egotism. It was not to a personal
discipleship that he called men when he said, " Come,
and follow me," but the word of a captain enlisting
soldiers for a struggle. Men and women might be gentle
and pure in their homes, but in such an emergency that
would not fulfil the need of the hour ; they must come
out and stand by the hated outcast battling for truth and
right, and thereby, prove their fidelity to the Kingdom of
God. Lord Bacon has remarked that when Christ told
the young man that if he would be perfect he should give
away his possessions and come follow him, he did not say
he should give them away unless he was so prepared to
devote himself absolutely to the new cause. Pie did not
lord it over the young man's conscience, but acknowledged
that a good life might be lived by obedience to the moral
laws ; though the perfect life could be attained only by
entire self-consecration to the great cause of truth, and
sharing its perils and hardships. Incidentally there is

ITS MORNING STAR.

reflected in the absoluteness of the demand the singular
extent of Christ's idealism, which disregarded the usual
appliances of success — wealth and rank — and trusted
only in the pure power of Truth, and the enthusiasm of
its adherents.
That, like Wesley and most other reformers, Christ at
first tried to work through the existing religious institu
tions is probable : the traditions of his early preaching
in synagogues are clear. They may have been ultimately
closed against him, or the crowds may have swelled so
that he could only address them out of doors. We know
very little of the mental phases and struggles through
which he passed in the thirty years preceding his public
consecration by baptism to the new kingdom preached
by John. But after that he speaks as one who feels
himself member of a new society, and by no means
realises the full extent and bearing of the revolution he
has espoused. He has rebelled against his class, and
taken his place with the humblest religious community
which boasted of the poverty of their prophet, whose
food was wild honey arid his dress a leathern girdle.
Christ is impatient of anything inharmonious with the
equality and democracy of the fraternity he has entered.
It is curious to peruse the laborious pedigrees by which
the gospels try to connect him with royalty, and the
homage afterwards paid by the church to his mother
beside the records of his own repudiation of such things.
They tell him his mother and brothers stand outside and
wish to speak to him ; but he points to his followers, and
will acknowledge only them as mother and brothers,

22 CHRISTIANITY.
"Blessed is the womb that bare thee !" cries a woman;
but, with the like impatience, he exclaims— "No! blessed
are they who hear the word of God and keep it." There
is a strong infusion of the Essene communism in this,
and there- are not wanting various early (as I think)
utterances disparaging marriage, in which the celibacy
favoured by that society is reflected.
But this could have only been transitional with him.
" At last he beat his music out" — and great music it was.
He was no ascetic against whom it was urged, "This man
receiveth sinners and eateth with them." He was no
Essene who wove bridal-feasts into parables ; nor was he
wanting in sensibility or filial feeling who took children
in his arms, was loved and followed by women, and in
his last agony asked John to be as a son to his mother.
VII.
The real beauty of Christ's life is just that which is
hid by the blind ascription of equal sanctity to all he did
and said,— his growth. Slight as the authentic points
are, they are points of fire. We see him steadily emerging
from sectarian trammels and national prejudices: the
smoke of Jewish tradition— Gehenna, devils, angels —
mingling with but never mastering the ever-mounting
flame of his thought. It is a Jewish . Messiah he sees
coming in clouds of glory, but the messianic costume is
thrown off when, descended, the judge says nought of
Jew or Gentile, but parts to right and left men, as they
have or have not fed the hungry and clothed the naked.

ITS MORNING STAR.

The hereditary conventional beliefs in his mind decrease
until they linger only as superficial garb of his truth : he
never makes any prevailing error his main point. It
appears to me that some liberals concede too much to
that Medusa, Superstition, which turns every thought
and emotion of Christ to dogmatic stone, when they
admit his responsibility for the demonology, the devil
the eternal hell, incidentally mentioned without denial in
his teachings. Under compulsion to fulfil the r6le of the
Messiah, the Christ of Christendom is made to give an
original and divine sanction to the cosmological notions
of his age, which he held as we hold the law of gravitation.
The demonology, the great gulf fixed between heaven
and hell, were the best science of his age ; the Darwins
and Huxleys of his time, such as they were, "believed
them : he was not a dialectical or scientific sceptic
engaged in questioning such things. In estimating a
great man we should surely look to that wherein he
was unique, individual, exceeded his age and added to
it. In raising to equal import Christ's mere hereditary
mode of expression and the life that was in him — adoring
alike body and raiment — the sects are really building as
much upon the creed of Christ's crucifiers as on his own !
Every Scribe and Pharisee agreed with Christ about
Gehenna and Satan. It was not for such views they
put him to death. It is to complete their murderous
work only too faithfully that the dead Christ should be
dragged through the world at the chariot-wheels of that
very Messiah-theory which slew him. What Scribe and
Pharisee did not believe was in a Father who sends his

24 CHRISTIANITY.
sunshine and rain on good and evil alike, a Father, we
may deduce at length, not likely at any time to rain fires
of hell upon his children ! What shall be said of those
who attribute, to the man who believed in such a Father,
an equally conscious and thought-out agreement with the
logical results of the conventional cosmogony which was
sometimes the inevitable costume of his thought ?
Especially is it interesting to note how from basing his
opposition to falsities on the written Law, he more and
more appeals to nature and reason. David's eating the
shew-bread and man's superiority to the Sabbath are
oddly connected for a time ; but at length his protest
against the Sabbath is based simply upon unresting nature
and human liberty.
For his age and country Christ was, perhaps, unique in
his method of measuring usage and tradition by real
principles. When he warned the youth to keep the com
mandments, and the young man asks which, he does not
blindly reply " The whole ten, of course ;" he names only
five from the decalogue,— all the real and human ones ;
names none of those that protect Jehovah. For the
Sabbatarian command he substitutes " Love thy neigh
bour as thyself;" instead of warning the youth against
•' graven images," which he is in no danger of worshipping,
he touches his real idol— his wealth; and instead of
exhorting him to do the work of Moses' time, he calls him
to the great task of his own— to come out there into the
street, stand by his side, and toil for the right. How far
he carried this rationalism we cannot fully know, for his
words come to us mingled with much that is irrational in

ITS MORNING STAR.

his reporters : nevertheless, to the careful eye, his pearl
will not be confused with the shell enclosing it. We know
that it was a great soul, far above any New Testament
writer, which sends us those fine protests against prayer
in public places, that relegation of the heart to the closet
for its mystical communion with the Highest. Not one of
those believers in popular marvels who report him could
have invented those exalted poetic interpretations of
nature which bid us learn of the sparrow and of the lily,
more glorious than Solomon in his splendour, and
appealed to men to discern the signs of their own time as
for the weather they watched the morning red and glow
of evening. It was no believer in a fictitious providence
who rebuked the notion that those on whom the tower of
Siloam fell were worse than others. And among the few
things which, even in the fourth gospel, we can trace back
only to him, is that wonderful saying that he will not pray
for his disciples, because God needs no prompting of his
love ; and also that lesson of humility taught by his wash
ing the feet of the humble working men who followed
him. These things represent the integrity of a great
mind, — the mind of a thinker, a reasoner, a poet. Critics
sometimes charge rationalists who believe in the greatness
of Christ with selecting from the gospels all that is favour
able, and discrediting all that is unfavourable to him.
But for one I repudiate that charge. I see plainly that
there are some words and actions ascribed to Christ which
are inferior to others, while they are in some cases equally
authentic. But, believing that Christ was a man, I believe
that he grew, and it is our duty to estimate him at his

26 CHRISTIANITY.

highest, and not at his lowest. I would not, in my humble
concerns, like to have what I said as an orthodox preacher
quoted against what I believe now. We are entitled in
accordance with the laws of human evolution to claim
that the Judaic or superstitious utterances of Christ repre
sent a more youthful period of his life than those which
are in plain contradiction of them. Thus he says, " The
Scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses' seat : all things, there
fore, whatsoever they bid you, do and keep ; but do not
ye after their works : for they say and do not." Now I
say that is the attitude of a youth in transition, — and
why ? Because at another time he does what those occu
pants of Moses' seat tell him not to do, and repudiates
them on principle. They tell him to keep the Sabbath :
but he — casting, no doubt, a look on ever-active Nature
around him— replies, " My Father ceases not his work
on the Sabbath, nor do I."
Christ's attention was naturally first arrested by the
corruptions with which the priesthood had invested' the
ancient religion. He felt the grandeur that lay in that
old religion, and supposed that all it required was purifica
tion from later corruptions. It is possible that in the
ardour of this early aim he might have made the violent
attack on the tradesmen in the temple ascribed to him.
He denounces the priests for their hypocritical evasions
of the Mosaic Law. He finds them appending to the
command " Honour thy father and mother " a technical
escape from its penalty, which was " He that curses father
or mother, let him die the death." His attention not yet
turned to the law itself he attacks only their evasion:-

ITS MORNING STAR. 27
" But ye say, Whosoever shall say to the father or the
mother,- Be that an offering whatsoever thou mightest have
been profited by me, he need not honour his father or
mother." That is, a man might purchase an indulgence
for not supporting his parents by paying a sum of money
into the temple. But it is certain Christ did not continue
to believe that the established church of his country could
be so purified or expanded as to answer the needs of man
kind or represent his ideal. The time came when the
conviction was forced upon him that of all that edifice
not one stone should be left upon another. Not without
pangs was the transition completed. Those who have
known what it is to wrestle with doubts and misgivings,
who have known what it is to break the ties of love and
friendship in order to follow truth and right, can best hear
all the pathos of that lamentation that comes across the
ages, " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, that killest the prophets
and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would
I have gathered thy children as a hen gathers her chickens
under her wings, and ye would not. Behold your house
is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, ye shall
not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he
that cometh in the name of the Lord." The next
sentence is significant : "And Jesus went out, and de
parted from the temple." That was just such a heart
broken man abandoning finally and for ever the orthodox
religion of his time, as you, my friend, may have known
in your pilgrimage. VIII.
The question has long been discussed whether Christ

28 CHRISTIANITY.

believed himself to be the Messiah of Jewish prophecy
and hope. It is a very difficult question to determine
because of the conflicting theories of the New Testament
writers which so variously colour what he said. However,
my belief is that in this also his mind passed through
several phases of belief. At the time when Christ appeared
the ancient Jewish belief in the Coming Man had not
only been intensified by their subjugation, but modified :
they no more looked for the righteous Prince of Peace
leading in the Golden Age, but for a warrior overthrowing
the power of Rome. All the more, as the possibility
of successful resistance by natural or military means
vanished, had they come to rest on the hope of divine
interposition in their behalf. Exasperated and universal
as that feeling was we could not expect any ardent
Jewish youth to grow up without sharing it. Such was
the popular state of mind that no prophet or reformer
could arise without shaping his reform with reference to
the messianic idea. Theudas, Judas, Bar-kochab, and
other agitators had appeared, pretended to be the
Messiah, and fallen ignominiously when they could not
sustain the pretension. John the Baptist escaped the
ordeal by confessing that he was only the forerunner of
the Messiah. As for a" long time every religious radical
in Christendom — Fox, Wesley, Swedenborg, Channing —
have all shown eagerness to declare their faith the most
genuine Christianity, so it was felt as a necessity that
every Jewish innovator should prove that he was setting
up the only true and genuine Messiaship. This expected
kingdom might be conceived variously, but it always

ITS MORNING STAR.

involved the supremacy of the Jews over all other nations,
The enlightened Jews have long given up that notion
but it survives among Christian bibliolaters, and among
some Jewish tribes singular recurrences of the belief are
not infrequent, which show the nature of the supersti
tion. Thus in that valuable London paper, "The Jewish
World" (September 15, 1876), it is related that Ahmed
Eyub Pasha, commanding an expedition against the
revolted Beni Haschid tribes, was confronted by a Jewish
teacher named Suleiman Ishaki, who claimed to be the
Messiah, and aimed to establish a kingdom of Jews in
South Arabia with himself as Prince. The Turkish gover
nor has thrown this Messiah and his followers into prison
at Mariba, where Ishaki now remains.
This idea .of claiming Messiaship seems to have been
thrust upon Christ by his friends. After his baptism he
went about repeating the words of John, "the kingdom
of heaven is at hand," without any intimation that he
had a special part to play in that kingdom. But John
the Baptist sees him and cries, "Behold the man;"
disciple after disciple cries, "Thou art the Christ;" voices
in the crowd take it up and proclaim him " Son of God,"
" Son of David ; " until he himself seems to have been
mystified, and one day asked his personal friends who
they and others thought he really was. And when the
affirmation came that he was the Messiah, Son of the
living God, he begged they would not mention that to
anybody. In the synoptical gospels Christ never calls
himself " Son of God," and it is probable that in the old
phrase " Son of Man " he found the more rational and

30 CHRISTIANITY.

liberal side of the messianic idea which he temporarily
adopted. In one case he uses it nearly as we should
now use the word Humanity : " The Sabbath is made for
man, not man for the Sabbath. The Son of Man is Lord
of the Sabbath." That is, Man is master of the Sabbath.
The repeated desire expressed by Christ that his per
sonal followers should not proclaim him to be the
Messiah, but even keep secret their faith, is curious.
Plainly he had no personal ambition in the matter. If
he really believed himself the Messiah for whose advent
his nation looked his injunction would be something as if
a politician, trying to be elected President or Premier,
should conceal the fact that he was a candidate. It is
not impossible that in the early days of his agitation he
canvassed among his friends in private the possibilities of
a political movement, and, as a poetic radical sometimes
does now, dreamed of a reformed world in which the poor
working men around him should rise to power with their
oppressors at their feet But it is more certain that the
messianic idea was gradually translated into the larger
spirit of his mind, and merged in his final conception of
a regenerate Humanity. Utterly inconsistent with any
existing theory of the Messiah was his announcement of
a kingdom that was to come without its being observed,
a kingdom within, or, if we accept another sense, "in
the midst of" his disciples. No Jew would have.recog-
nised as messianic a kingdom not of this world  even in
Christ's sense of its being moral and spiritual. Nothing
could then have been more anti-messianic to a Jew than
that in response to his cry for a national leader one

ITS MORNING STAR. 31
should start forward with a proclamation of an invisible
kingdom, made up of meek and lowly non-resistants !
The Bishop of Manchester declares that Jesus was the
great secularist of his time, and that by his phrase
" Kingdom of Heaven " (or " of God ") he by no means
meant any region beyond the grave, but a new moral
order in the earth, and in the present. For once I can
agree with a Bishop. He pointed his comrades to the
harvest white before them, warned them against thinking
too much of the morrow, and was impatient of all talk
of a Messiah to come, and a kingdom shaped after the
patriarchal fashion. John the Baptist was Elias enough,
and the Messiah was already with them, if they were so
far liberated from tradition as to see him in a poor out
cast minister of truth, and were not like the rest looking
for a mighty Captain and Prince, in purple and gold,
with mailed hand uplifted against Cssar.
We must especially guard ourselves from adopting too
readily the terms of a report made in the interest of a
theory, and so likely to turn any spontaneous utterance
of a fervent and private moment into an official docu
ment. Thus when Peter says (Matt, xvi, 16) "Thou art
the Christ," it is probable Christ thought of his lowliness
rather than of his grandeur as he exclaimed " Blessed art
thou, Simon, for flesh and blood hath not revealed this
to thee, but my Father in heaven." The priestly perver
sion which represents Christ as then and there founding a
Church, with Peter for its pope, may well admonish us
how cold the warm words of that great heart had become
in the days of ecclesiastical strife amid which the tradi-

32 CHRISTIANITY.

tions concerning Christ were " revised in the interest of
the orthodox faith," as the prelates naively confess. It is
more probable that Jesus was simply touched by the fact
of a poor working-man turning from all the proud
ambitious notions of his race to recognise the Son of
God in a man who had not where to lay his head, simply
for the truth that was in him. Nor were there wanting
some who, long after, confronted the pomp and power of
the world with the superior greatness of a rejected and
crucified teacher who bore the secret of God in his breast.
They cried " Who is he that overcometh the world but
he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God ! " That
man had seen through all the tinsel that decorated the
seeming favourites of heaven, he had overcome the world,
who could fix, not on Caesar in his purple but on Jesus
in his poverty, as the real king of men and beloved of
God. The centuries, rolling on, have reversed all this.
We may now ask, " Who is he that yields to the world
but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?"
That man swims with the current. Were Jesus in
Christendom, and heard one name him the Messiah, he
could no longer say the compliment came not of flesh and
blood ; but to any one amid the crowd who should say
"Thou art a man, — a right and true man, than whom none
do I love more," his hand Christ must surely clasp, and
say, "Blessed art thou, my brother! Flesh and blood
did not tell you that, neither conventional opinion, nor
priest, nor your own interest; but the spirit of truth, and
patient thought. Blessed art thou ! "

ITS MORNING STAR.

