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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Chief End of Man, by George S. Merriam
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Chief End of Man
+
+Author: George S. Merriam
+
+Release Date: August 22, 2007 [EBook #22371]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHIEF END OF MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CHIEF END OF MAN
+
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE S. MERRIAM
+
+
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+
+1897
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1897,
+
+BY GEORGE S. MERRIAM.
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+_The chief end of man,--to define it anew, and cite the witness of the
+ages, may seem an audacious attempt, likely to issue in failure or in
+commonplace.  By the scholar this work must often be judged as crude,
+to the churchman it will sometimes seem mischievous, and to the man of
+science it may appear to lack solidity of demonstration.  But its
+essential purpose is to utter afresh, though it be with stammering
+tongue, the message with which the universe has answered the soul of
+man whenever he listened most closely and obeyed most faithfully._
+
+_It is the assurance that Fidelity, Truth-seeking, Courage, and Love
+are the rightful lords of human life, and its sufficient guides and
+interpreters.  It is the knowledge that as man is true to his best self
+he finds the universe his friend._
+
+_That message the seeing eye reads in the face of earth, and the
+listening ear hears it in the song of the morning stars.  The will
+finds it as answer to its loyal endeavor.  The heart wins it through
+rapture and through anguish.  It is our dearest inheritance, it is our
+most arduous achievement.  It is the sword with which each man must
+conquer his destiny.  It is the smile with which Beatrice welcomes her
+lover to Paradise._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+      PROLOGUE
+
+   I. OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY
+
+  II. THE IDEAL OF TO-DAY
+
+ III. A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK
+
+  IV. GLIMPSES
+
+   V. DAILY BREAD
+
+
+
+
+THE CHIEF END OF MAN
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+It sometimes happens that a man is confronted by a perplexing crisis,
+before which he is quite at a loss how to direct his course.  His
+familiar rules and habits seem to fail him, and his perplexity
+approaches dismay.  At such a time, if his previous life has been
+guided by purpose and consideration, he may perhaps help himself by
+looking attentively back at the steps by which he has hitherto
+advanced.  He recalls other crises, he sees how they were met, and
+light, it may be, breaks on the path before him, or at least he takes
+fresh heart and hope.
+
+Some such crisis confronts the thoughtful mind of the world to-day, in
+the disappearance of the old sanctions of religion.  When the idea of
+an authoritative revelation of divine truth has been finally dislodged,
+there are moments when moral chaos seems to impend.  We are still
+upheld by old habits and associations, we are borne along by forces
+mightier than our creeds or negations, and the loyal spirit catches at
+moments the "deeper voice across the storm," even though the voice be
+inarticulate.  But it is felt that we need to somehow define anew the
+rule of life.  By what road shall man attain his supreme desire,--how
+can he be good, and how can he be happy?
+
+As the individual seeks help in looking back over his course, so it may
+help us if we look back a little over some of the significant passages
+in the movement of mankind.  History is to the race what memory is to
+the individual.  One's best treasure is the memory of his happy and
+heroic hours.  The best treasure of humanity is the story of its happy
+and heroic souls.  Let us call before us some of these, and see how
+they answered the questions we ask.
+
+Following this clew, we run back along the line of what may be called
+"our spiritual ancestry."  Turning naturally to our own next of kin, a
+child of New England, going back from the teaching of his youth to his
+fathers and to their fathers, soon finds before him the Puritan.  When
+we study the Puritan it appears that he was a most composite product,
+and that just behind him, and essential to the understanding of him, is
+the great mediaeval church.  Studying the church, there is nothing for
+it but to go back to its foundation, and ponder well the one from whose
+person and teaching it grew.  And to know at all the mind of Jesus we
+must know something of the mind of Judaism, of which he was the child.
+Indeed, the popular religion of to-day bases itself directly on the Old
+and New Testaments; so that our lineage must clearly be traced from
+this as one of its origins.  Another ancient line attracts us, by a
+history which blends with Judaism at the birth of Christianity, and by
+a literature which is rich in moral treasures.  We must glance at some
+of the landmarks of the Greek and Roman story.
+
+And here our present study may define its bounds.  We will not go back
+to the progress from the animal up to man, nor survey the prehistoric
+man; nor will we turn aside to the religions of Egypt, Arabia, and the
+East; and we can but lightly glance at the early Teutonic people from
+whom we are descended after the flesh.  It will sufficiently serve our
+purpose if we touch a few salient points among our more direct
+progenitors in the life of the spirit.  And, after all, our richest
+search will be in the years nearest ourselves.
+
+But no version of history simply as history gives an adequate basis for
+the higher life.  That life must be worked out by each for himself,
+equipped as he finds himself by inheritance and circumstance, and
+guided largely by the sure and simple laws of conduct which he drew in
+with his mother's milk.  Study and thought may help a little, and so
+such essays as the present are offered for whatever they may afford.
+Of all human studies, history, at its best,--the knowledge of whatever
+of worthiest the past of mankind affords,--such history is of all
+studies most delightful and inspiring, for it is the contact through
+books with noble souls--and the touch of a great soul is a natural
+sacrament.  Such history has significance mainly as its events and
+characters find parallels in the mind that reads.  The soul of to-day,
+catching from the past the voices of prophets and leaders, thrills with
+a sense of kinship.  The story of American independence means most when
+the reader has fought his own Bunker Hill, and wintered at Valley
+Forge, and triumphed at Yorktown.  The death of Socrates has small
+significance unless something in the reader's heart answers to his
+affirmation that "nothing evil can happen to a good man, in living or
+dying."  The life of Jesus and the story of Christianity are most fully
+understood when life's experience has brought the Mount of Vision and
+the Garden of Gethsemane, the cross and passion, the resurrection, and
+the coming of the Holy Spirit.
+
+The interest of the present study is in the illustration of certain
+great spiritual laws.  These are laws of which every man may make proof
+for himself.  He may find instances of their working in any close
+observation of his nearest neighbor, or in reading his newspaper.  He
+may find the clearest exemplification of them in studying the noblest
+men and women he has known, or, if his life has been worth living, in
+recalling the most critical and significant passages of his own
+experience.  The reading of these laws is the latest and finest result
+of the experience of the race.  In their substance, they are
+acknowledged by all good men.  No wholly new path to goodness and
+happiness is likely to be suddenly discovered; certainly no essentially
+new ideal of what kind of goodness and happiness we are to seek.  The
+saints and heroes are all of one fellowship, though they do not all
+speak the same language.  In a word, there are certain traits of
+character which all men whose opinion we value now recognize as
+supremely worthy of cultivation.  To seek to know things as they really
+are; to fit our actions to our best knowledge; to conform in word and
+act to the truth as we see it; to seek the good of others as well as
+our own; to be sympathetic and responsive; to be open-eyed to beauty,
+open-hearted to our fellow creatures; to be reverent and aspiring; to
+resolutely subject the lower elements of our nature to the higher; to
+taste frankly and freely the innocent joys of life; to renounce those
+joys and accept privation, suffering, death, when duty calls,--such
+purposes and dispositions as these are unquestionably a true rule of
+life.  The main theme to be illustrated in these pages is that this
+ideal and rule is in itself an all-sufficient principle.  Fidelity to
+the best we know, and search always for the best, is the natural road
+to peace and joy, the sure road to victory.  It is the key which opens
+to man the treasury of the universe.
+
+To enforce and vivify this conception,--this interpretation of the key
+of life as consisting in fidelity to certain ideals of character,--we
+go back to the memorable examples of the past.  We use those examples,
+partly to show how the spiritual laws always worked, the same
+yesterday, to-day, and forever; and partly to show how as time advanced
+the laws have been understood with growing clearness, and applied with
+growing effectiveness.  The same stars shone above the sages of Chaldea
+as shine above us, but our astronomy is better than theirs.  The sages
+of Greece, the prophets of Palestine, the heroes of Rome, the saints of
+the Middle Ages, the philanthropists and the scientists of to-day, each
+made their special contribution to the spiritual astronomy.  From age
+to age men have read the heavens and the earth more clearly, and so
+made of them a more friendly home.  Just as, too, there come times of
+momentous progress in the physical world; the establishment of the
+Copernican theory, the discovery of a new continent, the mastering of
+electricity,--so there are periods of swift advance and discovery in
+the spiritual life, and such a birth-hour, of travail and of joy, comes
+in our own day.
+
+In this hasty panorama of the past, then, the effort has been to give
+real history.  But every student knows how transcendent and impossible
+a thing it is to recall in its entirety and fullness any phase of the
+past.  Even the specialist can but partially open a limited province.
+So with what confidence can one with no pretensions to original
+scholarship, however he may use the work of deeper students, express
+his opinion on any special point in a survey of thirty centuries?  If,
+accordingly, any competent critic shall trouble himself to convict the
+present writer of error: "This view of Epictetus confuses the earlier
+and the later Stoics;" or "This account of the Hebrew prophets lacks
+the latest fruit of research,"--or, other like defect,--acknowledgment
+of such error as quite possible may be freely made in advance.  But, in
+our bird's-eye view of many centuries, any fault of detail will not be
+so serious as it would be if there were here attempted a chain of
+proofs, a formal induction, to establish from sure premises a safe
+conclusion.  Only of a subordinate importance is the detail of this
+history.  We say only: in this way, or some way like this, has been the
+ascent.  The contribution of the Stoic was about so and so; the Hebrew
+prophet helped somewhat thus and thus.  But the ultimate, the essential
+fact we reach in the Ideal of To-day.  Here we are on firm ground.  The
+law we acknowledge, the light we follow,--these may be expressed with
+entire clearness and confidence.  The test they invite is present
+experiment.  Nothing vital shall be staked on far-away history or
+debatable metaphysics.
+
+In the fivefold division of the book, "Our Spiritual Ancestry" is a
+bird's-eye view of the main line of advance, which culminates in "The
+Ideal of To-Day."  A more leisurely retrospect of certain historical
+passages is given in "A Traveler's Note-Book;" thoughts on the present
+aspect are grouped under "Glimpses;" and "Daily Bread" introduces a
+homely and familiar treatment.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY
+
+The ideas and sentiments which underlie the higher life of our time may
+be largely traced back to two roots, the one Greek-Roman, the other
+Hebrew.
+
+Each of these two races had originally a mythology made up partly of the
+personification and worship of the powers of nature, and partly of the
+deification of human traits or individual heroes.
+
+
+The higher mind of the Greeks and Romans, in which the distinctive notes
+were clear intelligence, love of beauty, and practical force, gradually
+broke away altogether from the popular mythology, and sought to find in
+reason an explanation of the universe and a sufficient rule of life.
+
+The Greek-Roman mythology made only an indirect and slight contribution
+to modern religion.  But the ethical philosophy and the higher poetry of
+the two peoples belong not only to our immediate lineage but to our
+present possessions.
+
+A humanity common with our own brings us into closest sympathy with
+certain great personalities of this antique world.  Differences of time,
+race, civilization, are powerless to prevent our intimate friendship and
+reverence for Homer, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius,
+Epictetus.
+
+Homer shows the opening of eyes and heart to this whole wonderful world
+of nature and of man.
+
+Sophocles sees human life in its depth of suffering and height of
+achievement.  He views mingled spectacle with profound reverence, sure
+that through it all is working some divine power.  Goodness is dear to
+the gods, wickedness is abhorrent to them.  But the good man is often
+unhappy,--from strange inheritance of curse, or from complication of
+events which no wisdom can baffle.  Yet from the discipline of suffering
+emerges the noblest character, and over the grave itself play gleams of
+hope, faint but celestial.
+
+In Socrates, we see the man who having in himself attained a solid and
+noble goodness, addresses all his powers to finding a clear road by which
+all men may be led into goodness.  He first propounds in clearness the
+most important question of humanity,--how shall man by reason and by will
+become master of life?
+
+Plato takes up the question after him, and follows it with an intellect
+unequaled in its imaginative flight.  Plato lighted the fire which has
+burned high in the enthusiasts of the spirit,--the mystics, the dreamers,
+the idealists.
+
+Aristotle confined himself to the homelier province where demonstration
+is possible, and laid the foundation of logic and of natural science.
+
+Lucretius resolutely puts away from him the whole pageant of fictitious
+religion.  He scouts its terrors, and scorns to depend on unreal
+consolation.  He addresses himself to the intellectual problem of the
+universe, and decides that all is ruled by material laws.