33

IX.
Christ's pacific teachings, the unobservable interior
ingdom he announced, his rebuke of those who look
here and there, prove that he had advanced not only
beyond the creed and ritual of the synagogue, but beyond
the conceit and political narrowness of his nation. Dr.
Furness, who has studied the life of Jesus as thoroughly
and sympathetically as any living man, has suggested that
the spirit of submission was taught by Christ with some
reference to the condition of his country. " Accounting
themselves the chosen of Heaven, and all other nations
but as dogs in comparison, they were stung to the quick
by the humiliating consciousness of national subjection.
They thirsted for vengeance upon their Gentile masters,
and indulged in the wildest dreams of temporal pros
perity. It was the proud fierce temper of the nation,
causing it to chafe against the Roman authority, that
was sure to bring on a collision with that mighty power
by which it would be ground to powder. This Jesus
plainly foresaw. To his prophetic vision the magnificent
Temple in Jerusalem was to become a ruin, not one stone
left upon another. The only salvation of the people,
collectively and personally, was in a temper directly the
reverse, in a spirit of patience which no suffering nor in
juries could exhaust, and in a humanity that acknowledged
an example to be followed in the despised Samaritan."*
* Jesus. By W. H. Furness. Philadelphia : Lippincotr. 1871.
To this and other works of my dear friend and h onoured teacher, as
well as to his conversation, my debt has grown with time and is
larger than I can compute. C

34 CHRISTIANITY.
And it is just here that the testimony of Paul becomes
valuable. Paul knows nothing of Christ as a thaumaturgist ;
he transmits to us the moral portrait of a man charac
terized by "gentleness" and "simplicity," and one who
believed that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
Bpt it is a still more important thing that Paul, who,
above all other witnesses, bore impress of Christ fresh
upon him, should have instantly consecrated himself to
the work of uniting Jew and Gentile. The very keynote
of Christ's Gospel was to Paul that which he declared to
the nations : — Christ has broken down the dividing wall
between Jew and Gentile, slain their enmity, made their
peace, and spiritually united the sundered races into " a
new man," having access by one spirit to the one Father.
This is the Gospel which Paul declares he received from
Christ, and I cannot doubt that it represents the last
teachings of Jesus in Jerusalem.
But that, again, was by no means the voice of a
Jewish Messiah. Such indifferentism as between Jew
and Gentile might naturally have evoked from Roman
Pilate the words " I find no fault in the man," but to the
priesthood it meant utter ruin. It was the reversal of
the whole Jewish history. It was as if, in Elijah's time,
a Jew had started up to affirm that Baal was equal to
Jehovah, and both destined to be superseded by a higher
deity. It meant that presently a Paul should be preach
ing on Mars Hill with texts taken from Greek altars and
poets. The Jewish priesthood was nothing if not supreme
over all others, and their fundamental claim was that the
gods of the nations were idols.

ITS MORNING STAR. 35
Thus, then, the chief burden of Paul's ministry was
the downfall of that tree at whose root John the Baptist
had laid the axe ; and between John and Paul stands
Christ, whose life, genius, and martyrdom had made that
consummation possible, and who from the messianic stem
of Israel had flowered into a prophet of Humanity.
X.
To two great ideas, both fatal to a priesthood, Christ
fell a martyr. He was not put to death because of his
beautiful moral teachings or his pure life. There was
nothing novel in his moral teachings : his precepts can all
be found in Talmudic and other scriptures existing before
his time, albeit stated by him far more felicitously and
simplified for the popular comprehension, and his high
morality was no more original than the sunshine. His
fatal peculiarities were, first, that he taught a natural
religion, a religion written in flowers on the earth, one
with the stars in their courses. He taught men to
judge of themselves what was right. Such ideas rendered
a priesthood totally unnecessary. EVery priesthood rests
upon the assumption that they are the essential solicitors
and barristers of truth and holiness, and no man can
approach Heaven without them. This teacher of a Father
whom men could approach and love, and be loved by,
simply through virtue and faith, without any priestly
mediator, or any rite or ceremonial, was assailing the
very foundation of every temple. Do not go to churches
to pray, but to your closet ! Put no trust in tithes !

CHRISTIANITY.

Consider the lilies ; observe that sower with his seed, or
the little mustard seed from which that great tree sprang;
think of God as a father waiting and watching for the
return of his poor foolish son from a land of famine !
It was not indeed for the first time simple natural
thoughts had come to freshen the heart of the world,
but wherever they have come the successful teacher of
them has made necessary the death, gradual or violent, of
the priesthood or of himself.
But if this had been his only offence Jesus might
perhaps have escaped death, for his eloquence and
sincerity had won him. a popularity which no priest pos
sessed. But he turned the people against him when he
added to it that other fatal idea, — namely, that all their
hopes of a national political Messiah and military de
liverer were vain, that their proud temple was to be
overthrown, and their future glory to be found in frater
nising with other nations and not in conquering them.
That was more than they could stand. The' very masses
that could shout Hosanna to a son of David, preparing
to overthrow Pilate and priesthood together, were found
crying " Crucify him," when he stood as a friend of
Samaritans, a welcomer of Greeks who called on him,
and a man who had plainly found favour with the Roman
governor. The mob was lashed to frenzy when theysaw
Pilate trying to protect him.
But why should Pilate, as is recorded, have steadily
set himself to save Jesus ? Partly no doubt because he
was impressed by the grandeur of the man ; but also, it
is probable, he felt that no popular man could just then

ITS MORNING STAR. 37
serve the secular authority better than one engaged in
destroying those expectations of a coming national
deliverer — of a kind which sometimes fulfil themselves
— by substituting for them enthusiasm for a moral and
religious reformation. Nothing could have satisfied
Pilate more than that the Jews should have generally
agreed to such a King of the Jews as he over whose
dying head he wrote that title. We may indeed compare
with Pilate's inscription Christ's own outburst of wonder
when a poor fisherman named him the Anointed of God.
" Flesh and blood " could never have attested that there
lay any divine mark about that homeless helpless man.
There was something transcendental in all this, and, as
we have seen, it flamed on through the years of early
enthusiasm. XI.
Some years ago I sat with an assembly in the open
theatre at Oberammergau to witness the Passion Play.
The stage was tastefully adorned. On the curtain was a
picture of Jerusalem, with the mountains rising around it
as they rose around us. All about us were symbols of
the most ancient German religion sweetly blending with
those of early Christianity. On the stage architrave was
the Madonna holding the goddess Bertha's rose, whose
crimson symbolised a new Heart come to watch over the
humble household ; and the pelican feeding her young
with her blood : emblems now of man's long search to

38 CHRISTIANITY.

find attestations in nature of an unnatural faith, ending
still in fables ! The old sacred trees of mythology were
there, the beech and birch and pine, and the birds sang
gaily in their green branches.
The ancient symbols of faith had grown as naturally
as the trees, the heart could carol amid them like the
birds, while the blue of heaven and the blessed sunshine
' poured their warm and tender light upon them all.
But what was the figure we were presently to see
moving amid that glorious frame, and bearing the name of
Christ ! Never before then had I realised how low had
sunk the idea of that beautiful heroic soul, in the con
ventional conception of Christendom. From first to last
this Christ of the Passion Play, made up to look like the
images turned out by thousands in Italian factories, was
about as wooden as one of those images were it only
automatic. It was a mere perfunctory high priest, a
characterless effigy— no touch of humanity about him
no sparkle of feeling, no real wrath, no reality of any kind.
Not for a moment could this effect be ascribed to the
actor : he acted faithfully the conception of Christ which
had been drilled into him by the priests who manage the
affair. The Bavarians all regarded it as perfect, for not
one of them had ever dreamed of associating true and
simple human emotion or action with Jesus. They were
looking on a god, accepting every unreality as a token of
how divine he was,— so admirably unhuman ! But I will
say, even for those poor peasants, that at no time did they
evince such horror at the careful crucifixion of Christ as

ITS MORNING STAR. 39

they did when the thieves' legs were broken. Humanly
speaking, Christ did not suffer so much as the thieves.
And as to the god, — how could a few hours of physical
pain be anything to one engaged in the glorious work of
saving a world on his way to share the throne of the
universe ?
There were numbers of English people there, most of
them clergymen. I took some pains to learn their opinion
concerning the play and its chief character, and their
enthusiasm was boundless. Coming home I found that
books, articles, letters, had been written, all full of
glowing eulogies of the Ammergau Christ, and some
speculator was proposing in the Times to get up the same
thing in London. I have tried to find some one who
was shocked, to discover some criticism which should
intimate that this passionless simulacrum, who could
neither laugh nor cry nor strike back, was not the European
ideal of a man. In sooth, he was as much like a man as
the Phantasm which demanded his sacrifice was like a
god. It was the apotheosis of abjectness.
Precisely opposite in every respect to the perfunctory
conventional Christ, — with his unreal difficulties, which
he knows he will conquer, and his affectation of the sor
rows and feelings of men who must fight their troubles
with no angel or reserved omnipotence to help, — is the
man whom the gospels portray on any mind not taught
to portray him beforehand on the gospels. A man of
quick sensibilities, who can flash anger on his best friends
when they would drive off the children, and in another

CHRISTIANITY.

moment be all sunshine as the little ones nestle to his
heart. A man who can fulminate lightnings of invective
against hypocritical deceivers of the people, when his
heart is ready to break with agony for his beloved Jeru
salem. Impulsive, sympathetic, and sometimes wonder
fully prudent, with the eloquence that speaks from a deep
conviction — with authority of conviction, not that of the
scribes — so that even rude policemen sent to arrest him
return empty-handed, and say only " never man spake
like this man ;'' a man who knows the power of silence,
and then as a sheep before his shearers is dumb !
The conventional European Christ — the Christ of
Ammergau — marches on to his cross by a prescribed
foreknown path, fulfilling hard and fast theological con
ditions. The real Christ escapes whenever he can, slips
out of the hand of his pursuers, and when death over
takes him at last views it with anguish and dismay. Other
martyrs have sung at the stake ; he cries, " My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me ! "
That cry could never have been wrung from the
lips of a man who saw in his own death a pre-arranged
plan for the world's salvation, and his own return to divine
glory, temporarily renounced for transient misery on
earth. The fictitious theology of a thousand years
shrivels beneath the awful anguish of that cry. He
forsaken by God! Why he was God, says Theology,
and this was the supreme act of his divinity ! That
Christ might have known if he had been trained in the
smallest of our theological schools. But he had not that

ITS MORNING STAR. 4I

advantage. To him untimely Death brought pain and
unmitigated disappointment. It seemed the end of all
the good he could do for humanity. He at least was
not acting in a Passion Play. Again and again had
Christ tried to escape this danger, even with dexterity,
and on his trial he fenced with every art of speech and
silence. When he saw the coils of priestly hatred closing
around him, his soul was exceeding sorrowful. Death
haunted him. When a woman anointed him tenderly,
the odour reminded him of death. " She embalms me
for burial," he cries, and his very words shudder. He
meets his disciples at supper ; but when he sees and
tastes the red wine, that too suggests death : he recoils,
and cries " It's my blood ! Drink it yourselves — I'll never
taste it again ! "
It took many centuries for such ejaculations of a man
facing premature and violent death to harden into the
formal speeches of New Testament tradition, and longer
still to fossilise into sacraments and dogmas. Under
these formal dogmatic sophistications the masses of
Christendom have been so long moulded that it is hardly
to be conceived that they can ever recover the genuine
Christ, or come into contact with his spontaneous life, .
his heart, his genius. And fortunately, it is not a matter
of eternal life and death that they should. Yet we may
hope that so soon as the people have been educated out
of the degrading superstition that a man's eternal well-
being or wretchedness depend on a particular opinion
about a person who lived in an obscure age and region,

42 CHRISTIAN11Y.

they will at least be free of that paralysing fear which
has turned Christ to a graven image. And though it be
not a matter of life and death, still it is a grateful and a
noble task to rescue the memory of a great man from the
perversions and superstitions with which he has been
invested, and preserve to our human nature every token
and example of its power to rise above the animalism
which degrades and the evil which afflicts it, and ascend
to the heights of excellence and beatitude.

II

ITS DAWN.

ITS DAWN. I.

^^HRISTIANITY is about fifteen hundred years
v€3il °^' That is about the age of the completed
Nicene Creed which first combined into a
distinct doctrinal system its previously incoherent ele
ments. As an ecclesiastical and temporal power it is
somewhat older, dating from the conversion (A.D. 312)
of Constantine, who held his new beliefs mixed up with
paganism, as did most of the Latin Christians. The
name Christianity is first found used by the opponents of
the Christians — such as Pliny the Younger, early in the
second century,— but used as name for a crime not for
a system of doctrine ; as meaning that it is much later.
Although the word Christianity is not found in the New
Testament, the word " Christian," which by no means
implies as yet the existence of a system, occurs in the
New Testament (Acts xi, 26; xxvi, 28; 1 Peter iv, 16)
three times ; it is in the later books, and is used in a
sense indicating that it was a term of reproach or con
tempt directed against the believers in Christ. It is a
slang word, mixed of Greek and Latin. The efforts which

46 CHRISTIANITY.
have been made to prove by the sentence (Acts xi),
" The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch,"
that they adopted that title in the first century, while
Paul was preaching there, is disproved by the fact that
Paul warned his friends against calling themselves after
the name of Christ (i Cor. i, 12). Paul's failure to
recognise the title when Agrippa uses it was very marked.
Tacitus says : — " So for the' quieting of this rumour" (of
his having set fire to Rome) "Nero judicially charged with
the crime, and punished with most studied severities,
that class hated for their general wickedness, whom the
vulgar (vulgus) call Christians. The originator of that
name was one Christ, who in the reign of Tiberias suffered
death by sentence of the procurator, Pontius Pilate.
The detestable, superstition (exitiabilis superstitio) thereby
repressed for the time, again broke out, not only over
Judea, the native soil of the mischief, but in the city also,
where from every side all atrocious and abominable things
collect and flourish."
Looking beyond the form of Christianity to its elements,
we might follow Bishop Sherlock as he followed Augustine,
and say that Christianity is as old as the Creation, but
for the very unphilosophical character of the phrase. One
religion differs from another mainly by the outward ex
pression and body it gives to the moral and religious
sentiment. To say that Christianity is as old as the
Creation is as misleading as to say that Steam-power is
as old as the Creation, which in a sense is equally true.
Christianity represents a special embodiment and definite
application of that religious sentiment which has always

ITS DA WN 47

existed, which has been variously organised in the other re
ligions of the world ; and its history is known. Like other
religions it may be viewed in three chief aspects : i, as a
moral system ; 2, as a philosophy ; 3, as a mythology.
Our present task is to trace these several elements from
their proximate sources to their confluence and combina
tion as Christianity. II.
As a moral system Christianity is mainly Jewish. In'
saying this I do not refer to the fundamental laws against
murder, theft, and the like, which are common to all
historic religions ; nor to such maxims as the Golden
Rule, which was not only always a current Levitical rule
in Judea, but has been of immemorial use among all
great races. But the ethics of Christianity are distinctive
only as those of other systems are, that is, in those respects
in which their moral laws are not based upon the uni
versal conscience. Such unique moral laws are in any
country generally found bearing in the direction of man's
supposed duty to God, or of those actions whose per
formance is meant to bring man into favour with God.
In this respect Christianity mainly repeats the laws and
rules of the Essenes, a sect which had divided from the
Pharisees some two centuries before the birth of Christ.
We have ample information concerning this sect from
Philo and Josephus. They lived in communities, and did
not marry, — depending, not without reason as Pliny
declares, upon conversions and initiations from the out
side world for their continuance and growth. They pro-

48 CHRISTIANITY.

fessed to find a mystical, or allegorical sense in the
Hebrew Scriptures, even to the smallest jot and tittle.
A convert after undergoing a year's probation was baptized.
After a further probation he was received into full mem
bership. If a member committed a fault he was privately
reproved by the elders ; if he did not repent he was re
proved before the community ; and if he then did not
reform he was excommunicated. They placed before
every member the following eight degrees which might
be, successively and with increasing difficulty, attained.
i. Outward or bodily purity by baptism; a symbol of
which, given to each, was an apron, such as was used to
dry one's self with after baptism. 2. The stage at which
the vow of celibacy was taken. 3. Inward or spiritual
purity. 4. The banishment of all anger and malice, and
the cultivation of a meek and lowly spirit. 5. Holiness.
6. Fitness to become a temple of the Holy Spirit and to
prophesy. 7. The devotee advanced to that state when
he could perform miraculous cures, and raise the dead.
8. And finally, he who had reached such a rare degree of
sanctity and power as the seventh, would fulfil the office
of Elias, as forerunner of the Messiah. These people
lived as hermits in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, along
the shores of the Dead Sea, and in the neighbourhood of
Alexandria. They would never pray in synagogues, and
sent their offerings privately. They were non-resistants,
refused to take oaths, and forbade Essenes to go to law.
They were especially antagonistic to the Pharisees, because
these believed in the outward law without acknowledging
any mysterious sense in it.