+
+In Epictetus man reverts from the problem of the universe to the problem
+of the soul.  The beauty of the Greek world has faded, the stern Roman
+world has trained its best spirits to live with resolute self-mastery.
+The mythologic gods are no longer worth talking about for serious men.
+But here is the great actual business of living,--it can be met in manly
+temper, and be made a scene of lofty satisfaction and serene tranquillity.
+
+Epictetus was the consummate expression of that Stoic philosophy in which
+were blended the clearness of Greek thought and the austerity of the best
+Roman life.  Stoicism reverted from all universe-schemes, spiritual or
+materialist, to the conduct of human life which Socrates had propounded
+as the essential theme.  The Stoic affirmed that all good and evil reside
+for man in his own will, and that simply in always choosing the right
+rather than the wrong he may find supreme satisfaction.  Epictetus
+expresses this in the constant tone of heroism and victory.  In the more
+feminine nature of Marcus Aurelius the same ideas yield a beautiful
+fidelity along with a habitual sadness.
+
+Stoicism was the noblest attainment of the Greek-Roman world.  It was a
+clear and fearless application of reason to human life, with little
+attempt to solve the mystery of the universe.  It gave an ideal and rule
+to thoughtful, robust, and masculine natures.  It made small provision
+for the ignorant, the weak, or the feminine.  Its watchwords were Reason,
+Nature, Will.
+
+
+The distinction of the Hebrew development was that the higher minds took
+up the popular mythology, elevated and purified it.  The Hebrew genius
+was not intellectual but ethical and emotional.  The typical Hebrew guide
+was not a philosopher but a prophet.  Through a development of many
+centuries the popular religion from polytheistic became monotheistic, and
+from worshiping the sun and fire came to worship an embodiment of
+righteousness and of supreme power.  An ideal of character grew up--in
+close association with religious worship and ceremonial--in which the
+central virtues were justice, benevolence, and chastity.  The sentiments
+of the family, the nation, and the church were fused in one.  Its outward
+expression was an elaborate ceremonial.  Its heart was a passion which in
+one direction dashed the little province against the whole power of Rome;
+in another channel, preserved a people intact and separate through twenty
+centuries of dispersal and subjection; while, in another aspect, it gave
+birth to Jesus and to Christianity.
+
+
+Jesus was one of the great spiritual geniuses of the race,--so far as we
+know, the greatest.  The highest ideas of Judaism he sublimated,
+intensified, and expressed in universal forms.  Indifferent to the
+ceremonial of his people, he taught that the essence of religion lay in
+spirit and in conduct.
+
+The holy and awful Deity was to him a tender Father.  The whole duty of
+man to man was love.  Chastity of the body was exalted to purity of the
+heart.  He lived close to the common people; taught, helped, healed them;
+caressed their children, pitied their outcasts, laid hands on the lepers,
+and calmed the insane.  He brooded on the expectation of some great
+future which earlier seers had impressed on the popular thought, and saw
+as in prophetic vision the near approach of the perfect triumph of
+holiness and love.  Overshadowed by danger, his hope and faith menaced as
+by denying Fate, he rallied from the shock, trusted the unseen Power, and
+went serenely to a martyr's death.
+
+
+Jesus had roused a passion of personal devotion among the poor, the
+ignorant, the true-hearted whom he had taught and called.  When he was
+dead, that devotion flamed out in the assertion, He lives again!  We have
+seen him!  He will speedily return!  The Jewish belief in a bodily
+resurrection and a Messianic kingdom gave form to this faith, and
+unbounded love and imagination gave intensity and vividness.  That Jesus
+was risen from the dead became the cardinal article of the new society
+which grew up around his grave.  His moral precepts, his parables, his
+acts, his personality,--the personality of one who was alike the child of
+God and the friend of sinners,--these were enshrined in a new mythology.
+A society, enthusiastic, aggressive; at first divided into factions; then
+blending in a common creed and rule of life; a loyalty to an invisible
+leader; a sanguine hope of speedy triumph, cooling into more remote
+expectation, and in the finer spirits transforming into a present
+spiritual communion; a growing elaboration of organization, priesthood,
+ritual, mythology; a diffusion through vast masses of people of the new
+religion, and a corresponding depreciation of its quality,--this was the
+early stage of Christianity.  It vanquished and destroyed the Greek-Roman
+mythology, already half dead.  Philosophy strove with it in vain,--there
+was no real meeting-ground between the two systems.  The final appeal of
+the Stoic was to reason.  The Christian theologians thought they
+reasoned, but their argumentation was feeble save at one point.  But that
+was the vital point,--experience.  Christianity, in its mixture of ardor,
+credulity, and morality had somehow a power to give to common men and
+women a nobility and gladness of living which Stoicism could not inspire
+in them.  So it was the worthier of the two antagonists that triumphed in
+the strife.
+
+Ideally, there ought to have been no strife.  Christianity and ethical
+philosophy ought to have worked side by side, until the religion of
+Reason and the religion of Love understood each other and blended in one.
+Destined they were to blend, but not for thousands of years.  The new
+religion brooked no rivalry and no rebellion.  It swayed the world
+despotically, but the beginning and secret of its power was that it had
+captured the world's heart.  Its best watchwords were Faith, Hope, Love.
+
+In a word, civilized mankind, having outgrown the earlier nature-worship,
+and having found the philosophic reason inadequate to provide a
+satisfying way of life, accepted a new mythology, because it was inspired
+by ideas which were powerful to guide, to inspire, and to console.  For
+many centuries we shall look in vain for any serious study of human life
+except in conformity to the Christian mythology.
+
+
+The Roman world was submerged by the invasion of the northern tribes.
+There was a violent collision of peoples, manners, sentiments, usages; a
+subversion of the luxurious, intelligent, refined, and effete
+civilization; a rough infusion of barbaric vigor and barbaric ignorance.
+The marvelous conflict, commingling, and emergence of a thousand years,
+through which the classic society was replaced by the mediaeval society,
+cannot even be summarized in these brief paragraphs.  The point on which
+our theme requires attention is that the religion of this period had its
+form and substance in the Catholic church; and of this church the twin
+aspects were an authoritative government administered by popes, councils,
+bishops, and priests, and a conception of the supernatural world equally
+definite and authoritative, which dominated the intellects and
+imaginations of man with its Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.  The visible
+church and the invisible world of which the church held the
+interpretation and the key,--this concrete fact, and this faith the
+counterpart of the fact, were the bases and pillars of the religion of
+Europe for many centuries.
+
+We are not required to balance the merits and faults of this mediaeval
+religion.  It was a mighty power, so long as it commanded the
+unquestioning intellectual assent of the world, and so long as upon the
+whole it exemplified and enforced, beyond any other human agency, the
+highest moral and spiritual ideals men knew.
+
+Its supremacy was favored by the complete subordination of all
+intellectual life which was an incident of the barbaric conquest and the
+feudal society which followed.  Even before those events the human
+intellect seemed to flag.  The old classicism and the new Christianity
+never so wedded as to produce either an adequate civic virtue or a great
+intellectual movement.  In the Dark Ages which followed, learning shrank
+into the narrow channels of the cloister, and literature almost ceased as
+a creative force.  For almost a thousand years--from Augustine to
+Dante--Europe scarcely produced a book which has high intrinsic value for
+our time.  When intellectual energy woke again in Italy and then in the
+North, the ecclesiastical conception had inwrought itself in human
+thought.
+
+Along with authority and dogmas there developed an elaborate ceremonial,
+appealing through the senses to the imagination and the spiritual sense.
+For the multitude it involved a habitual confusion of the symbol with the
+substance of religion.  In an age when the highest minds lived in an
+atmosphere of profound ignorance, and philosophy was childish, there was
+wrought out the full doctrine of the Mass and its accompaniments,--a
+literal transformation of the bread and wine of the sacrament into the
+body and blood of Christ, powerful to impart a saving grace.  The power
+to work this miracle was the supreme weapon of the priesthood.
+
+We may glance at the mediaeval religion in its culmination in the three
+figures of Dante, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas à Kempis.  À Kempis shows
+religion fled from the active world with its strifes and temptations,
+sedulously cultivating a pure, devout, unworldly virtue; feeding on the
+contemplation of heavenly splendors and infernal horrors; self-centred
+and inglorious.  The opposite type is Frances, a joyful prophet of glad
+tidings to the poor; ardent, sympathetic, heroic; touched with the beauty
+of nature and the appeal of the animal creation; exalting simplicity and
+poverty like an ancient philosopher; seeking the needy and sorrowful like
+Jesus of Nazareth; but with no spiritual originality like Jesus, no power
+to create a new religion; strong only to revive the best elements of the
+traditional faith, and to organize a society which erelong sank back to
+the general level of the church.
+
+Dante is an embodiment of mediaeval belief in its most sublime and
+intense phase.  He has much of the temper of the Hebrew psalmist, in his
+tremendous love and hate, his patriotism, his sorrow, his quest for the
+highest.  This vast spiritual passion finds its expression and
+satisfaction in an invisible world, which promises in a future existence
+the supreme triumph and reign of a divine justice, wrath, and pity, and
+for which the visible world is but antechamber and probation.  Dante
+shows the culmination of supernatural Christianity, but he has something
+further.  The guide of his pilgrimage, the star of his hope, the
+inspiration of his life, is a woman,--loved with sublimation and
+tenderness, loved better after her death, and felt as the living link
+between the seen and unseen worlds.  Thus at the heart of the old
+supernaturalism is the germ of a new conception, in which human love
+sanctified by death becomes the revealer.
+
+In Dante we feel that the projection of human interest to an unseen and
+future world has reached its furthest limit.  The mind of man must needs
+revert to some nearer home and sphere.  And closely following Dante we
+see in England a group of figures who betoken the return.  There is
+Chaucer, displaying the various energy and joy and humor of earthly life.
+There is Piers Plowman, showing the grim obverse of the medal, the
+hardship and woe of the poor.  Wyclif insists on a personal religion,
+whose austere edge turns against ecclesiastical pretense and social
+wrong; and he applies reason so daringly that it cuts at the very centre
+of the church's dogma, in denying Transubstantiation.  A little earlier
+we see Roger Bacon making a fresh beginning in the experimental
+philosophy which had been slighted for centuries.  These four are the
+precursors respectively of the purely human view, as in Shakspere, of the
+elevation of the poor, of Protestantism, and of natural science.
+
+
+As pagan mythology, Stoicism, and Judaism all were superseded by early
+Christianity, as that in turn was succeeded by mediaeval Catholicism, so
+another stage has brought us to the religion of to-day.  The leading
+features of this last transition may be summarily sketched, we may then
+glance at certain groups of figures illustrating the advance in its
+successive periods, and so we shall come to the ideal of the present.
+
+The religious transition of the last four centuries is in one aspect
+marked by the waning of authority and the growth of individual freedom;
+and in another aspect it is the substitution for a supernatural of a
+natural conception, or, we may say, in place of a divided and warring
+universe, a harmonious universe.
+
+In this double progress toward individual liberty and toward a new way of
+thought, a conspicuous agency has been the advance of knowledge.
+Connected with the advance of knowledge has been an improvement of the
+actual conditions of human life.  Meantime the ethical sense and the
+spiritual aspiration of mankind have asserted themselves, sometimes as
+slow-working, permanent forces, sometimes in revolutionary upheaval.
+With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new forms
+of sentiment and aspiration have appeared,--a wider and tenderer
+humanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon the
+study of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the sublimity
+and beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon the powers
+and intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient guides; a
+rediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and hope which
+were once supposed inseparably bound up with ritual, dogma, and miracle,
+but which now when given freer wing find firmer support and loftier scope.
+
+Along with these forces has gone the steady push of human nature for
+enjoyment, for ease, for power; the grasp of man for all he can get of
+whatever seems to him the highest good.  There have been mutual injuries,
+degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of human
+history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, and
+which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making."
+
+Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action of
+strong personalities.
+
+No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers,--their interplay
+is constant.  The main argument of the drama, from the mediaeval to the
+present phase, may be briefly shown.
+
+
+Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three great
+lines,--opening the material universe, rediscovering a lost
+interpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the
+many.  The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven
+and a new earth.  The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated
+class a "renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual
+beauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake.  It was a new
+birth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell;
+worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity
+which Christianity had bred.  In others it was a new birth to the pursuit
+of moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism and
+early Christianity.  Then came the invention of printing, and the
+aristocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy.