ITS DA WN. 49

The New Testament opens with the appearance of a
great prophet, John the Baptist, whose dress and speech
are those of an Essene, and who denounces other sects
without including that Probably his movement indicated
some variations from the early Essenism; but. however that
may be, Jesus became one of John's converts, and was
baptized by him. For a time he preached the Essene
doctrines, and practised them. He did not marry, and
recognised the exalted condition of those who made them
selves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake
(Matt, xix, 12). He taught non-resistance, selling all
one's possessions for the sake of the poor, and baptism.
Presently we find him gradually taking on the appearance
of a type, rather than of a real person, — a sort of Essene
allegory, going through the eight stages : — baptism, the
anti-marriage state, inward purification, manifestations of
the meek and lowly state of mind, reception of the holy
spirit in his body as a temple (transfiguration), and
prophecy, curing diseases and raising the dead, and finally
—the eighth state, that of Elias, being awarded to John —
becoming the Messiah.
This development and process is too normal and regular
not to excite our suspicion. I have already noted (c. r)
some of the indirect and unintentional testimony in the
New Testament showing that Jesus by no means adhered
rigidly to the Essene sect. It is especially remarked that he
never baptised any one, and his direction to his disciples.
to baptise becomes very doubtful when we further find
Paul thanking God that he had baptised none. Moreover
there is a tradition of his having attended a wedding, of
D

So CHRISTIANITY.

his eating with publicans and sinners, and his disregarding
the Sabbath, all of which are inconsistent with his really
having remained with the sect even so far as it may have
been represented by John the Baptist. But we shall often
have to observe how little the individual mind and character
of Christ had to do with shaping Christianity. The
Essene moral machinery caught him up and made him
over into its model saint, to so large an extent that we
shall never perhaps know how far during life he really
followed that sect. When the system of Christianity
was finally formed we find its moral elements, beyond
those common to all religions, to be Essene, — namely,
baptism, celibacy, communism among the most holy
and sacramental communion as a relic of it among the
less holy, religious orders with initiations, secret signs
resembling those of the Essene hermits of Syria and
Egypt. There is much abjectness calling itself lowly,
and mendicancy aping self-denial. There are elders with
powers of private rebuke and public excommunication.
The becoming of temples for the Holy Ghost reappears
as ecstasy, and there are saints claiming power to work
miracles. All this represented a scheme of sanctity which
from many more primitive sources had cohered in the
Essene sect, and, through the prestige of Christ, passed
to be the inheritance of Christianity.

III.

The Christian Philosophy is much less simple as to its
sources. It resulted from a most singular interchange

ITS DA WN. 5!

and interaction at great intervals -between the Semiticand
the Hellenic minds. At some very early period the.
Greeks had derived from the Hebrews the worst feature of
their religion, — that of Human Sacrifices. This was an .
idea alien to the Aryan race from which they sprang. It
was a famous point made by Buddha against the Brahmins,
that if they thought the gods were fond of precious;
offerings they ought logically to offer their own children.
The first cases of human sacrifices among the Greeks were
sufficiently isolated to be made the themes of great poems.
The salient instance of Iphigenia, who was vowed to a
deity, but not sacrificed, — a kid having been miraculously
substituted for her, — bears in it traces of having been,
mixed from the story of Abraham and Isaac, for whom a
ram was substituted, and that of Jephthah's daughter,
whose name is probably travestied in Iphigenia. The:
Greeks, having borrowed this notion, elaborated it into
a sort of theosophic conception that the stern deities
could only be appeased by sacrifice of the most pure,..
unblemished, virginal beings, and it remained a theory and
sentiment among them long after it had ceased to be a
practical part of the Hebrew religion.
Meanwhile the Hebrews had come under Greek influ
ence, and for some centuries before Christ had gradually
been personifying the Wisdom of God. In the poetry
of the Old Testament much is said of the "Word"
of Jehovah. We find it recurring in the Psalms,—" By
the Word of Jehovah were the heavens made ; " "he sent
his Word and healed them;" "his Word runneth very
swiftly." Then we find, as I have said, "Wisdom " more

CHRISTIANITY.

clearly personified, especially in the writings ascribed to-
Solomon, — "Doth not Wisdom cry?" "Where shall
Wisdom be found ? " Wisdom speaks, saying — " Jehovah
possessed me in the beginning of his way. Before his?
Works of old. I was set up from everlasting. Then was
I by him as one brought up with him. And I was daily his
delight, rejoicing always before him." When we come to
the region of time covered by the Apocryphal books
of the Old Testament and the Talmud we find the course
of personification has so far advanced that Jehovah is no
longer alone, — that the " Word " and " Wisdom " have
Blended to form a being capable of being further identified
with the " Logos " of Plato,. which had undergone a similar
process at the hands of the Platonic School of Alexandria.
It so happened that the head of that school, at the time
of Christ's appearance, was a learned- Jew named Philo.
His great aim was to recommend Jewish ideas to his
Hellenic philosophers and friends, and, chiefly through
him, the identity of the personified " Wisdom " and the
" Logos " was already established. But it was still an
invisible ideal until that great work — the Fourth Gospel
— appeared. Who wrote that book no man knows. All
that we know is that it was written by an Alexandrine
philosopher about the latter part of the second century,
and that it had- a distinctly theoretical purpose. It was
the keystone which completed the arch formed by the
Hebrew " Wisdom " on one side, and the Hellenic
" Logos " on the other.
Next we have to consider Paul, who had imported
other ideas into the swelling mass of theory. Brought up

ITS DA WN. 53

a Pharisee, and still preserving so much of his original
belief that when accused he did not hesitate to cry " I
am a Pharisee," Paul aimed to have his idea of Christ
fulfil that sacrificial notion which he found as deeply
rooted among the Gentiles as among his own countrymen.
The deity was to be soothed by immolation of the purest
and best ; but as the world was now refined beyond the
coarse and literal sacrifice of Macarias and Iphigenias,
Christ was represented by him as such an exceedingly
pure and perfect being that he would answer as a sub
stitute for all other sacrifices, and for the human race in
all ages. This idea, coarse as it now appears, denoted
in its day a distinct ascent of the human mind above
one more repulsive.
When Paul — whose voice and theme inspired from afar
the eloquent but unknown author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews — established this point, he .had, not the slightest
anticipation of the new philosophy which was to arise
and embody itself in the gospel said to be written after
traditions received from John. But Paul did other impor
tant work towards forming .Christianity, principally by
breaking down Jewish exclusiveness, the partition-walil
between Jew and Gentile — and preparing the way for
ithe new faith to become a general religion instead of
merely another Jewish sect. When Christianity came to
,be formulated by the two great Nicene Councils (a.d. 325
.and 38.1) these elements were already prepared. The
-doctrine of the personality of the Holy Ghost has an
archaeological history too long to be traced here ; nor is
•that necessary, for, so far as its appearance in Christianity

54 CHRISTIANITY.

is concerned, we need look for its origin no farther than
the Fourth Gospel and the Epistles of Paul. Egyptian
Paganism still insisted on three gods ; Philosophy de
manded unity : the compromise was a triune godhead
The doctrine of a personal Spirit of Evil, originating in
Persia, had invested some centuries before the birth of
Christ an Assyrian angel of Accusation, — Satan, — and
he had become degraded from a retributive agent of God
into a fiend. There was no philosophy of evil at the time
to secure even the mind of Christ against this idea. And,
iiideed, however repulsive it may be now, at that period
it seemed essential to the growth of a pure ideal of God, as
infinite Love, with whom the origination of evil could not
be associated. The world was recoiling from the worship
of demons under guise of deities, and the new ideal was
secured by attributing all phenomena of evil to imps,
furies, dragons, — all of which were ultimately generalised
by Christianity into Satan, whose works it was the mission
of Christ to destroy. IV.
We come now to consider the Christian Mythology.
Under this title I include all those supernatural narratives
in the New Testament upon which Christianity rested
its authority over, and against, human conscience and
reason. I know well that there are some able men who do
not regard these miracles as purely mythical or fictitious.
They say, and it is perfectly true, that there are many
instances in history, especially in periods of religious
excitement, when men and women afflicted with disease

ITS DA WN. 55

have experienced remarkable physiological effects, and
even temporary cures, from the word or touch of an indi
vidual in whose magical powers they had faith. I, should
be perfectly ready to concede that some of the apparently
marvellous actions ascribed to Christ might be found by
analysis not subversive of natural laws. But before having
to explain them or account for them on rational or scientific
principles, it is first of all necessary to inquire whether
there be any testimony of importance showing tha't
anything of the kind was believed to have occurred by
those who must have witnessed or heard of them if
they did occur.
Now, in the case of the alleged miracles performed by
Christ, we have the very strongest evidence that he never
did work them, nor anything like them, that he never
professed to work them, that he regarded the whole
principle of miracle-working with contempt.
In the first place we have his own words, when asked
for a sign. He replies, "A wicked and adulterous genera
tion seeketh after a sign, and there will no sign be given
to it." It is true that to this is added, "but the sign of
the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and
nights in the whale's belly, so will the Son of Man be
three days and nights in the heart of the earth." But we
have reason to believe that this reference to Jonah was
not made by Christ, inasmuch as it rests only on the
authority of judaising Matthew, and, as we have seen,^
anticipates the legend of his resurrection after three days'
burial, which could only have arisen after his death. But,
it may be asked, by what right do you take one part of

to CHRISTIANITY.
the utterance as genuine and reject the other ? I answer,
simply because the writer of a gospel full of signs and
wonders would never have invented so sharp a rebuke of
signs and wonders ; but when he had to report such an
utterance he might naturally have tried to soften it by
interpolating an exception in favour of the resurrection, —
the main sign around which the believers were gathering,
— and its supposed prefiguration in the story of Jonah.
Again, in his parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Christ
represents Abraham as saying, " If they hear not Moses
and the prophets, neither would they be persuaded though
one rose from the dead." Startled they might be, but
not really persuaded of the truth as he wished men to be
persuaded who said, " Why even of your own selves
judge ye not what is right ;" who pointed men to the light
and cloud of morning and eyenimg and bade them discern
the signs of their time as they did the weather in the sky;
who chose his texts and parables from nature — the lily,
the mustard-seed, the faling sparrow.
The high improbability that a mind such as this should
have also claimed to work the very signs against which
he protested, is corroborated by the absence of any
reference to such performances in the writings of his
contemporaries. Here was Philo, who was twenty years
of age when Christ was born and who lived long after
his death. If any man had appeared at Jerusalem pro
fessing to be a Messiah and working wonders, there is no
man whom the news would reach more certainly than
Philo; yet we do not find the least allusion to such
things in any of that writer's various works. Again there

ITS DAWN 57

was Josephus, who wrote a minute account of the Jews
and their history, including the affairs of that very period.
He appeared in the first generation after Christ's death.
And yet we do not find in his work that even any rumours
existed of a man working miracles or wonders. Next we
have Clement, who, we know, wrote in the same century
in which Christ died, mentioned by Paul as his fellow-
labourer. Clement wrote an Epistle, known to be a
genuine production of the first century, in which no
allusion is made to any miracle wrought by Christ or his
Apostles. The same is true of Ignatius, about whom
there was a tradition that he was -one of those children
that Jesus took in his arms : he died about a hundred
years after Christ's birth, but left no mention of the
miracles. Both Pliny and Tacitus mention Christ and
the Christians, but neither hint that any miracles were
spoken of in their time, that is, at the close of tihe first
and beginning of the second century. And finally, there
are the voluminous writings of Paul, writings by a man
whose birth in Jerusalem was very near the period of
Christ's dearth,— if, indeed, it did not precede that event,
since in his Epistle to Philemon (about a.d. 60) he speaks
of himself as " Paul the aged." Paul does not allude to
any miracle wrought by Christ, nor to any rumour that
miracles were associated witfti his ministry, nor even
mention- the names of those afterwards connected with
such ewents. Such stories are related only in anonymous
writings called gospels, not professing (unless in one case
where we know the profession untrue) to be records by
eye-witnesses, traditions collected late in the second

58 CHRISTIANITY.

century, and by no means to be set against the works
whose authorship and early origin are undisputed. Are
we to believe that a man appeared in the greatest eity of
the East, wrought miracles, healed the sick, raised the
dead, and that all this was unknown to the chief historians
and authors of his own era, — his enemies not ridiculing
such stories, his own devoted Apostles never even faintly
alluding to them ? That is plainly incredible.
But how, then, shall we account for the Christian
Mythology as we find it in the canon of the New
Testament ratified by the Council of Carthage, a.d. 397?
Why, the stories represent only the familiar fables and
folklore of the people swarming in Greece and ,Rome
from every part of the World. Among all the miracles of
the New Testament not one is original. Bacchus had
changed wine into water. Ancient heroes and sages were
generally said to have sprung of the unions between the
gods and daughters of men. In Arabian Mythology
Abraham's birth was announced by a star. By a star
Eneas and his companions were guided from the shores
of Troy to the West. The sacred dove had betokened
to Noah the emergence of the world from its baptism
before it descended on Christ at his baptism, and in many
lands it had been the emblem of renewal, its note being
the first voice of spring. Moses and Elias also fasted
forty days. Buddha and Zoroaster were also tempted by
Evil Powers, and pursued by kings like Herod. Five or
six centuries before Christ,. Pythagoras was said to have
miraculously named the number of an enormous draught
of fishes, — a legend the more remarkable because the

ITS DA WN. 59

Egyptian Essenes closely resembled the Pythagorean
communities, and inherited many of their legends
Pythagoras had power to still waves and tempests at
sea. Elijah made the widow's meal and oil increase;
Elisha fed a hundred men with twenty loaves; the Hindoo
Saint Mugdala, giving from his little store of food to
Holy Duriasa finds that store inexhaustible ; many such
myths preceded that of the loaves and fishes. As for
opening blind eyes, healing diseases, walking on water,
casting out demons, raising the dead, resurrection, ascen
sion, all these have been the common mythologic currency
of every race, from the beginning of time to the present,
when stories of a similar kind are firmly credited by those
who put their faith in so-called Spirit-mediums.
It is highly important to understand the sources of
Christian Mythology, in order not to fall into the error
of supposing that the miraculous legends were invented
by 'the early Christians, as an intentional imposture.
Such is by no means the fact The popular superstitions
of the people about their gods, prophets, heroes, genii,
had invested hundreds of forgotten beings before they
were told of Pythagoras, Bacchus or Elias, and by the
same process they invested Christ and his mother, and
passed on to be told of the Apostles, and then of Saints
—like the first Bishop of Jerusalem, who turned water
into oil to feed the lamps; and holy Paul, to whose cave
St. Anthony came, when the raven, which had been
bringing the hermit a daily half-loaf for sixty years, now
brought a whole one ; and St. Stephen, whose dead body
restored five other bodies to life,— oddly enough without

60 CHRISTIANITY.
resuscitating itself. The mantle of myth falls from pro
phet to prophet, from saint to saint, and it represents the
love and homage of the ignorant >for the great whose
influence they feel but cannot comprehend.
It is not easy to acquit the authorities of the early
Church, as we can the common people, of dishonesty.
They encouraged what they knew were superstitions, and
added to them. However, it is fortunately of no im
portance to us to draw the line between their credulity
and their dishonesty. It is enough that we know the
pedigree of every Christian myth, and that not one of
them has any connection with Christ whatever. Only
one, indeed, was heard of in the first Century, the resur
rection of Christ. Of that Paul had heard, and his eager
belief in it shows how ready he would flaave been to be
lieve Christ's own miracles if he had heard of them. Of
this particular miracle it need only be remarked that
Paul's testimony to it is valueless for the supernaturalist,
since, after naming those who had seen the risen Christ,
he places all their evidence on the same unsatisfactory
footing as his own. He tells us that the only appearance
of Christ to him was as to " one born out of due season,"
— which may mean the apparition of some spiritual
>ecstasy, but at any rate by no means fulfils the conditions
even of that low degree of evidence which any man's
word or belief could supply for such a fact.
The Mythology had a long time in which to gather
around Christ ; the stories were already floating about,
and the old forms they had once invested were crumb
ling or discredited. They had at least from 100 to 200

ITS DAWN. 6 1

yearsto make their way into the traditions about Christ
as we find them in the New Testament ; and in an un
critical, unscientific age that is. more than five centuries of
England. But this I would observe : the philosophy, the ascetic
rules, the mythology, which we have been tracing, could
not gather around Christ while he was a living man, nor
around his name so long as it was associated with a
personal influence. As in some countries villages gather
around extinct volcanoes and plant their vintages in the
lava which once streamed down their slopes as fire, so
it was long after the first enthusiasm kindled by Jesus
and John had cooled, and they had become chiefly
names to conjure with, that the priesthood, whose line
has never been broken, fenced in the hardened lava of
their hearts, and turned its subtle quality and lingering
virtues to their own ends. Personally, Christ's heaviest
blow was at the very principle of a priesthood. When
Christianity was formed it meant Christ's whole prestige
and popularity impressed to rebuild that very power
which he assailed and which crucified him.

in.
ITS DAY.

ITS DAY.

OR a thousand years Christianity reigned over
Europe with undisputed sway. That may be
called its Day. What power the Christian
Hierarchy held may be partly estimated by comparison
with the supremacy of our Courts of Law. The Holy
Trinity in Heaven was the symbol and authority of a
mighty engine of ecclesiastical power on earth, which
brought its force and its sanctions to bear on every nation,
throne, home, and on every man, woman, and child.
The statutes of this religious Empire consisted of the
Bible as codified in creeds, arbitrarily interpreted by
Pope and prelates, and applied by a priesthood armed
with the strength of kings and nobles, armies and navies.
That which Tacitus sneered at as a "detestable supersti
tion," had gained such ascendancy that the world saw the
last of the Caesars holding the stirrup by which a Christian
Pontiff mounted his horse — an incident which signalled
the conquest of what is now called Christendom.
It is sometimes claimed by theologians that this spread
ing of Christianity far and wide is in itself a proof of its
E

66 CHRISTIANITY.
divine origin, and of the providence that attended it.
But on this it must be 'remarked that its spread has been
surpassed by several rival religions. Mahommedanism, —
wielding the same powers that Christianity wielded, the
sword and authority of princes, — has, in a far shorter
time, gained numbers as great of people much more united
and earnest in their faith. Buddhism, without aid of the
sword, in far less time had almost doubled Christianity
in numbers. Only a hundred years ago the Wesleyan
movement was a despised revival going on in the streets
of English cities and towns ; now it is not only a very
large sect in England, but the largest in the United States.
Any one who has observed the contemporary agitation
called "Spiritualism," may see how such movements are
spread. Spiritualism in a few years has run up to millions,
where in the same length of time the Christian revival had
not won a thousand adherents; and the propagandists
of Spiritualism, having to run the gauntlet of a shrewd
sceptical age, without the power of life and death over
gainsayers, have exceeded the numerical triumphs of
Christianity during a corresponding length of time after
it possessed that power. So, the theory that the spread
of Christianity is evidence of its divine origin, proves
too much one way, for it would show a greater provi
dential favour attending other religions ; and it proves
too little in another way, for it leaves us to ask why Provi
dence has not enabled it to swallow up its rivals.
It has also been said that the trials and martyrdom of
the early followers of the crucified teacher, and those who
subsequently believed in him, are proof of the truth of

ITS DA Y. 67

that in which they believed. We are asked whether it
is possible men would undergo such sufferings for a
falsehood. To this my reply is, that most of those
martyrdoms took place before there was any system
rightly called Christianity in the world. In those primi
tive days, before Christianity ascended the throne of
Europe, the believers were humble people who were con
fronting proud established religions, such as Christianity
itself afterwards became. They did then have truth
with them — at least far higher truth than was embodied
in the pagan systems against which they were rebelling.
That truth sustained them, filled them with enthusiasm.
It does not, however, prove that there was not with their
truth much admixture of error. When Christianity after
wards spread through Germany and Britain, it had to
propagate itself with fire and sword; and many thousands
in these Northern nations were found as ready as the
early believers in Christ to undergo martyrdom for the
sake of their gods and goddesses— a fact which raised an
inscrutable problem before the early Christian zealots
themselves. Our ancestors had to confront the alterna
tives, " Be baptised or burnt ;" and though many were
baptised many others were burnt, or slain by such refine
ments of torture as having vipers thrust down their throats.
But all that does not prove that the pagan martyrs died
for the truth. Nor does Christian martyrdom prove that
the beliefs of the sufferers were true.
Christianity never numbered a fourth as many martyrs
as were sacrificed by itself when it came into power.
These martyrs were not only pagans but heretics from its

68 CHRISTIANITY.

own ranks. Indeed, its constitution from a society of
voluntary adherents into a great compulsory authority,
denotes the fact that it gained and preserved its long day
of rule only against the protest of many honest minds,
which it was necessary to crush.

II.
Nevertheless, Christianity did prevail, and it is now
open to us to analyse the sources from which its power
was fed.
i . Popular Ignorance. There was no printing-press, no
school : the masses could not read. The few books in
existence were monopolised by the priests. For untold
ages the training of the people had been in gross super
stition, an endless instruction to make themselves as blind
as possible, and to follow priestly guides implicitly, under
temporal and eternal penalties. Even here, in this com
paratively enlightened country, how few are they who
personally study the laws under which they live ! How
naturally we trust all that to judges and lawyers ! How
few, again, study the laws of health, or investigate tlieir
own frames ! The great mass trust themselves entirely to
the doctors. In those early days the people surrendered
themselves even more unquestioningly to the priestly
barristers of heaven and physicians of the soul. When
Christ appealed to the people in Jerusalem, he was met
with the cry—" Have any of the rulers or Pharisees be
lieved on him? But this multitude that knows not the
law are accursed." The great crime of Christ was,

ITS DA Y.

69

" He stirreth up the people." Every such effort to
induce the masses to think for themselves was sure to be
crushed. Since the day when the man, woman and
serpent were said to have been all cursed by Jehovah
for a joint conspiracy to learn something, every priest
hood has hated all real education of the masses ; and
though in some countries they have had to yield to the
popular hunger for knowledge, they still insist that it shall
not be had except as adulterated with such drugs of
superstition as shall paralyse, so far as possible, their
ability to use it.
2. Celibacy. Abstention from marriage, though it
originated in mere asceticism, was retained among the
priesthood because it was found to be one of the most
potent means of preserving the Church as a compact
centralised system. One can hardly repress a smile on
observing how simple to Pere Hyacinthe appears his
violation of Catholic law in this particular, and how easy
he seems to think it would be for the Church of Rome to
relax its rule. The fact is, the Church began by holding
the celibacy of its priesthood in a lax way, and its whole
progress has gone hand-in-hand with increased strictness
in that law. The chief reason why the Western Church
so far surpassed the Eastern in power and influence was
because the latter did not preserve a celibate priesthood.
Lord Bacon said, " He that hath a wife and children hath
given hostages to fortune." It is certainly true. The
man of family has given hostages to his own state, to his
community. He has not his whole stake in a Church.
The Pope cannot say to that man who has an interest in

70 CHRISTIANITY.
some locality, a home where his affections are centred,
" Go," and he goeth, or " Come," and he cometh. His
loyalty is divided. He is brought under social influences
that may be far removed from those which surround the
distant centre of an ecclesiastical system. The Roman
Catholic priest has always been the trustworthy servant of
his Church, because wherever he may be in the world he
is moved by nerves that centre in Rome. He has no
other interest, no other passion, and no hope of advance
ment from any other source. Cut off from hopes of
social distinction, political promotion, military renown, or
family joys, he is thus and thus only in a position to be
absolutely occupied with the interests of his Church.
Christianity could never have reigned in Europe had it
not possessed a priesthood bound to its service in body
and soul. For this reason the Church was far more ready
to relax the rules of morality than of that which pre
vented a priest from having a legal wife and family. It
was but very slowly that the English people and clergy,
even when the Reformation began, could bear the idea
of a married priesthood ; and they were more willing to
recognise illegal than legal relations. The Archbishop
of York took an oath that he was not legally married,
though he was ; and Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury,
for a long time carried about his wife concealed in a large
chest with breathing holes in it. From the day that the
English clergy began to marry Romanism declined, not
only as a power but as a system of doctrine ; for the
priesthood was subjected to all those social influences
which make the progress of mankind.

ITS DAY. n
3. The Confessional. This institution no doubt origi
nated in the natural influence exerted by wise and sympa
thetic individuals over the humble people who came to
them for counsel or support. When this pure and simple
influence was formulated and invested with the right of
command under shelter of secrecy, the Church was able
to spring its engine upon the individual with immense
power. It was able to utilise the intimate condition, the
morbid fears, the sentiment of each man and woman. It
could ferret out secrets and turn them to strength. No
conspiracy against its authority could escape detection in
the confessional. Every sin confessed made the poor
penitent a slave. The priest had each offender in his
power, whose secret he knew ; and, if his authority in the
community were assailed, his menaced retainers were all
around to sustain the detective, who himself had no family
or any corresponding interest at stake.
4. Sanctions. Christianity possessed the right to punish
every offence or unbelief to any extent, even with death :
by this means it was able to silence all who ventured to
criticise its creeds, and to reward largely those who main
tained them with special devotion. It was thus able to
press into its service all the learning, the genius, and the
arts of the time. By killing off all men of ability who
would not submit, the Church was able to cover its walls
with admirable pictures of the torments awaiting all who
did not obey it, and the bliss of all who did. It had
skilled orators who could artfully defame all other beliefs
than its own, and scribes able to bring out of the Bible
just what the Church desired. The masses were thus

72 CHRISTIANITY.

fettered not only outwardly but inwardly ; each was trained
from the cradle to believe that the same hand which Pro
vidence had empowered to bind him or her on earth
could bind them also beyond the grave to all eternity.
5. The Prestige of Christ. While Christ was on earth
the common people heard him gladly. He had taken
their side against an oppressive priesthood ; he had taken
his lot with the poor and the outcast ; he had appealed to
what was deepest and best in every man ; he had treated
women with respect and even the sinful with affection.
He had taught the divine love to those who had heard
only of an angry and jealous Jehovah. He had uttered
many beautiful discourses and parables, bringing the
highest truths within realisation of the lowly, whereas
previously they had been speculations confined to
philosophers. He had been transmitted from generation
to generation as an ideal type, in whom were embodied
the wisdom, gentleness, and peace for which all hearts
longed. Christianity added to this much that was calculated to
influence the people powerfully. It made a new Christ.
It represented him as a deity who, moved by compassion
for the poor who were all under sentence of everlasting
tortures, laid aside the splendour of his celestial abode,
descended to the earth ; assumed the form of an humble
working man, a carpenter ; became the very poorest
of the poor, having not where to lay his head ; suffered the
most ignominious death, voluntarily; — all this for the
sake of mankind, and in order to save them from eternal
anguish. To this end, they alleged, he had founded a

ITS DAY. 73

Church to represent him, and any disobedience to that
Church was base ingratitude to a Saviour who had un
dergone so much for human advantage.
Fictitious as this representation was in every par
ticular, it was very effective. In the first place it made the
masses more contented with their poverty. It was a con
secration of pauperism that the best man ever born was
the poorest. Various sentences of his also could be
quoted levelled against riches. It was very important
o the Church that the people should be willing to
part easily with the fruit of their toil, and that they
should be satisfied with the least part for themselves.
For the Church itself must be rich : its treasures belonged
to the king of heaven.
Another thing fostered by the pathetic pictures of
Christ's poverty and low position, and also by his patient
submission under suffering, was a kind of abject and
spiritless character among the people. They were
thoroughly tamed. They thought of themselves as worms,
and any idea of having rights or trying ' to obtain them
could never arise, so long as the meek, self-sacrificing,
unresisting, peasant of Nazareth was pictured on every
Church wall and in every sermon as the type of what God
demanded every human being should aspire to be.
It will thus be seen that the thousand years of
Christian sway implied innumerable populations bound
hand and foot, mind and body ; that its long day of
power was a long night to the mind and heart of Europe.
But there were holy stars watching through this long
night. Christianity could not entirely quench the pure

74 CHRISTIANITY.
flame of Christ's heart, and still less could it arrest that
steady evolution of humanity and religion which is the
unwearied eternal providence.

III.
In judging the tree by its fruits I must affirm my
conviction that the fruits of Christianity, though not
altogether evil, were preponderantly evil.
The chief root of its evil was that it taught mankind
that their supreme duty is to believe certain propositions ;
and that the very worst sin man or woman can commit
is to disbelieve those propositions. The motto of
Christianity was : " The Church has a remedy for
every sin except heresy." Higher than morality, con
duct, or character, was set this unquestioning submission
of the mind to creeds. Now, it may be said that a
man's belief determines his conduct and character. But
that is not true. Some philologists say that the word
believe is one form of an old word meaning to Move ; but,
if so, "belief" and "belove " long ago parted company,
and, at any rate, the kind of belief which the Church
has all along demanded has been an assent apart from
performance. If we examine the creeds for which it
demanded belief we find that they have little or nothing
to do with a man's character. The Apostles' creed has
no word about duty. The Athanasian creed opens by
saying, "Whoever will be saved, before all things it is
necessary that he hold the Catholic faith," and it goes on
to recite the Catholic faith, - namely, the Trinity, the

ITS DAY. 75

deity of Christ, and his coming to judge the quick and
the dead. It anathematises those who confound the
persons or divide the substance of the Trinity. Out
of about 700 words in it one sentence has a vague
reference to conduct, in that it says that they who have
done good shall go to everlasting life, and they who
have done evil to everlasting fire ; but the force of even
this one sentence is broken by the definition of belief
in the mysteries of heaven as necessary for salvation
" before all things." The Nicene Creed does not even
mention good and evil deeds ; it anathematises only those
who deny the eternal deity of Christ. But a man cannot
live the Trinity. He cannot reduce the eternal procession
of the Holy Ghost to a way of loving his neighbour as
himself. I once heard of a venerable lady who said
Total Depravity was a very good doctrine if it was only
lived up to ; but even she, I fancy, would find difficulty in
living up to the uncreate co-eternal subsistence of the
Three Persons. The Nicene creed declares its objects
of worship incomprehensible. The Church declares its
doctrines and sacraments mysteries. Belief in them
therefore cannot be an intelligent belief: it can only
amount to assent, or an admission that a thing is true
without any real grounds for believing it true. That kind
of assent, without knowledge of the thing assented to,
must be either superstition or hypocrisy. The result of
this kind of teaching is that the name of Jesus became
the label of Jesuitism, and that another name for false
hood; that intellectual veracity was denounced as a crime

76 CHRISTIANITY.

and scientific men compelled to renounce on their knees
their actual knowledge; and that by such means as
these reason was dishonoured, research discouraged,
dishonesty fostered, and both the moral and intellectual
progress of mankind seriously retarded.
A cognate evil was that Christianity was from the first
based on the notion that the great end' of man was to
give pleasure and benefit to God. Its theory was that
God was profoundly concerned to have certain creeds
believed and rites performed, and would be disturbed and
enraged if not so satisfied. It was discovered long ago,
and became a political maxim, that the obj ect of all govern
ment is benefit of the governed; but the Church persisted
in holding the good of man subordinate to the pleasure of
God. And as the Church identified itself with God it
made its system not a means but an end. The result
of this error was that man was freely sacrificed, holocausts
of men burned and massacred. Christianity carried fire
and sword among Jewish and Mussulman races to such
an extent that it has become a symbol of violence and
discord, under which no religious unity can ever be
secured. It has successively alienated Science and
Humanity. Under these tremendous doctrines and mysteries, raised
up as the chief thing, such things as pertained to every
day life shrank to insignificance. The Methodist- still
sings, O tell me no more
Of this world's vain show.

ITS DA Y.