+
+The foremost men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church,
+either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be
+maintained and purified.  The successful rebel against the church was a
+peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long had
+sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice.  It was
+originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his own
+experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spirit
+was possible without dependence on the church of Rome.  But neither
+Luther nor any of the reformers were men of spiritual originality.
+Driven to construct a new creed, they simply worked over the old dogmas,
+divesting them of the keys of priestly power--the Mass, the confessional,
+absolution, Purgatory, and the like; and giving infallible authority to
+the Bible only.  A war of creeds followed, mingled with a strife of
+ambitions and a struggle between the powers of the secular state and of
+the hierarchy.  To men of piety and peace like Erasmus and Melanchthon it
+seemed as if religion were only a loser by the long period of bloodshed
+and bitterness that followed.  The gain, as we see it, was that half of
+Europe was wrested from the dominion of the Catholic church; that that
+church was driven to purify its morals; and that in the Protestant states
+the liberty which at first was only a change of masters spread gradually,
+as one sect after another established its foothold, and as the secular
+temper in the state rose above the ecclesiastical, until the religious
+freedom of the individual is at last becoming generally and securely
+established.
+
+Only by this overthrow of ecclesiastical authority was rendered possible
+that unchecked freedom of intellectual inquiry which has been the great
+positive factor in modern advance.  Step by step men have learned to know
+the condition, the history, the natural laws of the material world in
+which they live and the social world of which they are a part.  The
+bearing of this growing knowledge on the conception of the spiritual life
+has been various,--seeming for a while to lie wholly apart from it; then
+at times menacing its existence or contracting its scope; again arming it
+with powerful weapons and enlarging its ideals.  Of the latest chapters
+in the story of science, one has retold the origin of Christianity,
+divested it of miracle and revelation, and translated it into purely
+natural and human terms.  Another chapter has fixed the general trend of
+the universe known to man as an ever advancing and broadening movement,
+under the name of Evolution.
+
+Amid all these changes the Christian church has continued to present its
+ideals, precepts, incitements; partly affirming them in contradiction of
+all denial, partly adapting them to the changes of time and thought.  The
+moral and spiritual interpretation of life has not been confined to the
+church, but has been voiced in each generation by poets, moralists,
+reformers, statesmen, each after his thought.  Out of the conflict and
+confusion a substantial agreement and harmonious ideal is at last
+appearing.  More clearly and confidently in our day than ever before the
+universe may be seen and felt by man as a Cosmos,--a beautiful order.
+
+
+This bird's-eye view will grow more distinct and vivid if we study
+certain typical figures which group themselves as the representatives of
+succeeding generations.  Our conventional division of centuries will
+serve as a convenient framework for four groups.
+
+In the sixteenth century we have Sir Thomas More, uniting the highest
+virtue of the church with the clearest intelligence of the new thought,
+and setting forth in Utopia the ideal to be sought,--not mere individual
+salvation, not an ecclesiastical fold, but a human commonwealth of free,
+happy, and virtuous citizens.
+
+Instead of the peaceful growth of such a society,--made impossible by
+selfishness, ignorance, and passion,--comes social upheaval and religious
+revolution, its central figure the burly, heroic, great-hearted Luther;
+by turns a rebel and a conservative; leading the successful revolt of
+Teutonic Europe against Rome, but leaving reconstruction to other hands.
+
+Then we have Calvin, the builder of the creed of Protestantism; in its
+substance little but a symmetrical statement of mediaeval ideas, but
+resting its appeal not on authority, but logic; or, more exactly, on the
+authority of a book, which, having no longer an infallible interpreter,
+must be judged by human reason as to its contents and at last as to its
+nature and origin.  Thus, unconsciously, Calvin initiated a religious
+democracy and ultimately a religion of reason; while for the time he
+established a creed more austere and grim than the Catholic.  Opposite
+him stands Loyola, the reviver of Catholicism, infusing it with a new
+heroism and self-sacrifice; reaffirming and intensifying its authority;
+scornful of speculation, powerful in organization; zealot, missionary,
+educator; giving to ecclesiastical obedience an added emphasis, to
+organization a new force.
+
+
+For a typical group in the next century, let us take Francis Bacon,
+leading the human intellect away from abstractions and from other worlds
+to the close, intelligent study of the material world in which men live.
+Beside him stands Shakspere, reading the world of humanity with eyes
+neither biased by creed nor sublimed by faith; portraying with marvelous
+range the joys, sorrows, humors of mankind; showing on his impartial
+canvas a true humanity, far different from the fictitious saint and
+fictitious sinner of the theologian; showing, as with the truth of
+nature, "virtue in her shape how lovely;" but with no consolation beside
+the grave, no satisfying ideal for man's pursuit nor rule for man's
+guidance.  Near him we see "the Shakspere of divines," Jeremy Taylor; he,
+too, is close to the realities of life, but he is planted firm on the
+belief in a supernatural revelation of God, Christ, and a hereafter, and
+for those who so believe offers a simple, noble way of "Holy Living and
+Dying."
+
+In Cromwell is embodied the attempt of extreme Protestantism to mould
+society and the state by the authority of a supernatural religion.  The
+Puritan creed for which he stands is a mixture of Hebraic and Calvinistic
+elements; the Puritan temper is at its best heroic and austere, made
+despotic by its confidence of divine authority, and by its
+supernaturalism made indifferent to the new science and to the various
+elements of human nature on which statesmanship must build.  Its
+political sway is brief, its effects on English and American character
+are lasting.
+
+In the next century the master minds stand outside of Christianity.
+Voltaire assails the whole ecclesiastical and supernatural fabric with
+terrible weapons of hard sense and derision.  For the target of his
+arrows he has a church at once corrupt, tyrannical, and weak, and a creed
+which the best intelligence has outgrown.  He heartily scouts the church,
+dogma, miracle; admits a vague Deity and a possible hereafter, but cares
+little for them; is fearless, jovial, generous,--a rollicking,
+comfortable, formidable apostle of negations.
+
+Into the vacuum he creates comes Rousseau, and at his touch there well up
+again deep fountains of feeling, belief, desire.  Rousseau, too, has left
+behind him the church and its dogmas; but he craves love, joy, action,
+and finds scope for them.  He delights in nature's beauty, and it is the
+symbol to him of a God in whom there remains of the Christian Deity only
+the element of beneficence.  He exhorts men to return to nature, but it
+is a somewhat unreal nature, a dream of primeval innocence and
+simplicity.  He idealizes the family relation, and brings wisdom and
+gentleness to the training of the child.  He lacks the Hebraic and
+Puritan stress on conscience; the mild benevolence of his Deity is
+somewhat remote from the ethical need of man and from the actual
+procedure or the universe; Rousseau himself is tainted with
+sensuality,--a diseased, suffering, pathetic nature, with "sweet strings
+jangled," worthy of pity and of gratitude.
+
+In France, the highest intelligence was at war with established
+institutions,--the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, against the
+Catholic church and the reigning authorities: on the one side
+persecution, but growing feeble; on the other side derision or evasion or
+attack.  In England, a large measure of civil and religious freedom gave
+the intellectual combatants a fairer field and a milder temper.  The
+English genius showed itself as practical, matter-of-fact, and moderate.
+Supernatural Christianity was attacked and defended; against the assault
+on the miracles the defense was really a shifting of the ground, and an
+insistence as by Butler on an ethical order in the observed workings of
+the world, which gives a sort of analogue and support to the Christian
+scheme of future retribution.  In speculative thought the prevailing
+school, as in Locke, approached reality from the side of sense-knowledge,
+till Hume showed how this road led to a denial of miracle and in
+philosophy to a fundamental skepticism.  Berkeley reverted to the ideal
+philosophy, and there seemed but a continuance of the eternal seesaw of
+metaphysics.
+
+In Germany, Kant sank his plummet deeper.  He found indeed in the working
+of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction.  But he
+recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world
+affords, the commanding sense of duty,--the "moral imperative;" and
+through this he found the presence and the authoritative voice of a moral
+deity.
+
+Goethe lived through a rich and various experience, of book-culture,
+emotion, conversance with men and affairs, in the attitude of an explorer
+and observer, unbound by creeds, but open to all teaching from past
+records or present impressions.  The projection of this experience was an
+ideal of life which gave large scope to all human faculties,--to
+knowledge, pleasure, passion, service,--under a wise self-control, and
+with theoretical allegiance to a moral law and a future hope not unlike
+the law and the hope of Christianity.  It was an ideal which appealed
+only to the man of intellectual habit, and which lacked the note of
+heroism and self-sacrifice.
+
+It was the opposite quality, the passion of self-forgetful service, which
+won for Christianity its most notable triumph in this century, in the
+movement led by John Wesley.  In Wesley, Protestantism came back to the
+rescue of the poor, as Catholicism came back in Francis of Assisi.  Among
+the peasants and colliers of England, among the backwoodsmen of America,
+swept an uplifting wave of love, joy, and hope.
+
+Jonathan Edwards did Christianity the service of carrying Calvinism to
+its logical extreme, and showing what it really meant. He started in
+the New England ministry a strenuous speculation, which was not to
+rest till it destroyed the foundation from which he worked. The hell
+as to which comfortable churchmen were getting silent, he painted in
+such lurid colors that reaction and ultimate revolt were necessities
+of human nature. The life of holiness and love--in himself a most
+genuine reality--he defined in such terms of introspection and
+self-consciousness, that there opened a wide gulf between the forms of
+religion and the most sturdy and natural virtue of the time.
+
+That sturdy and natural virtue was embodied in Benjamin Franklin,--in all
+this eighteenth century the best type and herald of the coming
+development of man.  Franklin inherited the characteristic virtue of the
+Englishman and the Puritan; he started in ground which Puritan and Quaker
+had fertilized, and when the fire of the early zeal had cooled; he worked
+out the problem of life for himself with great independence and entire
+good sense.  After a few vagaries and some wholesome buffeting, he
+determined that "moral perfection" was the only satisfying aim.  But
+instead of proclaiming his discovery as a gospel, he quietly utilized it
+for his personal guidance.  He had a keen eye for all utility; he carved
+out his own fortune; he early identified his own happiness with that of
+the people around him, and served the community with disinterested
+faithfulness through a long life.  That unselfish beneficence, of which
+Goethe thought a single instance was enough to save his hero from the
+fiend to whom he had fairly forfeited his selfish soul, was the habit of
+Franklin's lifetime.  He found the ample sanctions and rewards of virtue
+in the present world, though he held a cheerful hope of something beyond.
+In the study of this world's laws, he saw, lay the best road to human
+success.  He recognized the homely virtues of industry and thrift, on
+which the young American society had worked out its real strength, and
+assigned to them the fundamental place, instead of that mystic and
+introspective piety which the Calvinist made his corner-stone.  He took
+the lead in penetrating the secrets of nature, and not less in moulding
+and guiding the infant nation.  If his virtue was prudential rather than
+heroic, his prudence was close to that large wisdom which is a right
+apprehension of all the facts of life.  Only the realm of the poet, the
+mystic, the ardent lover, lay beyond his ken.  He stands side by side
+with the grand and magnanimous figure of Washington,--the twin founders
+of the American republic.
+
+
+The complexity and onrush of the nineteenth century may be in some degree
+made clear if we fix our eyes on certain typical groups of men whom we
+may classify under the aspects of Knowledge, Philosophy, Literature,
+Protestantism, Catholicism, Social Ideals, Personal Ideals.
+
+Regarding under Knowledge what may fairly be considered as solid and
+irreversible acquisition,--the general movement of humanity has received
+conspicuous interpretation by Darwin, who by most patient investigation
+discovered at least approximately the path by which man has been
+developed out of the lower animal forms.  Spencer has shown, by a vast
+generalization of facts, the working throughout all realms of existence
+known to man of certain common tendencies--of variation and new and
+specialized formation.  Apart from all debatable theories of psychology
+and metaphysics, he and a host of other students in the same direction
+have discovered clews by which the growth of human societies and their
+individual members can be in some degree traced under general laws.
+
+In another department of knowledge the sacred histories of Christianity
+have been given a new reading by scholars, among whom Strauss, Baur, and
+Renan are conspicuous.  The general result has been to show that these
+scriptures are purely human documents, and the personages they describe
+are purely human.  Through the gospel histories Strauss ran his critical
+theory like a plowshare through a field of daisies.  He showed especially
+the genesis of many of these stories by imagination working creations out
+of Old Testament texts.  Baur led the way in discovering by marvelous
+analysis the composite influences which helped to shape the apostolic
+histories in the interest of party or of piety.  Renan reillumined the
+scene which his predecessors seemed to convert into a dreary waste, by
+reconceiving, with erudition illumined by genius and sympathy, the
+personality of Jesus of Nazareth as a human character, nowise infallible,
+but a sublime leader of the race.  While Christianity has thus been
+brought to the level of a natural religion, its old-time adversaries, the
+other world-religions such as Buddhism, Brahmanism, Islamism, have been
+shown by sympathetic students to be vast upward essays of mankind toward
+truth and goodness.  That no religion is handed down complete from
+heaven, and that all religions are expressions of human aspiration and
+effort, is coming to be accepted as axiomatic.
+
+Turning from well-established knowledge to theoretical schemes of the
+universe, the three typical names in this century are Hegel, Comte, and
+Spencer.  Hegel stood for the interpretation of all existence in terms of
+man's inner world--thought and being are regarded as identical, and the
+movement of thought, expressed by a new kind of logic, becomes
+interpreter of the development of the universe.  In absolute revulsion
+from this tendency, Comte in his world-scheme rejected metaphysics and
+theology alike as belonging to the infantile stage of man, and recognized
+as legitimate only the "positive" knowledge which science affords.  For
+the emotional and ethical needs of man, he offered "the religion of
+humanity," with the service of mankind as its worship and woman as its
+priestess.  Spencer, equally discarding the supernatural as matter of
+knowledge, relegates the distinctively religious emotion to awe before a
+supreme power wholly inscrutable to man.  He sets himself to formulate so
+far as possible the observed workings of the universe in which man is a
+part; he makes Evolution the central principle; he finds in Heredity and
+Environment the great formative influences upon the individual; and he
+reaffirms as of supreme importance the familiar ethical principles which
+mankind has discovered in its experiences.
+
+In all these forms, the constructive philosophy of our century has
+visibly fallen short of the immense volume of old and new truths which it
+has striven to mould and formulate.  The characteristic genius of the
+time is shown more powerfully on the one hand in the accumulation of
+specific knowledge, as science; and on the other hand in the imaginative
+portrayal of human life.  The favorite vehicle of imagination has been
+the novel.  If our successors hereafter desire to know how man in the
+nineteenth century appeared to himself, their best guides will be such as
+Scott, Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hugo, Balzac.  It is
+the children of Bacon and those of Shakspere who are most conspicuous in
+the work of yesterday.  To-day we seem to stand on the threshold of a
+more inclusive, more profound, more inspiring philosophy.
+
+The Christian church has, like all other institutions, been deeply
+affected by the time-spirit.  In Protestantism, the great developments
+have been a modification of the creed, and a transfer of energy from the
+winning of a future salvation to the working out of a present salvation
+for the individual and for society.  The creed has been changed, in
+spirit more widely than in form, partly under the influence of reason and
+partly through a reawakening of spiritual and humane feeling.
+Schleiermacher interpreted Christianity as an emotional and ethical
+experience, rather than a dogmatic system.  In the English church, while
+one refluent wave swept toward a dogmatic authority and ritualistic
+splendor like that of Rome, on another side the effort to reconcile the
+church with modern thought and fit it to modern society was carried
+farther and farther by Coleridge, Arnold, Robertson, Maurice, Kingsley,
+and Stanley; till the advance has met a sharp check at the point where
+rejection of miracle involves a collision with the formularies of
+worship.  In America, a like advance has had the advantage of that more
+elastic polity which allows to churches of the Congregational order an
+easier change of creed and worship.  The leaders have been, in the
+Unitarian line, such as Channing, who purified Christianity of its
+Calvinistic harshness and then of its Athanasian metaphysics; and Parker,
+who took the great step to simple theism,--Christian in ethics and piety,
+but purely naturalistic in theology.  In the other great branch of the
+New England church,--for in New England alone has America shown religious
+originality,--Bushnell in a scholastic way, and Beecher with poetic and
+popular power, resolved the dogmatic system into a supremacy in the
+universe of love and holiness, embodied in a deity who became actually
+incarnated as Christ.  Phillips Brooks, exercising a spiritual power of
+extraordinary purity and intensity, and so unspeculative that he felt no
+difficulty in the formulae of the Episcopal church, taught a religion in
+which Christ represents a sublimed and perfect humanity, a realized
+ideal, the inspiration and helper of men who are his brothers.
+
+In the Catholic church, two Popes stand as representative, Plus IX. and
+Leo XIII.  Under the first, the monarchic system of the church was made
+complete, and the highest function of the Council, the definition of
+religious truth, was assigned to the Pope.  By Leo XIII. this autocracy
+is administered in sympathy largely with modern ideas.  The church allies
+itself less with the temporal monarch than with the common people.  It
+throws much of its force into ethical channels.  Its characteristic
+interest is in education, temperance, social reform; and along with these
+it still ministers publicly and privately to that communion with God in
+which it places the foundation and secret of human life.  Its limitations
+are that it still claims not only to persuade but to rule--a useful
+function toward some classes, but impossible toward other classes; that
+its pretension to infallibility obliges it to misread history; and that
+its foundation of dogma admits no frank and full reconciliation with
+modern knowledge.
+
+But to know the full mind and heart of our age, we must again take a
+survey beyond the church walls.  The emotional forces which have moved
+the world have been largely in the direction of certain social
+aspirations.  The first was for Liberty--freedom from the tyranny of
+king's and priests.  It won its first great victory in America, where the
+War of Independence and the making of the Constitution marked by a brave
+struggle and a masterpiece of good sense the consummation of many years'
+growth of an English shoot in virgin soil.  England herself has followed
+with more unequal steps to a similar result.  In France, there was
+volcanic explosion which convulsed Europe.  The other Continental states
+have variously followed, save Russia, which as yet lies impotent under
+despotism.  Following the substantial success of the effort for Liberty,
+or blending with it, came the aspiration for a better Social Order.  In
+one phase, this worked toward the consolidation of nations on natural
+lines of race and history, as in Germany and Italy.  In America, the two
+ideas of universal Freedom and national Union, conflicting for a while
+with each other, blent at last and triumphed after a mighty struggle.
+The supreme figure in that struggle was Abraham Lincoln; who in his
+public capacity illustrated how the most complicated problems of
+statesmanship find their best solution through good-will, resolution,
+patience, and homely shrewdness; while in his own life he showed that a
+man may rise above misfortune and melancholy, unaided by creed or church,
+working only by absolute fidelity to the right as he sees the right, till
+he renders to his fellows a supreme service and wins their unbounded love.
+
+The aspiration for Social Order pauses not when it has won national unity
+and harmony.  The principle and the result of the existing industrial
+system no longer content those who live under it.  That system has been
+stimulated by the enormous material acquisitions which have flowed from
+invention.  It has improved in some degree the condition of most members
+of society, but with a marked inequality in the improvement, and at the
+cost of the mutual hostility which unchecked competition involves, and
+which is fruitful in moral mischief and material waste.  The laborer has
+gained in intelligence by the school and the newspaper; holding the vote,
+he feels himself one of the masters of the state; sympathy draws him to
+his own class.  The scholar sees that the system of unchecked competition
+is an outgrowth of conditions which are changing, and which ought to
+change.  The idealist longs for a society which shall effectually seek
+the highest good of every member, and supplement the hunger for personal
+advantage with satisfaction in the good of all.  The toiler and the
+idealist unite to seek a more generous and serviceable order in the
+community, and the tendency is vaguely called Socialism.  One conspicuous
+exponent is Karl Marx, who, with his followers, would make the highly
+centralized German state the starting-point for a still more
+authoritative and minute regulation of the community, directed to the
+equal material benefit of all its members.  By a different road a degree
+of fraternal organization is being attained, through voluntary
+associations of workingmen, for mutual support as toward their employers,
+or for independent production or distribution.  All definite and dogmatic
+schemes of social reform prove upon challenge to need adjustment and
+modification, to fit the actual workings of a society already infinitely
+complex.  It is as the sentiment which for want of a better word we call
+socialistic works along with that broad and candid study of fact which we
+call scientific, and toward an ideal in which the material is but an
+instrument of the spiritual,--that there is solid promise of advance.
+
+With these sentiments of Liberty and Social Order may be named what is
+sometimes called Philanthropy, or in a broader way of speaking may be
+named Humanity,--the unselfish passion for the good of others, the ardor
+of service, to which early Christianity gave outlet in missions, and
+which now throws itself into reform, education, amelioration in every
+direction of human need.
+
+More central to man than any social ideal is the personal ideal.  For
+society is but an aggregation of units; state, church, community, family,
+have their aim and outcome in the individual man; they are serviceable
+only as through them he becomes good and happy.  What new interpretations
+has this century seen of the personal ideal?  They may partly be read in
+a group of poets of the English-speaking people.  Wordsworth, loyal to
+the forms of the old Christianity, shows life as really sustained and
+gladdened by simple duty and by the sacramental beauty of nature--one
+giving the rule of conduct, the other disclosing the divinity of the
+world.  Tennyson gives in "In Memoriam" that interpretation of human life
+which comes when love is sublimed by death.  Browning shows the soul face
+to face with the doubt, the denial, the dismay, which are added to the
+foes of human peace in an age which has lost the old faith, and shows the
+soul victorious over all by its own energy, constancy, and joy.  In
+Whittier, the dogmatic system of Christianity is transformed into a
+spirit of fidelity, brotherhood, and tender trust.  Emerson gives that
+direct vision of divine reality, seen in nature, in humanity, in the
+heart's innermost recesses, which is possible to a soul purified by moral
+fidelity, reverent of natural law, and winged by holy desire.
+
+These have been the prophets of hope and of victory.  The dark message of
+defeat and despair has also had its full expression.  Satiety with
+material good, disappointment of inward joy, the loss of the old objects
+of adoration and trust, have inspired utterances in every key of gloom,
+impotence, despondency verging toward suicide.  Schopenhauer has
+formulated a philosophy of pessimism, and through a host of the minor
+story-tellers and versifiers runs the note of discouragement and
+abandonment.  The most dangerous alliance which besets man is that
+between Sensuality and Unbelief, whispering together in his ear, "Let us
+eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!"  Sometimes unbelief is at the
+widest remove from sensuality; it may go with pure devotion to truth and
+thirst for goodness.  There are pathetic and noble voices of seekers
+after God, which when they do not gladden yet strengthen and purify, and
+which catch at moments an exquisite tone of peace and joy.  Such are
+Clough and Matthew Arnold.  We have one moralist of the Spencerian
+school, George Eliot, who unites a strong ethical sense with a wonderful
+reading of human nature.  Her essential message, told again and again in
+every book, is, "Life may be ruined by self-indulgence--beware!"  If we
+ask, "But may life be saved by fidelity?" her answer is uncertain.  And
+in her own life we read, with humbled eyes, the defect which marred the
+note of triumph and deepened the note of warning.
+
+If, again, as to the Personal Ideal, we revert to the basal elements of
+character,--to the homely, every-day aspect,--to the life not only of the
+cultivated few but of the mass of humanity,--the new perception has been
+reached, that Work is the basis of all personal and social virtue.  Toil,
+said the old Scripture, is God's punishment for man's sin.  Toil, says
+the religious enthusiast, is a necessary incident of an existence whose
+higher exercise lies in spiritual emotion reaching toward a future
+Paradise.  But toil, to modern eyes, is the root which binds man to his
+native earth, and transmits all the sap which creates flowers and fruit.
+Intelligent, arduous, thrifty toil is the mother of greatness.  "Do the
+next thing,--do the nearest duty,--labor rather than question,"--is the
+most articulate note in Carlyle's stormy message.  The old charity was to
+give bread to the hungry; the new charity is to help the hungry to work
+for their bread.  A generation ago it seemed to American reformers that
+the nation's problem would be solved if once the slaves were freed.  They
+were set free, and then it was seen that the whole question of their
+future destiny was still to be met.  Practical necessity, religious zeal,
+political schemes, all played their part; but the best answer came
+through the apostle Armstrong, "Character, wrought out through education
+and labor."  The inherited devotion of Christian missionaries caught the
+light of personal experience and observation, and a man in whom heroic
+temper blent with shrewdest wisdom laid the foundation of an education
+transcending in its aims and results the whole traditional system of
+school and university.  It is an object-lesson of supreme significance.