IV.
But let us consider, on the other hand, what advantages
it secured. First of all, notwithstanding its horrible doctrine of
human depravity, it gave man some conception of the
grandeur of his own nature. It taught the people to
believe in their own immortality. The humblest mother,
as she looked upon the babe in her arms, saw in it a
soul whose existence would run parallel to the existence
of God. No doubt that great light cast many shadows.
There was joined to it those pictures of Heaven and Hell
which powerfully stimulated selfishness and fear. It also,
to a large extent, projected beyond the grave devotion
and enthusiasm of which this world ought not to have
been defrauded. But at that time there was need that
mankind should attain a profounder sense of the far-
reaching issues of human life and the eternal dignity of
human nature, and such was one effect of that doctrine.
In the next place it conferred some dignity on labour,
and on the toiling class. The Church acknowledged a
carpenter for its founder and a fisherman for its first
pope. It preached a kingdom to which the humblest were
to be admitted along with the greatest. The Church did
not practice as it preached : it allied itself with princes
and nobles to crush the masses into serfs : but it could
never quite undo its faith by its faithlessness, and it
advanced the idea of human equality.
Along with the many evils it inflicted on woman, evils
from which it must be long before we can recover, it did,

78 CHRISTIANITY.
as I think, awaken some reverence for that sex. I do not
mean that it surpassed other religions in this : all religions
indeed have had their Madonnas and Holy Families ; but
the ideal of womanhood consecrated by Christianity in
Mary was purer and more tender than that previously
prevailing even in Europe. I am indeed putting the matter
in its very best light. It can never be forgotten that
Christianity took away from Woman, both in Rome and
in Germany, the legal and political rights which have
never since been restored to her. Yet with all this, there
is little doubt that the exaltation of the Madonna miti
gated the stern sway of such gods as Jehovah, Jupiter, and
Odin ; that it preserved the beauty and grace of the
goddesses, while adding graciousness, humility, and the
love that endures ; and that it taught rude and warlike
nations that it was noble, not weak, to be loyal to the
sentiment and moral genius of woman.
These appear to me the only religious and moral bene
fits by which we can offset the evils wrought by Christianity.
With regard to other kinds of benefit it has, I know, been
the fashion to credit that system with the learning— such
as it was — preserved and acquired during the middle ages.
But in truth the evolution of the world simply went on
beneath and through the terrible oppression which it
brought upon the human mind ; it went on despite the
system, not because of it. Christianity destroyed no
popular superstitions. It did not deny the existence of
pagan deities, but merely degraded them into devils, and
left them to haunt the world even now as goblins and
imps. What pleasant fables were told of the gods were

ITS DAY. 79

transferred to its own saints and angels. This has proved
indeed an incidental advantage to Comparative Mythology,
which can now gather up the myths of European pagan
ism from the lives and legends of the saints; but the
Church would hardly accept the thanks of Science for
that, if offered. In its Day of Supremacy no great man
or cause arose against which the Church did not fight.
It burnt the best books in the street, and the best men
at the . stake. It encouraged Art, and pictorial Art it
may almost claim to have created. Because the picture
had to be to the people what the Bible and all other books
are to us to-day, artists arose who painted the- Bible, and
the legends which made the chief literature, with every
circumstance of beauty and impressiveness. Yet though
the Church so inspired it also preverted Art. Its great
painters have left us endless biblical scenes, holy virgins,
and saints, but failed to transmit to us, with any fulness,
the life and scenery of their own times. Christianity built
grand cathedrals, but beggared the homes of the people
for them. The most we can say for it is that it was the
best thing attainable in its time ; that it was a necessary
phase or chapter in the history of the world ; and amid
all its immediate evils cherished some vital germs whose
growth involved its own dissolution.

IV.

ITS DECLINE.

ITS DECLINE. I.

HERE are excellent persons who cannot yet hear
such a phrase as " the decline of Christianity "
without feeling scandalised. They wish it to.
be considered that it is a false, spurious Christianity
which is disappearing, or has disappeared, but that there
is a true Christianity which is advancing to take its place.
Such may be assured that I do not believe the religion,
virtues, and ideas which they label Christian are declin
ing ; in a further chapter are presented my reasons for
thinking that such religion, virtues and ideas can not be
justly described as Christianity in any sense ; at present
I speak only of Christianity as it is interpreted by
the vast majority of its adherents. And this, I maintain,
has already declined. Its name preserves popularity, but
only because the real substance of its power — belief in
its dogmas and sanctions — has passed away, and it has
become by verbal fiction associated with the enlightened
sentiment of the modern age.
By consensus of all great Christian sects, whether
Roman, Eastern, or Protestant, the fundamental doctrines

84 CHRISTIANITY.

of Christianity are — i, the Fall of Man ; the corruption
of his nature, whereby every person has incurred the
penalty of eternal anguish ; 2, the Vicarious Atonement
of Christ ; who by his sufferings and death satisfied the
Divine Law, and opened a way of escape from the
penalty and anguish to all who by faith accept the benefit
of his sacrifice ; 3, the deity of Christ ; which alone
could have made his atonement satisfactory in lieu of the
whole human race; 4, the publication of this danger,
and the plan of redemption, in an inspired revelation,
authenticated by miracles ; 5, the eternal blessedness of
all who accept and believe this plan or scheme of salva
tion, and the everlasting torment of those who reject and
disbelieve the same.
The various Christian sects may severally demand
more than this, but, with unimportant and largely out
voted exceptions, they all hold these dogmas as essential
to Christianity. And these dogmas, I affirm, have had
their day and declined ; and I affirm that only because
I believe it can be proved.
Now, to what tribunal are we to look for the verdict
upon any system of belief ? So far as it is a philosophy
we must look to the philosophers ; so far as it is a
cosmogony we must look to men of science ; so far as
it is a system of morality we must look to the daily
life of mankind. If we seek to know whether the Gnostic
philosophy has passed away we look among contemporary
philosophers to find if it is held by any school or thinker;
if we inquire whether the Ptolemaic cosmogony survives,
or the Mosaic, we look to see if any astronomer believes

ITS DECLINE. 85

it ; and if we find none of those who best understand the
subject believing those systems, we recognise them as
having declined, even though thousands of the unlearned
should be shown holding notions traceable to them. We
may appeal to a popular jury when the question arises,
not whether such systems are true, but whether they are
popularly believed.
But further, we must be certain that our tribunal is
not only competent, but impartial. A judge cannot sit
in his own case. Thus, in the case of Christianity, there
are many learned men who advocate it ; but because they
are advocates — because they wear the uniform and badge
of retained and feed religious attorneys — we can not
agree that they shall be judges. The clergy and the
ministry as a body must be ruled out ; they have too
much at stake. Why, what would become of them, their
churches and chapels, their livings, their prospects, and
their credit, if it should suddenly be made known to all
men that all they have been preaching is a consistent
mass of errors ? The majority of them are, no doubt,
sincere : but self-interest, the long habit of looking mainly
at one side, and steady training in opposition to the other
side, are influences for casuistry too powerful to be
matched by the best intentions. And if in the ranks of
those who oppose Christianity it can be shown that they,
too, have some interest that may prejudice them, let their
names also be struck off. It would, indeed, be difficult
to prove that any man can have as much temporal interest
in opposing a wealthy and powerful conventionality as in
supporting it; but, nevertheless, in order that our verdict

86 CHRISTIANITY.

maybe Unquestionable, we must have no special pleaders,
no faintest interest that can sway the exact balances of
Reason.

II.

Now, how many metaphysicians believe in the total
depravity of human nature ? How many philosophers,
how many anthropologists believe in the utter corrup
tion of the mind and heart of man? How many of
such believe that this universal moral villainy could be
inherited, to say nothing of its originating in the eating
of an apple thousands of years ago ? How many ? Not
one. I do not speak of the past, but of the present ;
it is my contention that, though this system may once
have commanded the assent of thinkers, it is now dead
to them. And I may equally demand the page written
by any living writer on ethical, or legal, or religious
science, or philosophy, in which is defended the idea
that the human race is pardoned on condition of the
physical sacrifice of an innocent being. And where is
the author of our time who defends the wild notion of
an eternal punishment— a punishment without end, and
consequently without purpose— inflicted on millions for
a sin they did not commit, and who have not even de
termined their own existence ? These unnatural dogmas,
if proved at all, must be proved by unnatural events.
Such events are, of course, claimed; but what is the
verdict of historical criticism upon their evidences ? What
is the verdict of science upon their character? They
have fallen beneath criticism. They are utterly discarded

ITS DECLINE. 87

by those most competent to deal with questions involving
the uniformity of nature.
Thus on every fundamental point, Christianity, as a
creed or philosophy, is discarded by the Grand Jury
of thought and knowledge in our time. Among those
whose competency and whose disinterestedness we know
Christianity is without a distinguished defender. There
are indeed eminent men who call themselves Christians,
and who write eulogies of Christianity without dealing
with its substance. Mr. Gladstone, for instance, praises
Christianity ; but we do not find him ever arguing the
truth of its dogmas. He never tells us his opinions on
human depravity, vicarious atonement, and eternal hell-
fire. But he does let us know what he thinks of the
anathemas uttered by both Bible and creed on all who
reject those dogmas : he has recently selected the leaders
of heresy and theism for honourable mention as exception
ally good men. Such is the ablest living champion of the
Church. On Sunday he repeats that the eminent heretics
shall, without doubt, perish everlastingly : on Monday he
writes to the "Contemporary Review" that they are
excellent and spiritual men. Christianity says no man
can be saved but by faith in the atoning blood of Christ.
Mr. Martineau says he had rather be lost than saved in
that way. Mr. Gladstone holds up Martineau as one of the
most religious— Christian !— teachers of our time. That
is what his Christianity amounts to. But where is any
better defence those dogmas are receiving at present in
any part of the world ?

88 CHRISTIANITY.

III.
When we turn to consider Christianity as a moral
system, we may be content to accept the verdict of the
great masses of the people. We cannot indeed accept
the popular opinion as to the philological accuracy with
which this or that virtue is called "Christian;" but we
may look to them to declare, not by words, but by actions,
whether the moral demands, the moral standard, the
maxims and sanctions of Christianity are such as are good
to restrain evil, promote good, and to command life. In
that remarkable little book entitled "Christianity a
Refined Heathenism" — written, it is said, by the Rev. Mr.
Pulleyn, who was a minor Canon of Salisbury Cathedral,
but was sent off on an expedition to the North Pole,
to keep him, I suppose, from writing uncomfortable books
— a Hindoo offers to become a convert to Christianity
provided a clergyman can find a single man really living
the life of Christ. The clergyman seeks vainly for a long
time, but finally finds the man, as he thinks, in a poor
curate who passes his time in praying before the altar of
a small church, and who catches a disease, of which he
dies, in visiting the sick around him. But even he did not
follow Christ, for Christ resisted the established Church
and priesthood of his time, and this poor curate sup
ported both. In fact, the Hindoo made a perfectly safe
offer. There is not a sane man or woman in England who
fuffils the duties prescribed in the New Testament. Do
these people around us turn the other cheek when one
is smitten ? Do they refuse to go to law against each

ITS DECLINE. 89

other ? Do they give the thief another garment when he
has stolen one ? Do they decline to resist evil, and let
scoundrels have it all their own way ? Do they never ask
return of him who has borrowed of them? Do they
love their neighbours as themselves, and sell all they
have to give it to the poor? Do they have all things
in common ? Do they believe their friends and children
are totally depraved, and treat them as such ? These in
structions, we are told, must be taken in their spirit, not
literally : so a Socinian may justly say, but who, believing
them the words of a god, can claim that they require
modification by man ? But do the people — do Christians
—obey even their spirit ? Is it in Christ's spirit when if
a man has taken our cloak we give him the cat ? But
does this people, or any people, credit' Christ's plain
affirmations about a future life? Do they lay up no
treasures on earth, but only in heaven ? Do they live
among their neighbours as if they believed that the
millions around them were destined to be tortured in
everlasting fires? Do these smiling crowds show the
horror, the anguish, which such belief would inevitably
bring every moment to a heart of ordinary humanity ?
If these things be right, then is there still none that doeth
good — no not one !
It matters not what compliments to Christianity may
be upon the lips of the people if belief of it is not in their
hearts, and if their daily lives and actions prove that its
morality is unreal to them and impracticable ; and that
not because it is too high for them, but too low —the
survival of ascetic and fanatical systems, which, as com-

go CHRISTIANITY.
bined, could never have been practiced in any age, and
were certainly not practiced by Christ.
John Robert Downes is now (1876) in a London
prison for really believiftg the Bible. In that book he
read : " Is any sick among you ? let him call for the
elders of the church ; and let them pray over him,
anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord ; and the
prayer of faith shall save the sick and the .Lord shall
raise him up." Here could be no question of interpreta
tion : St. James' prescription is perfectly plain. It was
placed in the hands of of Downes by Act of Parliament,
as the infallible Word of God. The poor man accepted
it in good faith, followed it devoutly where his little
daughter lay ill : the child died. Downes is punished
for not having followed the course of Asa and called in
a physician, even though the Bible says Asa died because
he took to the physicians instead of to the Lord. Simple
minded Downes ! you are in prison, but you have laid bare
the hypocrisy of Christendom !
Thus, whether we listen to the conclusions of Science,
Philosophy and Literature on the philosophy and the
authentication of Christianity, or whether we listen to
the voice of the people, as uttered in actions that speak
louder than words, we receive a cumulative verdict that
Christianity has a name to live, but is dead.

IV.
tt remains for us to inquire why Christianity has
declined.

ITS DECLINE.

91

i. Christianity tried to crush Reason, and to arrest the
progress of Science. When it arose there were flourishing
Schools of Science in Egypt and in Greece. There was a
very important School of Jewish philosophers in Alex
andria. The extent to which Professor Tyndall finds the
theoretical Science of to-day germinating in the works of
Lucretius, the high rank still accorded to Aristotle, to
Plato, to Pliny, and others, show that important- investi
gations into the nature of things were going on before
the Church arose. Seneca writes of magnifying by glass,
of refraction, and prismatic colours, the regular course of
comets, and central heat of the earth, in a way that
harmonises to a large extent with modern Science.
Pliny writes similarly about electricity, and he says that
Tulhis was killed while trying to bring down lightning
out of a cloud, — an experiment in which Numa seems to
have anticipated Franklin by some 2,500 years ! Lucan,
writing before Christ, mentions similar experiments. The
Phoenicians had advanced Chemistry, many nations
metallurgy, and our recent discovery of toughened glass
is the recovery of an art mentioned by Pliny.
Against all this research Christianity set itself. Because
the schools of Philosophy were not interested in the new
Jewish movement, even Paul denounced Science. He
talks about the carnal mind. He says that his work is to
"cast down reasonings" and bring "every thought
captive into the obedience of Christ." (2 Cor. x. 5.)
We find presently Tertullian boasting that the humblest
Christian mechanic knew more than all the sages of
Greece ; and in his picture of the Day of Judgment,

92 CHRISTIANITY.
that chief sponsor of Christianity exclaims that he will
admire, laugh, exult, when he sees "So many sage
philosophers blushing in red hot flames with their deluded
scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the
tribunal not of Minos, but of Christ !"
Christianity having thus taken the side of ignorance
against learning, fought hard for its dark fortress ; but it
could not nail the climbing stars ; it succeeded only in
making the ascent of knowledge counterpart of its own
decline. The best minds grew restless. The Inquisition
of Toulouse came into existence in 1229 to prevent
inquiry : it ordered all heretics to be buried alive. The
utmost fury of the Church was poured out on the Jews,
because they maintained with logic and learning their
simple monotheism against the Church. They were
tortured and burnt in vast numbers. ' Some monks in the
1 2 th century pretended to have found on the sepulchre
of Jesus a letter from heaven demanding the immediate
conversion of the Jews, and as they would not be con
verted the Rhine ran red with their blood. In Spain
the Inquisition put to death over 300,000 heretics. All
of which implies that though the Church offered up some
millions of thinkers to its dark deity Ignorance, — its sole
protecting providence, — yet with all that it had to wane.
There appeared finally a man who invented type — the
priests said he did it in league with the devil — and from
that time the reign of darkness and terror began to
decline. 2. Christianity has declined because the piety it tried
to cultivate was inharmonious with refined and high

ITS DECLINE.