+That way lies the future education of our children,--character its aim,
+nature its chief book, exercise of all the bodily and spiritual powers
+its method.
+
+Here, then, are the results of our century as they bear on man's higher
+life.  A religion through special revelation has been displaced by a
+religion which faces all the facts of existence and bases itself on them.
+Man has found new clews to read the story of his past, and new ways to
+mould his present and future.  The old ethical ideals have been
+reaffirmed, broadened, purified.  The task of building personal life and
+of ordering society has been set before man in fresh clearness, under
+heavy penalties for failure and heart-filling rewards for success.  It is
+seen that the humble path of moral obedience issues in celestial heights
+of spiritual vision.  Out of the noblest use of the Here and Now springs
+the assurance of a Hereafter and the sense of a present eternity.  The
+way to the Highest is open, inviting, commanding.  The simplest may
+enter, and the strongest must give his full strength to the quest.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE IDEAL OF TO-DAY
+
+The way of the highest life is clear and certain.  Its first and last
+precept is fidelity to the best we know.  Its constant process is that
+fidelity wins moral growth and spiritual vision.
+
+All attempts to demonstrate the nature and attributes of God, all
+effort to prove by argument that the universe is administered by
+righteousness and benevolence, are aside from the main road.  The real
+task for man is to order his own life, as an individual and in society.
+To do that, he needs to understand his own life as a practical matter;
+he needs to study the procedure of the world in which he stands; he
+needs to rally every force of knowledge, resolution, sympathy,
+reverence, aspiration, upon this high business of personal and social
+living.  As he achieves such life, there develop in him the faculties
+which read sublime meanings in the universe of which he is a part.  As
+he becomes divine, he finds divinity everywhere.
+
+The heart of religion is joy, peace, energy, support under suffering,
+inward harmony, true relation with fellow creatures, grateful sense of
+the past, full fruition of the present, glad out-reach to a beckoning
+future.  The way to that life is wholly independent of doubtful
+argumentation.  It lies simply in a whole-hearted conformity to what
+are known beyond all question as the worthy aims, the just
+requirements, the righteous laws.
+
+Let us consider somewhat at large the unfolding of this philosophy of
+life.  Let us seek to sympathetically interpret the deepest, most
+significant working of the human spirit in our time.
+
+Is it not the distinctive note of the thoughtful and honest mind of
+to-day, as compared with a like mind some centuries ago, that it
+contemplates more directly the actual procedure of the universe, is
+less concerned with supernatural personages and transactions, and more
+attentive to what has happened and is happening in this mundane sphere?
+The piety of our ancestors contemplated the justice and mercy of God as
+manifested in the counsels of eternity,--his righteous condemnation of
+the wicked, and the love-inspired sacrifice of Christ.  The philosophy
+of our ancestors was largely an attempt to map out a world-scheme from
+man's inner consciousness.  The modern thinker, whether he calls
+himself Christian or not, is inclined to make his essay toward the
+Supreme Power by way of the observed workings of the universe.  And
+certain general impressions which he thus receives we may distinguish.
+
+That aspect of things which now engages us with the fascination of a
+new and vast discovery is what we term "Evolution."  Its spectacle, on
+the one hand, prompts a sure and soaring hope.  In the sum of things we
+see a movement upward and still upward,--from unorganized to organized
+matter, from unconscious to sentient existence, from beast to man, from
+savage to saint,--and who can say to what height in the coming ages?
+But on the other hand we see that thus far at least the progress of the
+favored is at deadly cost to the losers.  And we see that parallel with
+the ascending white line of humanity runs an ascending black line,--the
+bad man of civilization is in some ways worse than the bad man of
+savagery.  And this complexity of good and evil is recognized at a time
+when a higher sensibility has made the old familiar pain and sin of
+humanity seem more than ever intolerable.
+
+Yet the spectacle of creation and of the world, as we see and know it,
+makes upon us an impression far beyond that of mere perplexity or
+dismay.  It produces a sentiment which we may best call _awe_.  All the
+great aspects of nature wake in us this reverential emotion.  A
+familiar instance is the effect upon us of the starry heavens.  The
+Psalmist thrilled at that sight,--how much more deeply are we moved,
+knowing what we know of the vastness and the order!  Some like effect
+on us has the unfolding revelation of the whole process of nature.  "I
+think the thoughts of God after him," said Kepler.  Let any man study
+in some clear exposition the development of the human race from the
+animal; and the wonder of the process, the unity of design, the
+unforeseen goals reached one by one, the irresistible impression that
+the harmony which man's little faculties can discern is but a fraction
+of some sublimer harmony,--these emotions have in them a surpassing
+power to humble, purify, and exalt the spirit.
+
+The modern mind addresses itself to the highest reality through the
+actualities of existence, and of those actualities one most significant
+phase is the procedure and laws of nature.  But there is another and
+more impressive aspect: it is the inner life of humanity; it is man's
+own conscious existence, with its struggles, victories, defeats, its
+agonies and raptures, its mirth, its play, its sweetness and
+bitterness.  This to us is the realm of real existence.  In this we are
+at home.  The march of the planets, the evolution of a world, the whole
+process of nature, is like the view from a window; and, gazing upon it,
+sits feeling, thinking, aspiring man.  His consciousness is environed
+and conditioned by the surrounding world, but is utterly unexplained by
+it, wholly untranslatable in its terms.  Definite and precise is the
+language of mathematics, of chemistry, of physical procedure.  Mystery
+of mysteries is the human spirit,--mystery of mysteries and holy of
+holies.  A new sense of the sacredness of human life has been born in
+this later age.  It is our most precious acquisition.  Better could we
+have waited for modern science than for modern humanity.  Better could
+we spare the telegraph and the steam-engine and anaesthesia than that
+quickened sense of the value of man as man which inspires the deepest
+political and social movements of to-day.  In all sober minds, in all
+lofty effort,--whatever there may be of despair of God or hopelessness
+of a personal future,--we see a profound recognition of the solemnity
+and sacredness of human existence.  Through the sad pages of George
+Eliot, through Emerson's exultant psalm, through the reformer's battle,
+the socialist's scheme, runs this golden link,--the value of simple
+humanity.
+
+This, then, we may say is the characteristic attitude of the man of
+to-day,--before the processes of nature, awe and reverence; before the
+life of humanity, sympathy and tenderness.
+
+But now rises a heart-moving question.  The dearest article of
+religious faith has been a Divine Power, governing the universe and
+holding to man an intimate relation involving issues of supreme
+significance to humanity.  At this point modern thought falters.  The
+long-familiar expression of that belief is the assertion of a personal,
+providential, all-just, and all-loving God.  What reason have men
+assigned to themselves for belief in such a God, while confronted all
+the time by the fearful spectacle of a world in which sin and misery
+perpetually mingle with goodness and happiness?  What has been the
+resource of the Christian intellect against that mystery of evil which
+baffled the questioner in the book of Job, and drove Lucretius to
+virtual atheism, and left Marcus Aurelius in doubt whether there be
+gods or not?  The resource of the Christian thinker has been his belief
+that Jesus Christ was God incarnate.  Here was a soul which was sinless
+and holy, which loved sinners so as to die for them; and this was God
+himself.  That belief has been the foundation of Christian theology.
+It left the mysteries of earth's sorrow and sin unexplained; but it
+offered the assurance, under a most living figure, that the author and
+final disposer of the whole was one whose nature was love itself.
+
+When it ceases to be believed that Jesus was God, the corner-stone of
+this whole structure of belief, as an intellectual conception, is gone.
+The void is concealed for a while by intermediate theories,--that Jesus
+was a kind of inferior deity, that he was at least a supernatural
+messenger.  Frankly say that he was a man only, and we have really
+given up that intellectual ground of confidence in a God on which for
+many centuries men have stood.  And, in that involuntary and most
+regretful surrender, and in the first impression following it, that the
+only discernible order is a mechanical order, with no room for worship,
+no hope of immortality, lies the tragedy of the thinking world to-day.
+For a multitude of minds, God is eclipsed, and the earth lies in
+shadow.  In shadow, but not in despair.  For still there is
+
+          "The prophetic soul
+  Of the wide world, dreaming of things to come."
+
+
+Slowly emerges a new conception.  In the lowest depth of his spirit man
+has found that, in Robertson's words, "it is better to be true than to
+be false, better to be pure than to be sensual, better to be brave than
+to be a coward."  By that sure and simple creed man lives through his
+darkest day.  When the tree seems dead, that root lives.  And presently
+there grows from it a nobler tree.
+
+The turning-point from the old thought to the new is this: We see that
+the imperative task set to every man is not to understand the universe
+plan, but to live his own life successfully.  It will quite suffice for
+most of us if we can each one do justice to the possibilities of his
+own existence.  Those possibilities are something more than breathing
+and eating, sleeping and waking, toil and rest.  Among his
+possibilities each man hopes are included contentment, joy, peace.  At
+least there must be possible for him some right conformity to the
+conditions in which he is placed, some noble and spiritual
+satisfaction, some imparting of good to his fellow creatures.  There is
+for him some best way of life, which it is his business to find and to
+follow.
+
+And as he finds and follows it,--as he fills out the best possibilities
+of his own being,--so he must come into the truest relation possible
+for him with this whole mysterious frame of things we call the
+universe.  As he is himself at his best, so he will get the best, the
+widest, the truest impression of the whole in which he is a part.
+
+This, then, is the rational and hopeful way of addressing the supreme
+problem,--the problem, for the individual and for mankind, of a
+happiness and a success which shall be rooted in the true nature of
+things and the real order of the universe.  We are not to start with
+any supposed comprehension of the general plan, whether as revealed by
+miracle or thought out by wise men.  We are simply to live our own
+lives according to the best knowledge we have, the highest examples we
+know, the most satisfying results of our own experience.  And, with
+whatever discipline and enrichment this process of right living may
+bring us, we are to hold our whole natures open, attentive, percipient
+to the world about us, and accept whatever shall disclose itself.
+
+The two processes--right living and clear vision--blend constantly and
+intimately.  We may distinguish them in our thoughts, but there is
+constant interplay between life and sight.
+
+The business of living,--how infinitely complex it is, how endlessly
+laborious, yet how simple and how sure!  Its central principle, we may
+say, is the right fitting of one's self to his surroundings.  Modern
+science has learned that for every creature the condition of success is
+adaptation to its environment.  We may use that way of speaking to
+express the prime necessity of man.  His environment is a vast
+complexity of material, social, and spiritual realities.
+
+There is for him a true way of adapting himself to these surrounding
+facts.  He has somehow found it out in the long existence of the race;
+he has seen it more and more clearly.  This true way is expressed by
+what we call right principles of conduct.  It is such traits as we name
+courage, truth, justice, purity, love, aspiration, reverence.  It
+includes the study of natural laws and conformity to them.  It includes
+the search for knowledge, both for its use and for its own joy.  It
+includes the delighted gaze upon beauty of every kind.
+
+Whoever follows this ideal--and just as far as he follows it
+intelligently and earnestly--finds certain results.  Whenever he acts,
+he finds set before him a right way to follow rather than a wrong.  So
+from every situation he may draw strength.  So he may continually find
+peace,--often peace won through struggle, but the deeper for the
+struggle.  The love of beauty finds beauty everywhere.  The love of
+living creatures finds objects everywhere, and love given brings love
+in response.  This higher life gives joy,--not constant, alternating
+with sorrow; but the joy is incomparably sweeter and purer and higher
+than any other course of life yields, and the sorrow has such nobility
+that we dare not wish it absent from the mingled cup we drain.  And
+always through joy or sorrow may come moral growth--development of
+character.
+
+There is no exemption to be won from suffering, none from fear.  Pain,
+weakness, bereavement, death,--these things must come, and we must
+sometimes tremble before them,--no divine hand will pluck them away.
+But in our fear we learn a deeper strength.
+
+These are the gifts with which Life answers our faithful service.  The
+brave, the gentle, the peace-makers, the pure in heart, the forgiving,
+the patient, the heroic, are blessed,--incomparably enriched.
+
+This is what we know of the relation of the One Power to
+ourselves,--that it asks the very highest and best we can give, and
+returns our service with the best and highest we can receive.  This is
+what that power we name God is to us.
+
+This is the same reality which has been apprehended under the figure of
+a personal God, a Heavenly Father, or a Christ.  To many, those figures
+still express it.  But those to whom the Deity is not thus personified
+may no less fully and vividly apprehend the divine Reality.
+
+And further, this whole conception stands no less in stead the persons
+and the hours when the conscious sense of Deity fails altogether.  This
+conception makes the essence of religion to be conformity to the homely
+facts about us, in the relations of fidelity, sympathy, and service.
+When one has no conscious thought of God, or cannot reach such thought
+if he tries, he can always exercise love, sympathy, admiration,
+self-control,--and that is enough.
+
+The limitations of our knowledge imply everywhere a background of
+mystery.  But that mystery is at once a stimulus to our inquiry and a
+prize set before our longing.  In some respects it is only a challenge
+to search, and the horizons of knowledge forever widen before the
+explorer.  At other points the veil never lifts, but all longing,
+aspiration, unsatisfied hunger, inarticulate yearning, "groanings which
+cannot be uttered," reach out to and lay hold on this realm of mystery.
+It is not an adamantine wall that encircles us, it is the tender
+mystery of the sunset or the starry heavens.
+
+So of the mystery of death.  The veil is not lifted, but it stirs
+before the breath of our prayers and hopes.  The deepest fear in man is
+the fear of death, and that fear is conquered in him by something
+greater than itself.  Even on the natural plane man is seldom afraid of
+death when it comes; it is rather the distant image that appalls him.
+Before the reality some instinct seems to bid him not to fear.  Every
+noble sentiment lifts men above the dread of death.  For their country
+on the battlefield, for other men in sudden accidents and perils, men
+give their lives instinctively or deliberately.
+
+It is personal love to which death seems to menace irretrievable and
+final disaster.  But it is personal love to which comes the divinest
+presage.  Some voice says to our yearning heart, "Fear nothing, doubt
+nothing, only _live_!"
+
+From our birth to our death we are encompassed by mystery, but it is a
+mystery which may, if we will have it so, grow warm, luminous, divine.
+
+
+So, by simple fidelity, man may find within himself harmony, victory,
+and peace.  When now, from this standpoint, he looks out on the
+universe,--and from no other standpoint can he hope for any clear
+vision,--what does he most clearly discern?  These three
+aspects,--Order, Beauty, Life.
+
+As he opens himself to these three aspects and actively conforms
+himself to them,--as he studies, obeys, and reveres the Order, as he
+perceives and rejoices in the Beauty, as in sympathy and service he
+merges his personal life in the multiform Life,--so he grows in the
+impression of a divine harmony and unity pervading all things.  So he
+becomes aware of a Cosmos,--a universal order of beauty and of love.
+He becomes aware of it only as he becomes voluntarily and consciously a
+part of it.  Only through the fidelity of his moral life does he feel
+beneath his feet a sure foundation.  Only as his soul glows a spark of
+love does it recognize the celestial ether in which it is an atom.
+
+
+At every moment and on every side we are in touch with the realities of
+being.
+
+We live and move in a world of orderly procedure, to which we may adapt
+ourselves with growing intelligence and purpose.
+
+Both the animate and inanimate creation is clothed in forms which
+minister to the sense of beauty; and the more that sense is cultivated
+in us, the more universally do we recognize beauty, and the more
+profound is its appeal to our consciousness.
+
+In our social existence we come in touch with other souls, each with
+its actual or potential wealth of being, and each inviting our
+sympathetic response.
+
+These--order, beauty, conscious existence--are the impact on us of the
+universe.  The right apprehension of these and the active response to
+them constitute the true exercise of our own nature; and it is through
+that exercise that we know Life,--the one Life,--and know it to be
+divine.
+
+These three aspects,--order, beauty, our fellow-lives,--let us dwell
+for a moment on each in turn.
+
+An amazing stimulus to man's powers has come in the discovery that he
+may penetrate and follow to an indefinite extent the actual procedure
+of the Universe.  We are only on the threshold of our discoveries.  We
+are just beginning to see where they have their highest application.
+We have been harnessing the steeds of power to the service of our
+physical wants.  We are just beginning to understand that they are to
+be made the ministers of building up a complete manhood.  The
+theologian has sought to demonstrate that all natural processes work in
+the service of a divine righteousness.  In place of any such
+demonstration, we are finding the true exercise of knowledge in
+applying for ourselves the processes of nature to the fulfillment of
+our noblest purposes.
+
+We are just now at the transition point between the old and the new
+conception of divine Power.  The old conception was: "The Almighty is a
+merciful father.  If his children ask anything, he will give it: the
+weapon of desire is prayer."  The new perception is: "The Almighty
+moves in lines which we can partly discern.  By putting ourselves in
+line with that Power, we make it helpful: the weapon of desire is
+intelligent effort.  Through our wills works the divine Will."
+
+  "With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth!"
+
+
+It is moral fidelity which apprehends the true application and
+significance for man of that regular procedure of nature which environs
+and conditions him.  And this Natural Order, in turn, requires the
+moral sense to humbly and obediently go to school to it.  "You want to
+be good?" says Nature.  "You dare to believe that even I in my
+mightiness am set to help you to be good?  Then study my processes, and
+conform to them!"  A new set of commandments is being written in the
+sight of men,--commandments learned but slowly and often transgressed,
+even by those whose wills are pure and whose hearts are loving.  _Thou
+shalt sufficiently rest_!  How perpetually in these days is that
+commandment broken, and with what woeful penalty!  The practical basis
+of all religion is the religion of the body.  The body politic, too,
+the social organism, has its code of natural laws, intelligible,
+imperative.  And every new discovery yields guidance and utters
+command.  "Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened!"
+
+
+Only through moral fidelity is the higher meaning of Beauty won.  It is
+the pure in heart who see God.  The beauty of the human form is, on the
+one side, uplifting to the soul, sacramental, as if it were the shrine
+of a divinity.  On the other side, it blends with the instincts which
+when unchecked in their play degrade humanity.  Plato pictures the two
+mingled elements as two steeds yoked together, the one black, unruly,
+down-plunging, the other white, celestial, up-mounting, while Reason,
+the charioteer, strives to rule  them.  The nobler interpretation is
+slowly acquired by mankind.  There are great, sometimes catastrophic,
+lapses; there are periods when art and literature become the servants
+of the earthly instead of the heavenly Venus.  We still look far
+forward to
+
+  "The world's great bridals, chaste and calm."
+
+Yet, little by little, the ennobling aspect of human beauty becomes a
+familiar perception, is wrought into a habit, is transmitted as an
+inheritance.  Whoever achieves in himself the victory of personal
+purity is helping to open the eyes of mankind.
+
+The material world becomes instinct with majesty and with sweetness to
+the eyes that can see.  It is a revelation of which Wordsworth and
+Emerson are the prophets in literature, but which is written no less in
+many a heart quite untaught of books.  The face of Mother Earth is the
+book in which many a man and woman and child read lessons of delight,
+spelled in letters of rock and fern, of brook and cowslip, of maple
+leaf and goldenrod.  Such lessons mean little save to the pure and
+humble.
+
+The distinctive voice of nature's gospel is a voice of joy.  Mixing
+freely with humanity, we encounter the almost perpetual presence of
+trouble.  But turning to forest and mountain and sea and sky, we are
+confronted with gladness ineffable.  Still "the morning stars sing
+together and the sons of God shout for joy."  Can our religion find no
+other emblem than the cross,--the instrument of torture?  Mankind has
+pondered long the lesson of sorrow: dare it enter the whole inheritance
+of sonship, and taste the fullness of joy?  Reality which thought and
+word cannot convey is bodied forth to us in music and in natural
+beauty.  Music is the deepest voice of humanity, and beauty is the
+answering smile of God.  When the poet-philosopher has crowded into
+verse all that he can express of life's meaning,--of the subservience
+of evil to good, the "deep love lying under these pictures of
+time,"--he invokes at the last the very look of earth and sea and sky
+as the best answer:--
+
+  "Uprose the merry Sphinx,
+    And crouched no more in stone;
+  She melted, into purple cloud,
+    She silvered in the moon;
+  She spired into a yellow flame;
+    She flowered in blossoms red;
+  She flowed into a foaming wave;
+    She stood Monadnoc's head.
+
+  "Thorough a thousand voices
+    Spoke the universal dame,
+  'Who telleth one of my meanings
+    Is master of all I am.'"
+
+
+Yet is the chief exercise of our life through relation with our
+fellow-lives.  If the sublime joy of nature's companionship could be
+made constant, at the price of isolation from our kind, the price were
+a thousand-fold too great.  And it is through true and sympathetic
+relation with other lives that we chiefly come into conscious harmony
+with the universe.  It is in a right interplay with mankind that we get
+closest to the heart of things.
+
+"God is love."  So I am told: how shall I interpret it in my
+experience?  Is it a proposition to be believed about some being
+throned above my sight?  If I exercise my mind in that direction, if I
+weigh and balance and sift the intellectual evidence, I may toil to a
+doubtful conclusion.  But let me, issuing forth from my ponderings, put
+myself into kindly relations with my fellow beings,--let me so much as
+pat affectionately the head of the honest dog who meets me on the
+street,--and a thrill like the warmth of spring touches my chilled
+intellect.  Let me, for a day only, make each human contact, though but
+of a passing moment, a true recognition of some other soul, and I feel
+myself somehow in right relation with the world.  "He that loveth
+knoweth God, and is born of God."
+
+At the heart of all love is an instinct of reciprocity.  It may or may
+not get a return from its immediate object, but somehow it opens the
+fountains of the universe.  The heart that loves finds itself, it
+scarce knows how, beloved.
+
+
+Such, then, is the process, and such the revelation.  The first step,
+the constant requirement, the unsparing hourly need, is obedience to
+the known right.  The sequence is an ever-widening sense of a sweet and
+celestial encompassment.
+
+The man rightly practiced in all noble exercises of life--in moral
+fidelity, in reverence and sympathy, in observation and conformity to
+the actual conditions of the world about him--will find pouring in upon
+him a beauty, a love, a divinity, which fill the soul with a heavenly
+vision.  And that soul, in whatever of extremity may come to it, has
+under its feet the eternal rock.
+
+
+Through the serious literature of to-day runs a bitter wail,--the cry
+that life is sad and dark and cruel.  Sad and dark and cruel it is,
+until one meets it sword in hand.  The great Mother will have her
+children to be heroes.  She tests them, frightens them, masks herself
+sometimes in terror.  Face the terror, drive straight at the danger,
+and the mask dissolves to show the celestial smile, the "all-repaying
+eyes."
+
+
+The road is an arduous one.  The aged philosopher, you remember, was
+asked by a youthful monarch, "Tell me if you please in a few words what
+is the final fruit and outcome of philosophy?"  The philosopher
+answered him, "Cultivate yourself diligently in all virtue and wisdom
+for thirty years, and then you may be able to partly understand the
+answer to your question."
+
+It is an arduous road, but it leads to reality.  All short and easy
+answers to the supreme question dissatisfy after the first flush.  The
+confidence of the dogmatic answer, we soon discover, has no sufficient
+authority to back it.  The glib theoretical answer leads us, after all,
+to a Balance of Probabilities.  That is the best God that theoretic
+philosophy can give us.  It may be better than nothing.  But who can
+love a Balance of Probabilities?  Who can feel the hand of such a deity
+as that when his hand gropes for support in face of temptation,
+disaster, heartbreak?
+
+
+We are told, "It may suffice for the strong and saintly to bid them
+'Prove for yourself that the universe is good;' but what kind of gospel
+is this for the weak, for the child, for the average man and woman?"
+The answer is: The vast majority of mankind always have lived and
+always will live largely by reliance on some person or some body of
+persons or some social atmosphere of opinion.  That authority of the
+church which has availed so much is just the confidence of a crowd in
+the leadership of certain men to whom they are accustomed to look up.
+In the order of nature, always the leaders will lead.  What the strong
+and saintly receive with vivid impression and profound assurance, the
+mass who feel their influence will accept a good deal on their
+authority.  The child will catch the faith of its father and mother.