93

sentiment. Its God, demanding blood for his satisfaction,
its hell, its devils, were all coarse and revolting. It was
hard to worship such a deity. The Church in its ferocity
imitated its God very closely. The result was that really
refined and spiritual minds began to form themselves into
little fraternities and orders, in which they might con
template purer ideals, with something like masonic
secresy. A vast deal of quiet heresy went on in the
Church, without any doctrinal promulgation, of that kind
which finally disclosed itself in Tauler, Madame Guion,
Fenelon, and others. A long history, not likely to be
written, preceded those quietists and mystics. Carlyle
has derived from old chronicles this significant incident of
550 years ago. In the year 1322 the Markgraf Friedricii
of Misnia, having returned from his wars, and while his
country was reviving under peace, was entertained at
Eisenach by a dramatic representation of the " Ten
Virgins." It was performed by the clergy and their
scholars. " But," says the chronicle, " when it came
to pass that the Wise Virgins would give the foolish no
oil, and these latter were shut out from the bridegroom,
they be^an to weep bitterly, and called on the saints to
intercede for them ; who, however, even with Mary at
their head, could effect nothing from God; but the
Foolish Virgins were all sentenced to damnation. Which
things the Landgraf seeing and hearing, he fell into a
doubt, and was very angry ; and said ' What then is the
Christian Faith, if God will not take pity on us, for inter
cession of Mary and all the Saints ? ' In this anger he
continued five days ; and the learned men could hardly

94 CHRISTIANITY.
enlighten him to understand the Gospel. Thereupon
he was struck with' apoplexy, and became speechless
and powerless : in which said state he continued bedrid
two years and seven months, and so died, being then
fifty-five." This stern mediaeval warrior, dying broken
hearted at his first realization of the divine cruelty, was
forerunner of the old mystics from Tauler and Thomas-
a-Kempis who came soon after him, to Behmen and
Swedenborg, all fleeing from the hard barbarous theology
as from a City of Destruction, and taking refuge in the
sweet illusion that every text and creed meant something
precisely different from what it said. Madame Guion had
her vision of one whom she met bearing a pitcher and
a furnace, wherewith she would quench the flames of hell,
and burn up Paradise, in order that God might be loved
without fear or hope of reward. Fenelon was caught
up with the same longing for a God of Love as his
friend (Madame Guion), and for this he was with her
persecuted by Bossuet and others. The Pope (Innocent
VIII.) said, " Fenelon's fault is too great love of God ;
his enemies' fault is too little love of their neighbour."
Fenelon was degraded and exiled for preaching divine
love, without making enough of demoniac terrors ; Tauler,
a Kempis, Zwoll, Bohme, all who aspired to a sweet
mystical piety, were persecuted by the Church, though
now it is ready to claim their piety and genius in its own
credit. There is nothing more subtle, more all-pervading, than
the influence that flows forth- from a pure exalted human
being; and when that influence is found more potent

ITS DECLINE. 95

outside of a church than inside it, and when a system is
such that it has no place for that influence, — has to degrade
its living in the name of its dead saints — knows nothing
better to do with a Fenelon than banish him, — why it is
pretty certain that the candlestick of that Church is
removed out of its place.
3. Another main cause of the decline of Christianity has
been the antagonism between its moral system and the
laws and needs of human nature. All that was unique in
the moral code of Christianity was based not on the actual
wants of man but the fancied needs of God. Certain old
notions inherited from a distant past that God was jealous
of human pleasure and required sacrifices unrelated to
man's moral advantage, had become embodied in the
system. Jesus warned those around to go and learn
the meaning of the saying "I desire not sacrifice but
only charity," but they never did learn the meaning of it ;
the vast majority do not know the meaning of it yet ; and
so the Church proceeded for ages on the principle that
the more happiness man or woman gave up the more was
God pleased. The primitive Church was as hard, dismal,
unlovely as any remote Scotch town on a Sabbath.
But gradually, in the course of centuries, human nature
conquered it.
Thirteen hundred years ago a handsome young man
left the world and went to live in a tomb. That was his
and the Church's idea of being Saint, and he was
canonised as St. Benedict. There in his tomb he had a
dream of a maid to whom he had been betrothed, and in
his horror at such a sinful dream he rolled himself in

96 CHRISTIANITY.

thorns until his body was bleeding at every pore. The
jungle of thorns was thenceforth regarded as sacred, they
were carefully cultivated, and people went there from all
parts of the Catholic world to acquire sanctity by piercing
themselves with thorns. But seven hundred years later
St. Francis d'Assisi, he who used to preach to the birds
as his sisters, went to visit the spot ; he saw some
monks lacerating themselves amid the thorns; he went
away and got some roses and planted them in front of
the thorns. The monks then began to attend to the
roses; nay, gradually they left the thorns to wither,
cultivated the others, until after a time no thorns
remained but roses only. Just seven centuries the lesson
took, that a rose is as sacred as a thorn ! The story is a
fair type of how human nature steadily conquered the
dismal asceticism and thomworship of the Church. The
asceticism lingered only in nunneries and monasteries ;
the people and their priests together mingled in dances
and festivals. But all this meant the decline of Christianity,
which in its essence was opposed to joy, opposed to
marriage, and overshadowed life with apprehensions for
the present and terrors of the future.
Puritanism, both in Germany and England, attempted
to revive the old asceticism, but they are going the same
way. Their ugly Sabbath is departing; their dismal
temples are being adorned; their rigid exactions of
human nature are being relaxed ; but all of these features
of liberalism are contrary to Christianity,— in plain dis
cord with its dogmas, which teach horror of this world
as a thing accursed, horror of human nature as corrupt,

ITS DECLINE. 97

and the fearful apprehension of fiery torments awaiting
us all.

V.

These are a few of the many causes which superinduced
the decline of Christianity. Those causes mastered the
Church as it existed before the Reformation. The dis
covery of printing, and the speedy diffusion of the Bible,
shattered the Church ; but each of the many sects which
started up under the Reformation repeated something of
the same kind, as it were, in embryonic phases. An effort
was made to cast human life again in the old Syrian
moulds prescribed by the Bible, and by Christian tradi
tions. The whole world judaised. But it has been with
the same result. Christianity in its Protestant forms has
tried to renew some things that the Catholic Church has
unlearned by long and costly experience. It came into
sharp collision with the needs of everyday life, with the
pursuit of wealth, with the enterprise of the world. It
is now taught to a world that cannot believe, and cannot
practice it. The reality of it has passed away. Its
name now represents only the effort of a lucrative insti
tution to survive into and through a civilization built up
point for point against its protest and its errors. That
effort may continue for a time, but it is hopeless.
There is a Scandinavian fable which illustrates the
subtlety of those forces which bring death to a thing
leaving it for a little the form and semblance of
life. Mimir, the craftsman, was challenged by another
craftsman, Amilias, who boasted that he had made

98 CHRISTIANITY.

a suit of armour which no stroke could dint, to
equal that feat, or own [him the second smith then
living. Then Mimir forged a sword so fine of edge
that it cut a thread of wool floating on the water.
Dissatisfied with that, Mimir broke the blade to pieces
welded in red hot fire for three days, tempered it with
milk, and brought out a sword that severed a ball of
wool floating on the water. But still the edge was blunt
to Mimir : he returned to his smithy, and worked in
secret, and by means unknown to any but himself he
fashioned the sword Mimung. And now Amilias, encased
in his impenetrable armour, sat down in presence of
assembled thousands, and bade Mimir strike him. Mimi-
struck with his sword ; the blow was noiseless ; after it
the craftsman who had been struck merely remarked that
he felt strangely. Whereon Mimir said, " Shake thyself."
Amilias did so, and he fell in two halves, never to swing
hammer more. This may be originally the fable of a
giant iceberg, smitten by a sunbeam, parting asunder;
but it is the history also of the spiritual sunbeam
whose touch may seem to leave some great error un
harmed, when the first agitation will reveal that it is
cloven asunder, — dead.

ITS AFTERGLOW.

ITS AFTERGLOW.

SALIENT characteristic of this century has been
the effort to restate Christianity in some way that
would secure it from that hard collision with the
best tendencies of the age into which Catholicism and
Calvinism alike had brought it. When Independence was
born in America a hundred years ago, it recognised
instinctively the foe of Liberty ; it launched its bolt straight
at the throne of Christianity, destroying its authority in
civil government, affirming that the true society could
only be built up in freedom from its interference, in
direct reversal of the assumption of ages that all govern
ment and civilisation must be based upon it. When that
Republic entered upon this century, its progress was already
sufficient to justify the brave free-thinkers who founded
it. Every people of the old world knew, every priest
knew, that free and happy societies were growing up in
the New World, with order, arts, and education, unfettered
by the ecclesiastical systems and creeds which had so long
pretended to carry with them the favours of Heaven. The
present Archbishop of Canterbury once defended the

102 CHRISTIANITY.
union of Church and State in this country, by pointing
out that in America their severance had naturally led to
the growth of Socinianism. It was a very ingenuous argu
ment, and has the advantage of being true. Liberated
from all disabilities imposed on free inquiry, no longer
bribed by the social or pecuniary endowments of an
established creed, the human mind found in America its
first opportunity to prosecute freely and fully those reli
gions, revisions, and criticisms which gained a certain
embodiment in Unitarianism. This movement is to be
distinguished from all the radicalism and iconoclasm of
France, England, and America which preceded it, and
conquered for it the liberty under which it could grow.
It was, in both England and America, a movement in the
interest of Christianity, not against it. The Unitarians
believed that the common theology represented not real
Christianity but its abuses. They were encouraged in this
belief by the important discovery that the great central
dogma of all the churches — the Trinity — was totally un
founded and unscriptural.
An earnest, honest and learned criticism, turned during
the last generation to the work of searching out the
genuine text of the New Testament and its real sense,
has amply justified the misgivings of the Unitarians as to
the scriptural authenticity of the dogmas of orthodox
Christianity. The task crowned by the splendid discovery
of the Codex Sinaiticus by Von Tischendorf and the
invaluable critical labours of that scholar, maybe regarded
as nearly complete ; and the pious frauds of fifty genera
tions are nearly exposed. A story is told of a clergyman,

ITS AF TERGL 0 W. 103

who, in conversation with a Unitarian fellow-traveller
urged against him the text of the Three Heavenly Wit
nesses. " Is it possible, " said the Unitarian, " that you
do not know that the text is a forgery?" "Well, yes,"
replied the clergyman, " but I didn't know you knew
it." That candid clergyman had but attempted to carry
on in an age when it is not so safe the old priestly plan
of theologically manipulating the Bible while that book
was reserved for the clergy's exclusive inspection. Porson
ninety years ago pointed out that no Greek MSS., but
only the Vulgate, had anything about the three witnesses,
and so expunged from every honest Bible the only text
that even faintly suggested a Trinity.
It has now been proved that it is equally by fraud that
the idea of the incarnation of God in Christ has been
imported into the New Testament. For those who have
not at hand Von Tischendorf's last revision, and Dr.
Davidson's introduction to his own excellent translation
of it, I may here mention the more salient instances in
which the readers of the English version are deceived
with regard to the sense of the New Testament on impor
tant points. In Col. ii, 2, " God, even Christ,"—" Christ "
is a gloss. In Rom. ix, 5, we have the phrase " Christ
came, who is over all God blessed for ever;" the word
" came " has been supplied by the translators, a period has
been withheld where usage renders it natural ; and the
true reading is : " Whose are the fathers, and of whom is
Christ after the flesh. God, who is over all, be blessed
for ever. Amen." In Titus ii, 13, usage equally requires
a comma to divide two parts of a sentence skilfully

104 CHRISTIANITY.
welded together : instead of " The glorious appearing of
our Great God and Saviour Jesus Christ," the comma
which would have certainly appeared in an undoctrinal
text makes it the " appearing of our Great God, and of
our Saviour Jesus Christ." In Luke xxiv, 5 1-2, the words
stating that Jesus was " carried up into heaven, and they
worshipped him " are not genuine. In Phil, ii, 6, instead
of Christ's being said to have " thought it not robbery
to be equal with God," the rendering is he " did not
think equality with God a thing to be grasped at." In r
Tim. iii, 16, "God was manifest in the flesh "has been
made out by an ingenious change of the Greek os (who)
into ®eds (God). How far the English translators were
parties to such frauds we cannot tell, though we must
suspect that they knowingly perverted some important
texts, — e.g., 2 Tim. iii, 16, where "Every scripture
inspired by God, is profitable " is made to read that " all
scripture is given by God, and is profitable." Those
translators excluded from their work the ablest Hebrew
scholar of the time (Broughton) whose honesty was too
pronounced ; and it is not a happy augury of veracity in
the coming revised translation, that the friend of Von
Tischendorf, the learned and incorruptible Dr. Samuel
Davidson, should have no part in it.
The dogmas of a Trinity and the co-eternal deity of
Christ being discovered to have been impositions on the
Bible, the general authenticity of the book has been
weakened. But while the earlier Unitarians maintained
the inspiration of the book, they saw that the most
momentous dogmas were not so clearly stated in it, that

ITS AFTERGL OW. 105
one need give them entire credence. There were texts
for them, indeed, but also texts against them. Some of
these dogmas were morally repulsive, — such as atonement
through the blood of Christ, and the eternal and
physical character of Hell, — and when Christianity was
relieved of these it presented a very different aspect.
V/hen the more deforming dogmas were removed many a
long hidden treasure was revealed. The beautiful dis
courses and parables of Christ, his pure life, his heroic
fidelity, his martyrdom, acquired an impressiveness which
they could never possess while they were all merely inci
dental — at best ancillary— to the awful and mysterious
doctrines by which alone it was said, men were to be
saved from eternal anguish. It was inevitable that the
system should be seen and judged apart from its worst
corruptions. This necessity appeared in various countries,
and, leaving now the sectarian embodiments of it, we
may say that there flowered out of the most living branch
of Christendom what is called Liberal Christianity. This
is the Afterglow of that day which has set,— sequel of the
thousand years in which the system in its ecclesiastical
and dogmatic forms had ruled, and then reigned, and
finally declined. II.
It would be difficult to set too high an estimate upon
the learning and industry which have been brought to
the task thus briefly described: inestimable has been
the light cast upon the life and character of Christ, and
the history of his time. No dawn ever broke from the

106 CHRISTIANITY.

East more resplendent than that with which the research
of the West has flooded the East itself. But as it has
proceeded one thing has become increasingly plain,
namely, that Liberal Christianity is no real dawn at all,
but a brief Afterglow.
It began to waver almost as soon as it arose. Thus,
when it was discovered that the Trinity is an unfounded
dogma, the question had to be met ; what, then, is the
real teaching of the New Testament concerning Christ ?
The Bible is not Trinitarian, but is it Unitarian ? Cer
tainly not, that is in the ordinary sense of that term.
The New Testament writers have various views of Jesus :
one believes him the Jewish Messiah ; another believes
him the personified creative energy of God; another
thinks him a mysterious divine emanation ; but there is
no warrant in that book for believing Jesus to have been
merely human in his nature. No mere man would have
said " My father is greater than I," or " I am the resur
rection and the life." Then the New Testament is full
of miracles, which cannot be denied without tearing the
book to pieces : especially do all the hopes held out by
it to believers centre in the bodily resurrection of Christ
from death. Now all these things were as shocking to
reason as the dogmas of God's wrath and hell-fire had
been to moral sentiment. To men who had begun to
think, there was something repugnant in this idea of a
deity working through a secondary personage, and some
thing inconsistent with simplicity and nature in the idea
of primogeniture introduced with the notion of a specially
favoured, beloved, or only-begotten son of God. So the

ITS AFTERGLOW. 107
next step had inevitably to be taken, This was to impeach
the accuracy and authority of the record, to claim that it
was written after popular tradition by superstitious men,
each with some theory to support ; and yet hold that
there is reflected in it the wisdom and greatness of Christ
with sufficient clearness to constitute the essence of a
religion. It was still maintained by some, and is now,
that even after the miracles are gone, and the super
natural authentication of both Bible and Christ gone,
and Jesus stands simply as a good and wise man, and a
martyr, there may yet remain a system of Christianity
worthy to be maintained and extended as the right
religion of mankind.
In all this one thing was clear, namely that some motives
were at work, whether consciously or not, beyond love of
truth, to induce men to hold on so pertinaciously to the
Christian name after it had ceased to represent a living
and credible thing. These motives have been abundantly
displayed in recent controversies. Some of them are
very poor indeed. To one, Christianity seems to be a
kind of spell, the very name having become a fetish. I
do not know that such are to be held responsible for
their word-worship, for ages of superstition have cast the
mould of their brains. But argument would be wasted on
them. They are like those who gather at Rome around
the Bambino of Ara Coeli, the little effigy of Christ said
to have been carved out of an olive-tree on the Mount of
Olives, and painted by St. Luke : even now some devotees
believe that the security of pontifical Rome depends on
that very ugly Bambino, though it was that which dis-

io8 CHRISTIANITY.

gusted Gibbon as he looked upon its worship, and led
him to write the history which was one of the first blows
that weakened not only the pontificate but Christianity
itself. Others hold on to Christianity because it is a name
to conjure with. He who drops it loses what is called
politely prestige, so called by persons who do not reflect
that prestige is a foreign word meaning deceit. Though
we reject the authority of Christianity as a history and
a system of truth, we must keep up the name for its
popularity ! This is too much in the vein of Mephisto
pheles who advises Faust to " take care of words, and
leave things to themselves." We need not consider his
advice, nor that of those who praise Christianity for
the sake of the people, when they know that the word
means to the people a totally different thing from what
it means to them. Others hold on to the word for political
reasons. Great national interests have become bound up
with the Christian religion, and they think these can be
preserved only so long as the name lasts ; so they wish
us to think as we please, but only call our thoughts Chris
tianity. But we may feel pretty sure that any interest
which rests upon so transparent a falsehood will have to
find a better basis, or else fall, some time or other, and
it may as well be now as at any other time. It need not
stand on the order of its going ! And the same may
be said to those who dread the moral consequences upon
the masses of their discovery of the long deception which
has been practised upon them. The greater danger,
surely, will arise from trying to continue the deception
after it has been exposed. When the time came in Rome