+But, further, in its very nature, that method of approach to the
+highest reality which requires only goodness and open-heartedness and
+love is available to the little child and to the simplest mind.  When
+Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peace-makers, the
+pure in heart, they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness,"
+every one understood him.
+
+
+But it may be asked, Does this attitude bring man face to face with a
+personal God?  Personal he will be to some: to many the only solid and
+adequate expression of a real being is a personal being.  Nay, to many
+only a human personality means anything.  A great preacher and poet of
+our day once said that he never thought of God except under the figure
+of Christ,--a human figure in some human occupation and attitude.  Let
+Divinity body itself as Christ to minds so constituted.  Let others
+invoke "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."  But impose no
+constraint and lay no ban on those to whom, as Carlyle says, "the
+Highest cannot be spoken of in words.  Personal!  Impersonal!  One!
+Three!  What meaning can any mortal, after all, attach to them in
+reference to such an object?"  It is not these forms of thought that
+are essential.  What is essential is a way of living access to the
+Highest.
+
+
+The adequate conception--the keynote--must be one that is sufficient
+alike for the every-day mood, for the exalted hours, and for the
+emergencies.  That keynote is given in this truth: that there is no
+moment so dull or so hard but one can ask himself, What is the best the
+situation allows? and conform to that; can open his eyes to some beauty
+close at hand; can enter sympathetically into some neighboring life.
+
+
+We prescribe to ourselves certain attitudes, and strive toward certain
+ideals.  But the supreme hours are those in which there flow in upon
+our consciousness the inshinings and the upholdings of some unfathomed
+Power.  We are led, we are carried.  We feel, we know not whence nor
+how, a peace that passeth understanding and a love that casteth out
+fear.
+
+This is the substance of that religious experience in which throughout
+the ages the heart of man has found its deepest support and
+encouragement.  The experience has clothed itself to the imagination in
+the garb of this or that creed or climate.  It is liable to debasements
+and counterfeits, but no more liable than all other noble emotions and
+experiences.  Sometimes there is the culmination of a moral struggle,
+and the whole course of life receives a new direction.  Sometimes there
+is an illumination and joy and peace.  It is an exaltation of the soul
+in which gladness blends with moral energy.  No chapter of human life
+is written in deeper letters than those which tell of victory over
+temptation, strength out of weakness, radiance beside the grave,
+through this divine uplift.
+
+
+There is another experience, more common, less dependent on individual
+constitution, which bears an inward message of soberer tone but of like
+import.  It is the peace which attends the consciousness of
+right-doing.  Wordsworth personifies it as the approval of Duty, "stern
+daughter of the voice of God:"--
+
+  "Stern Lawgiver!  Yet thou dost wear
+    The Godhead's most benignant grace;
+  Nor know we anything more fair
+    Than is the smile upon thy face."
+
+
+The faithful child of duty, whatever his creed, whatever his
+temperament, is naturally the possessor of a steady, calm assurance.
+Somehow, he feels, it is well.
+
+
+Reasonings about immortality lead to little result.  Convinced or
+unconvinced, we profit little by a mere opinion.  We speculate, doubt,
+reject, or hope; and in either case the moral conduct of life is,
+perhaps, not much affected.  But there come hours when to love and
+aspiration the heavenly vision opens, and the sense of its own eternity
+thrills the soul.
+
+The crying need of the heart is always a present need.  No promise of a
+far-away satisfaction is sufficient for it.  And answering to just that
+need is the experience, sometimes given, that the human love once ours
+is ours still in its fullness,--some richer fullness even than that of
+days gone by.  There are hours in which the heart's voice is,
+
+  "Though mixed with God and Nature thou,
+    I seem to love thee more and more."
+
+
+The highest state of consciousness to which we attain is expressed by
+the old phrase that man feels himself a child of God.  His energy feels
+back of it an infinite energy.  His desires rest peacefully in some
+all-sufficing good.  All that is highest and purest in him mingles with
+its divine source.  He sees new and higher interpretations of his own
+life and other lives.  All the human love he has ever experienced he
+holds as an abiding possession.  There comes to him not so much the
+premonition of a future state as the consciousness of some state in
+which past, present, and future blend.  He is free from illusions, and
+serene.  It does not disturb him even to know that the vision will
+pass, and he will return to earth's level.  He sees the truth, he feels
+the divine reality; and the certainty and the gladness are such that
+not even the prevision of his own relapse into dimmer perception can
+depress him.  The hour speaks with command to the hours that are to
+follow; it bids them to fidelity, to love, to highest courage.
+
+When turning from contemplation we throw ourselves into the work and
+the battle, a pulse of divine energy blends with our noblest effort,
+touches our joy with an ineffable sweetness, and hushes our sorrow like
+a child folded in its mother's arms.
+
+The key of the world is given into our hands when we throw ourselves
+unreservedly into the service of the highest truth we know, "with
+fidelity to the right as God gives us to see the right."  So it is that
+we may find ourselves
+
+  "Wedded to this goodly universe
+  In love and holy passion."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK
+
+A tourist who roams for a brief while through some great country like
+England or Russia may jot down a few of the impressions which come home
+to him, making no pretense at completeness or symmetry of description.
+So, one who has journeyed like a hasty traveler over some passages in
+that vast tract of years which we describe as the classic and Christian
+civilizations, notes down in the following pages a few of the salient
+features that have impressed him.  He has already prefaced this with a
+sort of outline map, drawn largely from familiar authorities, under the
+title "Our Spiritual Ancestry;" and has further ventured to interpret
+some phases of our own time, as "The Ideal of To-Day."  Now he goes on to
+group a few observations on some special phases of the historical survey,
+disclaiming any attempt at exact proportion and perspective, but
+lingering where the prospect has pleased his fancy, or at points which
+seemed to yield some necessary clew or fruitful suggestion.
+
+
+When, in the poems bearing the name of Homer, the curtain rises on the
+drama of man as it was acted in Greece, after the immeasurable
+prehistoric space, we are amazed at the sudden brilliance.  The men and
+deeds brought before us are various in character and worth,--savage,
+heroic, repulsive, beautiful, by turns.  But the ever-present charm is
+man seeing the world about him.  It is the vividness with which every
+object is seen in its distinctive form and spirit, and conveyed by the
+fit word and phrase.  So seen and spoken, the commonest object becomes a
+thing of delight.  The high-roofed house, the brazen threshold, the
+polished chest, the silver-studded sword, the purple robes,--the tawny
+oxen, the hollow ships, the tapering oars,--the wine-dark sea, the
+rosy-fingered dawn, the gold-throned morning,--Hector of the nodding
+plume, the white-armed Nausicaa,--so in long procession moves the
+spectacle.  A like distinctness invests all the actions and emotions of
+the story with charm.  To us, as to the poet, the world becomes enchanted
+simply in being seen.
+
+And presently we discover a strange transfiguration that is being
+wrought.  Experiences which were painful or grievous to the actors and
+sufferers become in the representation the source of keen pleasure to the
+hearers or readers.  The Iliad is mainly a story of men destroying one
+another.  The Odyssey depicts a long strife with hardship and danger.
+The men who heard those songs were themselves familiar with the fight,
+with the wounds and terrors mixed with its energies and elations; they
+had tasted the perils of shipwreck and of pirates.  But as they listened,
+the rehearsal of trials the counterpart of their own filled them with
+exhilaration.  We who read in modern days, if less experienced in
+bloodshed and bodily peril, yet in some fashion have had our share of
+battle and storm; and we, too, like the first listeners, drink in the
+tale with delight.  The poet, in other words, has the secret not only of
+seeing but of idealizing the actual world.  We catch from him some subtle
+art by which, standing a little aloof from the pressure and turmoil
+around us, often felt as painful or degrading, we see it through an
+atmosphere in which it becomes a splendid and heart-stirring scene.  At a
+later stage we may perhaps in a degree analyze the change of view; we may
+partly understand how through the struggle with evil man is strengthened
+and ennobled; how in such strife courage and sympathy and tenderness are
+engendered.  But long before we can thus philosophize, and to a degree
+which our philosophy can hardly explain, we are affected by this beauty
+and elevation imparted to the spectacle of human life by the true poets.
+
+We moderns read Homer with delight in the roll of the music, the
+vividness of the pictures, the humanity so near us in its essence and so
+unlike in its dress.  When we inquire what are the moral ideals, we are
+often uncertain how far the impressions made on us may differ from those
+of the original audience, or the intention of the singer.  But often his
+work is like the painting of great Nature herself.  We pass upon it as we
+pass upon the facts of life.
+
+The supernal features in the story are not here discussed.  The deities,
+judged by our standards, have little of divinity.  Beyond the grave lies
+a dim and dreamy realm.  All this, with its great significance, we here
+omit, to linger a little on the essential and permanent humanity.
+
+Achilles, the embodiment of power and passion, just touched with human
+ruth; Hector, the selfless, brave and gentle champion; Odysseus, victor
+in the long pilgrimage by fortitude and by wisdom,--these are the three
+ideal types of the early world, portrayed by its noblest genius.
+
+The Iliad culminates in the triumph of pity.  The heart of Zeus is
+melted, the harder heart of Achilles is melted, before the sorrows of
+bereaved old age.  An exquisite gentleness breathes through the closing
+scenes.  All the wrath and terror and savagery of the story have led up
+to this height of pure compassion.  A new light falls on all that has
+gone before.  Achilles, the fierce hero of the earlier story, is outshone
+by his victim, Hector of the great and gentle heart.  The crowning word
+of praise, after father, mother, wife have uttered their lament, is
+spoken by the frail woman whose sin had brought ruin on Hector and his
+people: "If any other haply upbraided me in the palace halls, then
+wouldst thou soothe such with words, and refrain them by the gentleness
+of thy spirit and by thy gentle words.  Therefore bewail I thee with pain
+at heart, and my hapless self with thee, for no more is any left in wide
+Troy-land to be my friend and kind to me, but all men shudder at me."
+
+We see the sin of man and woman wrecking nations and leaving the sinner
+in dreary isolation.  We see unrelenting wrath, even when provoked by
+wrong, spreading woe upon the innocent, and at last smiting the wrathful
+man through his dearest affections.  We see the heroism which meets death
+in defense of the beloved, yet has only tender pity for her who has
+wrought the ruin.
+
+The Iliad is mostly war,--men acting hell on earth, as Goethe said.  But
+in the Odyssey the goal of the hero is his home.  The magnet is not
+Helen's beauty, but Penelope's faithfulness.  Odysseus, mighty warrior,
+crafty leader,--who with his sword has smitten the Trojans, by his wiles
+destroyed their city,--Odysseus is driven for ten years through hostile
+seas and men and gods by the compelling passion of home-sickness!
+
+In the Odyssey, it is the battle with the sea which does most to toughen
+and supple and make indomitable.  The soldier and sailor are the pioneers
+of the race.  These and the tiller of the earth are the strong roots out
+of which are to grow the flower and fruit.
+
+In the Iliad, woman appears in Helen as the tempting prize and the gage
+of battle, and in Andromeda as the tender wife foredoomed to bereavement
+and captivity.  In the Odyssey, woman plays a higher part--as Penelope,
+faithful and prudent and patient wife, fit spouse for Odysseus; as
+Eurydice, the devoted old nurse; and as Nausicaa, loveliest of pristine
+maidens.
+
+"The story of her worth shall never die; but for all humankind immortal
+ones shall make a gladsome song in praise of steadfast Penelope."  It is
+a noble story: the fidelity of a wife, the undaunted courage of a man; a
+long battle with adversity, crowned with the joy of love's reunion; the
+meeting with servant, nurse, dog, son, wife, father.
+
+Odysseus fights his battle as every hero must,--against hostile nature
+and man,--by courage and patience and craft, and a confidence that the
+heavenly power will somehow bring him through.
+
+So at the heart of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an austere and sweet
+message.  The singers who embodied it in tales which stir every pulse
+with delight were among the supreme teachers of mankind.  The inner
+meaning of humanity's story which their songs display is still the lesson
+set us,--out of adversity man may win fortitude; through battle,
+shipwreck, and overthrow he scales the heights of manhood; and the
+faithful pilgrimage ends in a home which is dearer for all troubles past.