ITS AFTERGLOW. 109
when two soothsayers could not meet each other with
out laughing, Rome had not much farther to go before
her fall. And we find much the same state of things
here, when eminent clergymen are driven to apologise
for calling themselves Christians, and others smile at creeds
they are under oath to preach.
Somewhat more honourable, but still quite fanciful, is
the motive of those who hold on to the Christian name
because they think it necessary in order to preserve the
continuity of our religious development. They maintain
that though the England of Charles I. is very different
from the England of Victoria, yet there is a national
continuity preserved with the old name and the old flag ;
and so, they maintain, the evolution of religion must go
on under the old Christian name and its symbols. Even
were it admissible that religion should be compared with
a national life, there is a fallacy in supposing that the real
continuity of a nation depends upon a name or a flag.
Under various names,— Britain, Albion, England,— under
many flags, this nation has preserved its continuity and its
greatness. Even in a nation, continuity is just the thing
that cannot be broken. It is like the individuality of a
man who, though he may pass under a pet name in his
childhood, a nickname in his boyhood, a family name in
his youth, a title in his manhood, is the same man
through all. But apart from this, we contend that it is
the peculiar glory of a religion that it is not national,
nor even ethnical, but human. Unless the absurdity be
contended for that Christianity represents a world-evolu
tion its continuity can only mean the self-righteousness of

no CHRISTIANITY.

a, group of nations or races* in which case the theory aims
a blow at that continuity of the Religion of Humanity,
which a miserable sectarianism denies. Humanity cries
out in our age, "While one says, 'I am of Buddha,'
another, 'I am of Mohammed,' another, 'I am of Christ,'
are ye not all sectarian and self-righteous ? "

III.
I know that the men who hold the Christian name on
this fanciful theory of " continuity " are not consciously
sectarian ; but however broad or human they may be in
dividually, their tribute to the religion of a single race is
finally delivered into the hands of the narrowest form of
their religion,— the form in which it is understood by the
masses, and maintained by all Christian priesthoods.
Some years ago the noble Garibaldi, by his heroism, won
a magnificent victory for the freedom of Italy from Papal
tyranny, against the will of his king, who was held fast by
his master in France, Napoleon III. who, in turn, was
pledged to uphold his master, the Pope, and not allow
the King of Italy to invade his dominions. But when
Garibaldi gained his victory, and all Italy was filled with
enthusiasm, the king of that country was unable to sup
press him, or to restore the conquered province to the
Pope, because of the people. But the thing was managed
in this way. A very liberal Italian minister negotiated
with Garibaldi to deliver the advantage he had won info
his highly liberal hands. Garibaldi could not doubt that
in the hands of such a liberal minister the cause would

ITS AFTERGLOW.

be safe. But when the minister received it, he gave it to
his master the king ; the king gave it up to his master the
French Emperor; the Emperor gave it up to his master,
the Pope ; and thus the grand achievement of Garibaldi
travelled through all the degrees until it strengthened
.the very tyranny at which his blow was aimed. It is very
much the same with the great achievements for freedom
of modern Christian liberalism. Some great rationalist
wins his province for freedom, and delivers it up to Uni
tarian Christianity, where its negations are left, and its ad
missions seized by Nonconformists to reinforce orthodoxy,
or the Broad Church steals its fire to give a new lease of
life to the Established Church. Thus the rationalist who
consents to call himself a Christian, in the very proportion
that he is able and eminent, is sending fresh power to
prop the throne of superstition. Whatever Christianity
may mean at the apex, at the base it means certain gross
superstitions and horrible dogmas ; those it will represent
to the masses ; but how can the ignorant be delivered,
when it is competent for any priest or preacher to tell
them that such and such great scholars and thinkers are
Christians? "What!" cries the preacher to the poor
working man, who begins to doubt the horrible dogmas
" do you think you know more than Professor Newman,
who has joined an organisation for 'the promotion of the
principles of Unitarian Christianity,' or than Martineau,
who admits Christianity to be true, or more than Dean
Stanley, or Bishop Colenso, Dr. Jowett, and other great
Christians ?" The preacher is suppressing truth, suggest
ing falsehood : no one of the men he names believes the

CHRISTIANITY.

Christianity which he is imposing on that working man :
yet it is those great men themselves who, by using a title
cf double meaning, enable the double-tongued to forge
from their reputation new chains for the human mind.
Nor can they prevent this result so long as they profess
belief in Christianity. All their refined qualifications,.
their textual criticisms, their philosophisings about con
tinuity, and the rest, have no relation to the common
sense and daily life of mankind. And it is most wonder
ful that they do not see that a religion which requires
all those "ifs" and "buts," and requires critical com
mentaries in order to be made true, is thereby disqualified
from being a faith for mankind. It is an infatuation to
think that a religion can be real to masses of men which
is anywise dependent on ancient Hebrew and Greek
books, or upon the scholastic criticism and metaphysics
of this or any other age. IV.
Consider the various theories that have arisen under the
Afterglow. One says, " Christianity means love to God
and love to man. Christ himself says, On those two
things hang all the law and the prophets." But, we ask,
how about Christ's other sayings, that men must be saved
by believing on him, and if they do not believe on him,
must go into eternal despair, where the worm never dies,
and the fire is not quenched ? Oh, they argue, Christ
doesn't mean that ; he means something else than that :
he means the fire will be quenched, the worm will die.
Very possibly. No doubt examination of the original

ITS AFTERGL OW, 1 13

Greek, and a long drill in exegesis and hermeneutics, Will
enable my neighbour the blacksmith to find that the texts
must be modified But he may wish a religion adapted
to a poor man who doesn't know Greek, and who, if he
is to depend on authority at all, will naturally depend, not
on ours, but that of the sect in which he was born.
Another theorist tells us that Christianity means the
" Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man." But, We
urge, Christ several times repudiated that brotherhood,
declared that the Jews were chosen above all races, called
the alien Canaanites "dogs," who had no right to the
religious advantages of Jews, told his apostles to have
nothing to do with the Gentiles. " Ah, but those texts
occur in doubtful books, and they don't mean what they
seem to say." Very likely not, I answer; but how can
you maintain before the uncritical masses that Christianity
teaches human brotherhood, when the only books they
have about Christ make him teach the contrary, and when,
the whole history of Christianity shows its representatives
hating and killing others in its name ?
Then a third comes forward to affirm that the life and
character of Christ were perfect, and that these supply the
basis of a credible Christianity. What man needs is a
perfect human and divine type, and Christ is that. But
where do they find such a Christ ? They have to evolve
him from their inner consciousness, or by elaborate com
parative criticism, for certainly no such being is plainly
reported in the Bible. The Christ of the New Testament
is obviously egotistical and fanatical. He attacks with
physical violence persons engaged in an honest calling,

H

ii4 CHRISTIANITY.
and injures their property ; he denounces his neighbours
as vipers and children of hell; he believes in ghosts,, devils,
and. in eternal fires for a portion of the human family. If
we turn from that Christ to another aspect in which he is
represented, he is equally a type of character which no
man would wish his son to imitate. Unresisting even
to abjectness, asserting his own perfections to such an
extent that his meekness becomes affectation, telling us
himself that he said a thing merely for effect, decrying
the world, denouncing the rich, denying the affections,
even turning away with contempt from his mother and
sisters, we see in this other Christ a type of character
perfunctory and spiritless. Now, understand, I do not
believe in the least that such were the real characteristics
of Christ ; I believe that the various types of character
ascribed to him would be impossible in any one man, and
am' quite sure that they are mere sectarian theories,.
asceticisms, fanaticisms of the time personified, and called
by Christ's name for the same reason that people still call
their little schemes and schools Christianity^— that is,
because the name carried weight among the people they
wished to conciliate. But though we can by elaborate
criticism relieve Christ personally of most of these faults
and find a great heroic man there (though no model) it
can only be done by abandoning Christianity in any
conceivable shape. For if we deny that he is responsible
for the gross demonology and violent conduct ascribed
to him, we are left without any record of his virtue which
may not be equally denied. So soon as we found a system
on hira we challenge such denial from rival systems. It

ITS AFTERGLOW. 1 1 5
is dishonest to go through the New Testament and put
everything you like on one side, and all you dislike on
the other, and say one parcel is true and the other false, -
That is using false weights and measures. Where would
science be if men of science decided on the facts of
Nature by their preferences, and a man were permitted
to discredit a discovered law because he had a distaste
for it? What should we say of a judge who should
charge a jury to believe so much of the evidence as they
found it comfortable to believe? This kind of dis
honesty, scorned everywhere else, is even the general rule
in theological discussion. This is proved by the fact that,-
Christians, even liberal ministers, do not hesitate to label
all the virtues "Christian," — Christian charity, Christian:
liberty, and I wonder they do not say Christian gravitation
and electricity, — when they know that there is not one:
moral law or maxim of Christianity which was not the
common currency of all great religions before the birth
of Christ. Nor do they hesitate to speak of pagan dark-,
ness and heathen idolatry as if other religions monopolised
ignorance and superstition, while Christianity monopolised
the excellencies and the light. All of which; is dishonest,
and immoral. Christ's assault on them that sold doves is,
as much a part of the Bible as Paul's chapter on charity.
Mohammed's chapter on charity is as much a part of his
religion as his paradise of pleasure. Men have no right to
take their own system at its best and that of others at its
worst. V.
Such injustice, such unfair glozing over of difficulties;

n6 CHRISTIANITY.
are the signs of a system in decay. No longer able to
live by fair means it has recourse to means not fair. There
are painful indications that the Afterglow is following the
plan of the dogmatic day which preceded it, trying to pro
long itself artificially by deliberately discouraging honesty
of research. The Unitarians of England and America
have done their utmost to make Christianity consistent
with truth and freedom, but they have shown that it is
impossible. If I apply to the Unitarian Association they
will admit me only under a rule that makes me say I am
a Christian. It may be a falsehood, but they will not
investigate that ; or it may be that my Christianity would
be of that kind which would burn a freethinker as Calvin
burned Servetus, and yet I shall be admitted ; but if I
frankly say, "I believe in God and in immortality; I
love Christ and regard him as the best and wisest of men,
and yet I do not think it honest to say I am a Christian,"
— then the fundamental law of their organisation excludes
me. By so doing they encourage me to tell a lie. Every
young liberal offered their aid and sympathy on condition
of pronouncing their shibboleth— " Christianity " — is en
couraged to shape his faith to suit his interest. So all their
professed liberality, all their publication of the works of
dead radicals like Parker, cannot atone for the daily and
hourly wrong they inflict on the living by dishonouring
the principle of veracity and fidelity, by rewarding
compliance with their creed, and punishing, however
indirectly, the independence which will not pronounce it.
Theodore Parker did not find it his duty to disown the
Christian name ; but there are others who do find it a

ITS AFTERGLOW.

117

duty to do so, and among these the congregation he
founded, and nine-tenths of those who knew and sym
pathised with him while he was living. These believe,
however mistakenly, that they represent a tendency of the
religious life of our time. What cheer has Unitarianism for
these? The English Unitarians have an honourable
history, and no page of it is brighter than the last; but
they can retain what they have won only by following up
their advance. They have reduced the ancient chain on
thought to one link — the Christian name, — but that,
unless broken, will increasingly preserve in it all the
galling intolerance of the links that are destroyed.
The painful warrior, famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foiled,
Is from the books of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.
A fundamental rule declares the object of their Asso
ciation (all the world can judge them by) to be " promo
tion of the principles of Unitarian Christianity ;" under
it all the Brahmos of India, with Sen and Mozoomdar, all
the Theists, Jews, rationalists,— George Eliot, Carlyle,
Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Thomas Scott, Kalisch, Miss
Cobbe,— are excluded. And this is the religion of love
to man,— of Fatherhood and Brotherhood !
No, it is the mere Afterglow of a Religion, preserving,
even in its faint ghostly light, enough of the semblance of
the old dogmatic day which has set, to remind us of the
essential errors by which Christianity has perished. It is
not within the power of any mind, however ingenious, to

n8 CHRISTIANITY.

liberalise Christianity so far that it will include all human
ity in an equal embrace, — Jews and- Gentiles, Hindoos,
Mohammedans, Buddhists — and draw no line against any
man's convictions.
Nor is it yet in the power of any to frame any definition
of Christianity, however liberal, which will not rest upon
the fatal figment that our race culminated religiously in a
small superstitious tribe of Syria over 1800 years ago.
We may progress in science, literature, and the arts;
but in religion progress ended in Palestine, and the highest
civilization must always look backwards, not forwards, for
its highest light, truth, and life !
It is on the ruins of that sectarian wall between man
and man, on the grave of that retrogressive superstition
that Religion now takes her stand to wait and watch for
the morning.

VI.

THE MORROW.

THE MORROW. I,
HERE is a fallacy, surviving even among
educated people, as a vague feeling, that
there is some causative connection between
Christianity and the higher civilisation of the chief
nations which profess it This, we know, is the main
argument of the missionary: he confounds the oriental
man by claiming all the science, literature, and arts of
Europe as the fruits of Christianity, thereby compelling
all of our men of science and culture — though denounced
for materialism here — to sanction the dogmas which our
sects are sending out there.
It has been already pointed out that there was reflected
in Christianity a more refined type of woman, and a
higher recognition of her moral influence, by reason of
its ideal Madonna, than existed in the European religions
which it superseded, though under those woman had
larger political rights ; also that it held the germs of a
higher political regime in its doctrine of the equality of
souls before God ; and it taught the dignity of labour in
its theory that Christ was a poor mechanic. But it would

122 CHRISTIANITY.

be a serious error to suppose that such ideas are con
tained only in Christianity. Other and earlier religions
have their Madonnas, and their deities incarnate in
humble forms, and taught human equality ; and if any
¦other of those religions had happened to get the mastery
of Europe the same ideas would have been selected out
of them. It is race, time, circumstance, which keep the
same ideas dormant in one place and develope them in
another. These determine religious forms, immeasurably
more than religious forms determine them.
As proof of this -we have only to consider the condition
¦of Christianity among other races than our own. Forty-
five years ago a young man who had graduated with the
highest honours at Oxford, filled with zeal for the spread
¦of Christianity, went as a missionary to Aleppo He
lived there and in various regions of the Ottoman empire,
where he could fully compare those of his own faith with
Moslems. There were Christians of all kinds and degrees.
The letters written home by that earnest and orthodox
missionary were published in 1856,* and I fear the book
is now out of print. He found that the animosities of
the Christians to each other rendered them helpless
before the united Turks, and yet that the Turks were
anxious to reconcile the Christians — Greek, Roman
Catholic, Syriac, and the rest— to each other. While
conscious of a desire that Turkish Government should
be overthrown, the missionary sees no chance of a

* Personal Narrative, in Letters, principally from Turkey, in the
years 1830-3. By F. W. Newman. London: Hojyoake & Co. ,
Fleet Street. 1856.

THE MORROW. 123

worthier successor, " no mark in the Christians of higher
qualities." They are " neither strong nor wise nor
ingenious nor active-minded." The Turks leave to them
freedom of the press, yet the Christians have no books
and their intellects were wholly uninstructed. He says
that the missionaries there have to leave the Turks and
try to convert the Christians. He and the other zealous
missionaries with him shrank from the native Christians
as "dangerous and faithless allies," and finally they
relinquished the idea of building a church there, and
came home disheartened.
This is the testimony of one who when he wrote it,
and for some time afterwards, was a Christian zealot-
Professor Newman. It shows that low races find their
barbarism harmonious with Christianity while advanced
races are crediting it with their civilisation.
The Nestorian Christian will kill a man if he works on
Sunday. He finds in the book given him as the Word
of God as ample warrant for his barbarism as an English
man can find in it for his civility. And just the same is
true of all other religions.
Mohammedanism, which among Turks turns to a cruel
superstition, once blossomed in Persia to a beautiful
mystical religion represented by the finest literary age
known to Asia.

II.

Professor Newman has related in another work
("Phases of Faith") the impression made upon his
mind by a Mussulman mechanic who, having listened to

124 CHRISTIANITY.
his instruction, remarked that while the English seemed
to be superior, in everything else, they certainly did not
possess a true religion. The devout Oxonian Scholar
returned to England with that humble workman's word,
and it was a seed cast in the mind of the sower who went
forth to sow, among the many which have since borne
fruit a hundredfold.
That Mohammedan laid his hand upon the fundamental
anomaly of this country. We are a civilised country in
everything but one, that is- religion ; that is barbarous.
Its dogmas are derived from barbarous tribes and ages.
We do not use, their ploughs nor other implements ; we
do not adopt their science nor their arts ; but we establish
in the School and the Church their wild superstitions of a
world accursed, man vicariously depraved and vicariously
redeemed, a deity demanding blood, and a hell of fire
and brimstone. Educated people even in the Churches
confess the barbarism of these beliefs by declaring,
whenever we state them, that we are caricaturing their
faith. We quote them word for word from their creeds
and confessions ; and yet they say it is misrepresentation
and caricature. No doubt it misrepresents them-, and it
certainly caricatures civilised humanity; but there are the
Creeds in the Prayer-book, and in dissenting Confessions,
in the Catechisms taught to every generation, and any
one may read them. Whatever the educated may secretly
read in the dogmas., such is their plain meaning to the
child and the unlettered millions.
Now, why is it that civilised England teaches her people
a barbarous religion ? It is because all progress in civilisa-

THE MORROW. 125

tion must be by free comparison and selection. In Science
we compare fact with fact, theory with theory, and select
that which best explains phenomena. If a man made a
discovery in India the English man of science does not
refuse it because he was a Brahman. In Philosophy we
do not reject a statement by Aristotle because he was
a " pagan." We do not in trade refuse the products of
Africa, Japan, or any country, because they are from non-
Christian producers. And so, freely combining the select
advantages of the world, we attain a high material and
scientific civilisation. We absorb Greece, Rome, Scandi
navia, into our literature. We follow the ancient evolu
tional law of nature, which combined all animal excellences
into man, — "the sum of every creature's best;" and
which combines single races to make higher races. In
religion alone we have arrested the action of this civilising
eclectic law upon us. We have isolated our religion, re
jected all contributions and criticisms from other religions,
cut off the natural streams of influence that would have
fed and enlarged it, and compelled the law of progress to
pass on over its grave.
It is no consolation to know that all other religions
have done the same, as far as they can. It is too true.
Every historic religion has detached itself from the living
body of humanity, and made itself a mere fragment ; each
takes up its bit of the dissected map of world-experience
and cries, " behold here the round world and all that
dwell therein !" There is not a Bible of any race which
can be understood without comparison with some other
Bible which its devotees scornfully reject. There is, no

126 CHRISTIANITY.

religious prophet or teacher whose words are not made
false if he is seen in dislocation, dissociated from other
teachers of his time, and set up in rivalry to them.. All
religions in the world are now crumbling, and all for the
same reason. There is a longing for unity among races,
and their sects are sundering them. The expansion of
commerce has revealed intellectual and moral treasures
in every land : while scholars seek them, priesthoods
guard them from exportation and importation. Every
where sectarianism still stands in the way of the free
spiritual commerce of race with race, and the gathering
together thereby of the accumulated experiences of all
climes and ages, which alone can make a religious
civilisation.

III.
But observe now all the signs of our time which tell
us what the morrow must be, and what its glorious task !
Within this century the Bible Society has distributed
through the world; translated into 150 languages*
131,000,000 Bibles. Yet in a thousand years Christ
ianity has not made one million converts among those
" pagan " races who are so glad to get the Bible. Why-
is that ? Simply because the Bible is a human book for
any mind that can read it with freedom. Christianity
means that it shall not be read as a human book, nor
with freedom, but that people must read into it, or extort
out of it, certain things which will prove English sects
right and all the rest of the world wrong. But the
Hindoo, the Arab, do not want any more compulsion of

THE MORROW. \i>j

that kind They have had enough of that. That is just
the way they have been reading the Vedas and the Koran
not to find what was truly there, but what it suited their
rulers should be found there. Now this distribution of
Bibles from England gives them exactly what they need,
a great sacred literature which they can read as free reason
ing beings, under no compulsion to believe its legends or
construct dogmas out of its poetry. Those Bibles will,
in the end, liberate them from thraldom to the letter of
their own books. It will supply keys to their Scriptures,
and unseal the eyes of millions to see that truth and
beauty are monopolised by no race on earth. As for
Christ, reverence for him in the East has not had to
wait for the diffusion of the Bible. For many centuries
oriental writers have held him in love and honour as a
great and good teacher, and they have some beautiful
traditions concerning him unknown to the West. They
reject with indignation the notion that Jesus was a
Christian. The Jews know that. Not long ago I met a
Rabbi and he said to me, " Jesus was a great Jew, and
if he were to reappear in Christendom he would be in
vited to preach in all the Synagogues, and crucified in
all the Churches." With what terms of admiration do
Keshub Chunder Sen and the Brahmos, and Moulvi Syed
Ameer Ali„in his " Life of Mohammed," speak of Christ !
And yet they never dream of becoming Christians, which
would mean identifying Christ and themselves with all
the wickedness and cruelties of Christian history, and
with the vulgar dogmas of missionaries,— dogmas just as
repulsive as their own. The Bible and Christ are wel-

128 CHRISTIANITY.

corned among them as liberators : Christianity comes
tryiftg to forge both into fresh chains for them, and it is
rejected. But while the Bible Society is thus breaking sectarian
chains for the rest of the world, what is to break the
chains of the people here at home ? There are very few
readers of the Bible in this country who get at its real
meaning. It requires a great deal of comparison with
other books,— the New Testament as well as the Old.
Even if people try to read intelligently they have so long
been reading it with prepossessions derived from ignorant
preachers that every sentence reflects their own preju
dice instead of the thought that wrote it. What we need
here is precisely what they need there, namely Bibles that
we may read freely, under no compulsion to believe their
fables, nor to read out of them what is not in them, to
suit the exigencies of systems. We shall learn that in every
age and nation truth has been shining abroad like the
sunlight, and beneath it have everywhere bloomed the
flowers of virtue. We shall learn what are weeds in our
own soil by seeing the corresponding weeds,- flourishing
where we are not bribed by any interest or custom to
pronounce them flowers or fruits. The Bibles of the
world will mutually unlock each other, and a great inter
change of world-experiences take place from which
universal religion shall emerge.
I hold it a great promise of the morrow that a German
orientalist, naturalised in England, and associated with its
oldest University (Professor Max Muller), has summoned
the scholars of Europe to translate into every Western

THE MORROW. 129

language the Bibles of the world. They have responded
and are now at their work. When those books are
gathered together they who now hear only the voice . of
Syria and Greece will hear the voice of Humanity. We
shall learn that errors which have gained new vigour
in the West by being grafted on our civilisation, have
flourished in many lands ages ago, have been tried and
found wanting, and that what we have been sending
out to ancient races as divifte truth have been the extinct
fossils of their own fabulous ages.
The Morrow, then, will not take away our Bible. On
the contrary it will for the first time really give us our
Bible, by illuminating it. It will enlarge it by adding to
it the manifold Scriptures, now rejected, which make up
the canon of revelation to Humanity.

IV.

Nor will the Morrow take away Christ. It will restore
him to the World from which patristic metaphysics have
removed him. It will no longer be considered any degra
dation to call him a man. He will be seen as one of
a high and holy fraternity of seers and teachers, stretch
ing through all ages, whom no one race can claim, who
speak for universal reason and right.
Every new day must build on the work of the days
that have passed and sum them up to its larger total.
The day that has passed of every religion has been
sectarian, national; but that means also that there has
been a distribution of labour. It was not without its

130 CHRISTIANITY.
Value. Each race has given its wealth and learning to
the work of preserving and popularising its own records
and traditions to an extent Which could only have re
sulted from a belief that the whole of truth was with
them. They builded better then they knew. They
have each brought their little block of stone, under
impression that it was the whole temple, to a point where
comparative study may take it up and fit it to every
other block; that the sacred edifice of Humanity may
arise. Already we have discovered signs of the universality of
the great Teachers with which the sects of the world label
themselves so exclusively, One sign is the moral names
they bear. It is rare that any great religious founder
bears the name given him by his family, or a name dis
tinctive of his tribe or nation. Their names are titles
conferred by the moral sense and enthusiasm of man
kind. Sakya Muni lives in the ages as Buddha, — the
enlightened. The great Hindoo law-giver bears the
Vedic name Manu, signifying the Father of Mankind.
The family name Ahmed becomes Mohammed, "the
praised." We do not know the original names of some
great religious teachers,— Zoroaster, for instance, a title
variously interpreted. Nor do we know the name first
given to Christ. Jesus (meaning Saviour) and Christ
(the anointed) are manifestly titles bestowed after his
work had ended and his greatness been recognised.
Thus in their very names these men are signed with
their relation to the moral consciousness of man, and
raised out of the national into the universal spirit.

THE MORROW. 131

Another notable fact is this. The influence of the
greatest religious Teachers has been felt mainly in other
countries than their own. Not in India, Buddha's native
land, does Buddhism flourish ; the religion of Zoroaster
is almost unknown in Persia, where it originated ; neither
Moses nor Christ is the chosen prophet of Palestine.
This rule, like the other, is not invariable, but it is
general enough to verify the ancient proverb that a
prophet is not without honour save in his own country.
Nor is the reason far to seek. Partly, no doubt, it is
because no mass of people have the culture required to
recognise greatness in guise of the familiar ; but fnainly
it is because the great man always comes as a reformer,
and is brought into immediate collision with the preju
dices, priesthoods, powers of his own locality. His local
warfare is left behind when his words travel to other
regions. The Pharisees of England never dream that
Christ meant them when he rebuked their class in
Jerusalem. Garibaldi was welcomed by lords in England,
but many an English Garibaldi has been despised and
rejected. The facts show that all men hunger and thirst
for truth, and always welcome it when permitted to re
ceive it; and their rulers more readily permit it when it
comes as' foreign learning than when it involves internal
reform and schism. They also show that the power by
which the great prevail is a pure human power, detached
from local complications, freed from tribal and sectarian
paltriness. Thus the teacher whom Judea crucified
triumphed in Greece and Rome under the Graeco-Roman
name of Christ; and he did so through the force of

132 CHRISTIANITY.

another great man who cast aside his provincialism even
to his name, Saul,* and went forth to translate Jesus
from a person to a spirit and restate his. doctrine so that
it might become, in a high sense, all things to all men.
That was the culmination of Christ's true influence : it
has been already related how his spirit passed away and
his lifeless form was entombed in Christianity.
But behold a third badge of the great religious
Teachers. Each nation preserves the legends and
marvels connected with the founder of its own religion,
because it thinks that these give him an authority above
all the other prophets. But now comes Comparative
Mythology, and shows the legends and marvels to be
substantially the same. The legends of Moses, Zoroaster,
Buddha, and Christ so closely resemble each other that
they cease to give a distinctive authority to either, so far
as his teaching claims to reveal things beyond universal
reason, Jesus descended from heaven, was born of a
virgin named Mary, wrought miracles, and ascended to
heaven from the top of the Mount of Olives where
Catholics still worship his last footprint on earth. But it
was already on record that Buddha descended from
Heaven, was immaculately conceived and born of Maia,
wrought miracles, then ascended from Adam's Peak in
Ceylon where Buddhists still adore his last foot-print on
earth. Two hundred millions believe the story about

* It is possible (even though Chrysostom denies it), that Paul
was preferred not only because it was Hellenistic, but because
Saul seemed related to o-aXevew, to persecute, and Paul recalled
Itavo-ao-Ocu to protect.

THE MORROW. 133

Jesus; three hundred millions believe the same about
Buddha. And yet with the same miraculous authentica
tion one of these prophets is held to have revealed that
after death each soul passes before a heavenly Judge, and
thence to endless joy or torment ; while the other prophet,
with the same credentials, taught that at death each soul
sinks to everlasting repose, if not annihilation. What
will those oriental people think when they find from
those millions of Bibles sent out to them that the same
signs and wonders which are attesting one thing about
the future in Asia are attesting a different thing in Europe?
And what will our Christians think when they presently
have 'the Eastern Bibles and make the same discovery?
Why the light of the new day will dawn for both East and
West. They will see in the legends and fables the broidery
of the mantle which falls from prophet to prophet. Its
decoration is the hereditary folklore of the ignorant, but
it is sacred to them, and their superstitions follow only
where their hearts have gone. It is the deep homage of
the poor that they believe of Buddha all the legends told
of Vishnu, or bring their sweetest fables about Apollo or
Minerva to twine them around the brow of Christ and
Mary The legends and miracles concerning the great
personal religions, being nearly the same, cannot on the
morrow attest their several and contrarious visions ; but
all the more will those signs attest that each was in his time
and place the highest, truest man ; a true saviour of the
people about whose neck they clung; who touched the
depth of their heart and revealed its treasures ; at whose
grave women planted mystical flowers as they wept forthem-

134 CHRISTIANITY.

selves and their children ; and all transmitted a blessed
memory that gradually called around it the old fables
which had hallowed every prophet till he passed into
abstract deification, then fallen on the shoulders of the
next worthy to wear their emblem. Miracle is not God's
sign, but sign of the homage of the poor. And when this
is realised, as the morning shall reveal it, then shall each
great Soul rise from his sectarian tomb, and take his place
in the fraternity of Saviours, and each shall bring in his
arms all his sheaves from the seed he has sown in human
hearts, for the common garner of Humanity.

V.

But, ah, you say, what- will the morrow reveal to us
about God, and about immortality ? What a confession
of the emptiness of all sectarian religions that at the end
of so many ages they have left the educated world without
certainty on the very points— God and Immortality— upon
which they have concentrated their power ! So many
millions sacrificed, so much wealth diverted from man to
God and from the present to the future, only to leave us
in scepticism at last !
Of one thing be sure,— the Morrow will reverse all that.
It is plain that no more light is to be got from the sectarian
day that has set, or from its Afterglow that now fades.
Christian enthusiasm is spent. The strongest manifesta
tions of its life in our time have been Mormonism,
Shakerism, Moodyism, and Spirit-rapping, Sectarianism
has run to seed in Christendom, and just as much in the

THE MORROW. 135

religions of Asia. All our hope of new light now comes
of the liberation of the human mind in every part of the
world from these other-worldly methods which have so
conspicuously failed ; and the concentration of the com
bined energies of all the mind, heart and wealth of the
earth to the work of civilising religion and raising it to
equality with our material and scientific progress. We
have found that gazing into the sky does not reveal God,
now let us try what will come of exploring the earth, and
man, and history. The Chinese sage said to men,
" Since you do not yet know man how can you know
God ? Since you do not comprehend life how can you
comprehend death? " Some of us believe— I believe-
that eyes turned from phantom gods have caught glimpses
of a divine life in the evolution of nature, and the
mystical movement of the heart of man. Already some
have listened deep, and heard a sweet music to which
the ages keep time, and man ever marches to a happy
destiny. The universe is the shrine of Reason ; it is the
abode of Love ; it is the temple of Conscience* These
we have derived from it, and from us they shall return to
it in that perfect trust which no surrounding darkness can
extinguish, not even the darkness of the grave. But it is
with these our larger hope is ascending. We know that
Reason has hardly begun to tell its story, that Love has
been drooping in the dungeon of fear, and Conscience •
hardly awakened from the drugs of superstition. They
have yet to fulfil their career in religion which has so
long denied them. They can find their freedom and
fulness only in the unity of mankind, Of old the races

136 CHRISTIANITY.

streamed out through the earth, like pulses from the
heart of Nature, that every member of the body might
be fed from a common life ; and though member has
warred with member, still has their secret life centred in
that one heart. Now let the day of harmony dawn !
Now let member co-operate with member, and nation
say to nation, "I have need of thee ! "
What ! some may say, have these half-civilised people
in the East, who have no railways or telegraphs, any con
tribution to religion which we have need of? Ask
Philology what it has got from their languages, — from
Zend, Pali, Sanskrit, spoken there when their people
were much more barbarous. Science will enter a new
kingdom by doorway of a beetle. The very thing we all
have need to get rid of is this same conceit about our
own religious condition. There was a day when even
learned men believed this little earth Was the centre of
things : when the earth lost that conceit of its own im
portance man gained a universe. And when we feel that
Christianity is but one race's sect among others, some of
which are more important, we shall enter into a spiritual
Cosmos, under which all sects will sink and all souls
arise. All this points to the future. Christianity,
Mohammedanism, all sects, are powerless to rule or
name the coming day because they have no supreme
faith in it ; their largest hope for all coming days is that
they may duplicate the days that are gone, or carry them
backward in closer retrogressive resemblance to the Year
One of Crescent or Cross. Their most refined state
ments bring the past to dim our hope of prophets nobler

THE MORROW. 137

than theirs, to be born of the enthusiasm of Humanity.
To cast away their authority is the first essential step
towards turning our face to the sunrise. While Science,
Art, Civilisation are bending all their eyes forward, this
anomaly that religion should ever look backward cannot
last. The highest religion of to-day is to look and
labour for a nobler day.
Nor can I think that new day so distant. For this
matter the world of men means mainly all those who
think. The thinkers of the world are but thinly divided
by veils of language and tricks of expression ; speedily
will they pierce these and discover that round the
world hearts beat with one moral blood, and eyes see
by one and the same sunlight. And as thought moves
so will the most motionless masses gravitate ; and every
sect in the world be subtly consumed, through and
through by that popular disgust of bigotry and hypocrisy
which will emanate from the fairly awakened conscience
and intellect of mankind.

THE END.

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