+
+The Homeric poems show man in his first full awaking to beauty and to
+music.  They show more.  The fashioning of the supernal world in man's
+mind varies with people and with time.  Here it is Zeus and Hades, again
+it will be Jehovah and Satan, and then Heaven and Hell.  But in the Iliad
+and Odyssey the human heart recognizes its rightful lords as long as it
+shall endure,--Courage and Pity, Fortitude and Fidelity.
+
+
+Socrates is the man who has actually achieved goodness, and tries to make
+a science and art of goodness, to find a way in which it can be clearly
+known and rationally and effectively taught.  "Can virtue be taught?" is
+his characteristic question.  The chief result of his keen scrutiny is to
+bring to light how little men really know of the higher life,--how little
+he knows of it himself.  The effect of this revelation of ignorance is
+not a despair of truth, but a humility which is the beginning of wisdom.
+The deepest thing in Socrates is his knowledge of the good life as a
+reality, and of the joy and peace which it brings.  Secure in this, he
+can go on in the most fearless temper, and even with light-hearted
+jesting, to sift the questions.  Intellectually, his main achievement is
+to bring out clearly the problems to be faced, and to give an immense
+stimulus to the higher class of minds.
+
+In the picture of Socrates by Xenophon in the Memorabilia, which bears
+all the marks of true portraiture, goodness goes with happiness and
+knowledge.  It is a most winning combination--beautiful as a Greek
+statue.  Xenophon lays stress on his happiness, but the basis is
+self-command.  Among a people where even religion and philosophy were
+tolerant of sensuality, he was pure.  He was hardy, trained to bear heat
+and cold, temperate, simple, faithful to civic duty, a reverent worshiper
+of the gods, watchful for the divine leading.
+
+Xenophon shows him absorbed in teaching, imparting the best he has found,
+never so happy as when he can win a young man to virtue.  His ideal
+society is the union of those who together are seeking goodness and
+knowledge.
+
+His patience is shown under the worst of domestic annoyances, a scolding
+wife,--he says he thus learns to bear all other crosses.  His admonition
+to his son to bear with her shows genuine tenderness.
+
+He has the heroic quality.  He resists the raging people, and refuses the
+part assigned him in voting the death sentence on the generals whose
+defeat had been a misfortune and not a fault.  He calmly disobeys the
+Thirty Tyrants, at the risk of his life.  He dies at last, a tranquil
+martyr to fearless truth-speaking.
+
+He teaches nobly of Providence, the Supreme, the guidance from above.  He
+conforms to the religion of his people, while planting a higher truth.
+When Athens, faithfully warned by him in vain, was sinking toward ruin
+and decay, he was sowing the seeds of spiritual harvests for future
+generations, like Jesus when Judea was tottering to its fall.  In the
+intellectual development of man's higher life he holds a place not unlike
+that of Jesus in the emotional development.
+
+Socrates, as Xenophon describes him, goes no farther as a teacher than to
+impress the principles of conduct as they were generally accepted by good
+men of the time, with peculiar persuasiveness.  But Plato shows him as an
+original investigator of the human mind and the universe.  In this there
+is an undoubted trait of true portraiture, but its limit is very
+difficult to trace, because in Plato's dialogues the master is made the
+mouthpiece of all the pupil's philosophy.  The most distinctive feature
+which can be identified as that of Socrates himself is the
+cross-examination.  Under this process, high-sounding generalities,--put
+in the mouths of speakers in the dialogues, the whole word-play set forth
+with exquisite grace and charm,--are shown by a rigid sifting to resolve
+themselves into nebulous and baseless figments,--the mere simulacra of
+true knowledge.
+
+The conversations glide from this destructive analysis into a
+constructive philosophy, and then we soon feel that it is Plato rather
+than Socrates whom we are getting.  The great contribution of Socrates
+himself to philosophy is the attitude he impressed--of inquiry which is
+serious because seeking the foundations of virtue and happiness, and is
+inexorable in its insistence on nothing less than solid reality.  Against
+all allurements of indolence, comfort, and social convention he presses
+the question, What is _true_?  His characteristic word is:
+
+"Some things, Meno, I have said of which I am not altogether confident.
+But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that
+we ought to inquire than we should have been if we indulged in the idle
+fancy that there was no knowing and no use in searching after what we
+know not; that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and
+deed, to the utmost of my power."
+
+
+Plato took from Socrates not method but inspiration, and soared into
+speculation.  He wrote over the door of the Academy, "Let no one enter
+here who does not know geometry."  That is, you are first to acquire
+absolute confidence, by familiarity with the demonstrations of
+mathematics, that real and certain knowledge is accessible to the human
+mind.  Thus planting his foot on firmest certainty, Plato leaps off into
+a glorious sea of clouds.  Flashes of insight and sublime allegory mix
+with fantastic theory and word-play.
+
+The vast range of his thought we will touch only at two points.  In the
+Symposium and the Phaedrus he discusses in his most brilliant vein the
+problem of love.  To the reader who has inherited the ethical ideal of
+Christianity, Plato's love will seem like the image in Nebuchadnezzar's
+vision,--the head of gold, the feet of miry clay.  He has a toleration
+for some aspects of sensuality of which Paul said, "it is a shame even to
+speak;" and this tolerance, in the greatest of the classic philosophers,
+is the most pregnant suggestion of the cleansing work which it was left
+for Christianity to undertake.  Yet Plato teaches most impressively the
+subordination of sense to spirit in love, and the struggle of the two in
+man has seldom been set forth more powerfully than in his figure of the
+two yoked horses: the white, celestial steed struggling upward; the
+black, unruly one plunging down, while Reason, the charioteer, strives to
+guide.  In the description of Love which Socrates professes to quote from
+the wise woman of Mantineia, there is the very height of the Platonic
+philosophy,--the gradual sublimation of human passion to the recognition
+of all noble forms and ideas, and at last to the vision of the Divine
+Beauty which is one with Wisdom and with Love.
+
+"The true order of going or being led by another to the things of love is
+to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for
+the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all
+fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to
+fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of
+absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.
+
+"What if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean,
+pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollution of
+mortality, and all the colors and vanities of human life--thither looking
+and holding converse with the true beauty divine and simple, and bringing
+into being and educating true creations of virtue, and not idols only?
+Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye
+of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but
+realities; for he has hold not of an image but of a reality,--and will be
+enabled, bringing forth and educating true virtue, to become the friend
+of God and be immortal, if mortal man may." [1]
+
+It is largely to Plato that we owe the idea of immortality as it exists
+in the mind of the civilized world to-day.  The belief in a continued
+existence beyond death is much older; it is seen in the Iliad, where the
+appearance of the dead Patroclus to Achilles in a dream is accepted as
+the assurance of a shadowy and forlorn hereafter; and in the Odyssey the
+visit of the hero to the land of shades is portrayed with a free and
+gloomy imagination.  It was a belief which among the earlier Greeks had
+little power either to console or to guide.  In the age of Socrates, it
+seems to have signified little in the minds of the orthodox and pious.
+The great tragedians, who sublimate the popular mythology, for the most
+part regard the after-life as only a sad inevitable sequel; and to be
+snatched back from it for even a brief reprieve, like Alkestis, is
+miraculous good fortune.  The greatest of the tragedians in his highest
+reach, Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, invests the departure of the
+hero, who has been purified by suffering, with a mystic radiance, a
+"light that never was on sea or land," the promise as it were of some
+future too sublime for mortal words.  But the philosophy of Socrates was
+directed rather to the clear penetration of the method and secret of
+earthly life, than to any vision of the hereafter.  It is noticeable that
+Xenophon, the loyal disciple and biographer of Socrates, himself of the
+best type of orthodox piety, and zealous to vindicate his master from the
+charge of irreligion,--Xenophon, in all the story of the master's life
+and death, gives not a hint of any future hope.  But Plato developed the
+idea that in man there resides an essential, indestructible principle,
+superior to the physical frame which is its home and may be either its
+servant or master--a principle which manifests itself in thought,
+aspiration, virtue; which has existed before the body and will exist
+after it; which chooses for itself an upward or downward path; and which
+rightly tends to a celestial and immortal destiny.  The thought never won
+universal acceptance even among philosophers; it had only an indirect and
+slight effect on the Stoicism which was the best religious product of
+ancient philosophy.  But it wrought by degrees all effect on the thinking
+of mankind.  While the lofty faith of the Egyptian passed away leaving no
+visible fruit, the idea of Plato slowly suffused with its light and
+warmth the current of human aspirations.  Meantime, the later Jewish
+belief in a hereafter--in its form a much cruder conception of a physical
+revival from the grave--flamed up in a passionate ardor, as the sequence
+of the life and teaching of Jesus.  The Platonic and the Christian belief
+sprang from a like source.  Each was born from the death of a man so
+great and so beloved as to give the impression of some imperishable
+quality.
+
+Socrates, with his noble character and aim, was put to death as a
+criminal.  Was that the end of it all?  Impossible--monstrous--never, if
+this world be indeed a cosmos.  The one firm certainty which Socrates
+seems to have held, "No evil can happen to a good man in life or
+death,"--flashes in Plato's mind into a glorious hope of immortality,
+embodied in his loftiest passage, the picture of the dying Socrates.
+
+The soul when withdrawn from all outward objects and rapt in
+contemplation is nearest to the divine,--this is the central thought of
+the Phaedo.  It is pursued with much subtle argumentation, of which the
+essential residuum is this: the soul's action is purest and most intense
+when farthest withdrawn from the visible and tangible world,--and hence
+we guess that her true and eternal home is in that invisible realm of
+which all this material universe is but the veil and symbol.
+
+But more impressive than the argument, more moving to the human heart, is
+the picture which is given of Socrates himself as the hour of death comes
+on,--the exaltation of all his familiar traits, the playfulness so
+exquisitely blent with seriousness, the searching thought, the frank
+human desire to be convinced by his own argument,--the charm of his
+friendly ways, the hand playing with Phaedo's hair, the taking of the cup
+"in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the least fear or change of
+color, looking at the man with all his eyes as his manner was,"--the last
+word, of calm reminder of a trivial obligation,--the whole scene of
+majestic and tender peace, like a sunset.  It is a scene which reconciles
+us to life, and makes us no longer impatient even of our uncertainties.
+It speaks with a voice like that of Landor's verse:--
+
+  "Death stands above me, whispering low,
+    I know not what into my ear,
+  Of his strange language all I know
+    Is,--there is not a word of fear."
+
+
+To the modern reader there is a singular contradiction between the
+doctrine of Lucretius and his temper.  The denial of any divine
+supervision of human life, or any hereafter for man; the dominion over
+all existence of purely material law,--this seems to us to destroy man's
+dearest faith and hope.  This is the teaching of Lucretius, yet on this
+road he marches with a step so firm and buoyant, an eye so awake to all
+beauty and grandeur, a spirit so elate, that as we read we catch the
+energy and elation.  The reading of the riddle is this: the religion
+against which Lucretius made his attack was not the soaring idealism of
+Plato, nor the inspiring and consolatory faith of Christianity, but an
+outworn mythology in which this world was ruled by capricious and
+unworthy despots, and the next world was gloomy with terrors and almost
+unlighted by hopes.  Such had become the popular mythology in its later
+day, and as contrasted with this the view and temper of Lucretius are
+rational and manly.  His message went far beyond a negation; he announced
+one of the greatest discoveries of the human spirit--the uniformity of
+nature.  Well might the genius of poetry and the vigor of manhood unite
+to make the message impressive and splendid.  Not caprice, but
+order,--not conflict, but harmony,--not deified partialities and spites
+and lusts, but exalted and unchanging law, rules the universe!
+
+When Lucretius essayed to define in what this law consists, he fell
+hopelessly short of the mark.  In his revulsion from the chaos and
+pettiness of man-like divinities, he fixed on material forces,--clearly
+to be seen and permanent in their operation,--as the only and sufficient
+cause and order.  Those forces, by a brilliant guess, he resolved into an
+interplay of atoms.  From this basis he projected a physical theory,
+which we know now was quite inadequate even for material phenomena, while
+the application of it to human thought and will was hopelessly
+insufficient.  Viewed from this standpoint, the spectacle of human life
+takes on a sadness which the poet's genius cannot dispel, and sometimes
+intensifies.  To man's inner world Lucretius has no serviceable key.  But
+he is to be judged not by what he missed but by what he gained.  He above
+all others stands as the discoverer of one of the few cardinal truths by
+which to-day we interpret the universe,--the constancy of nature.
+
+The genius of Lucretius did for the realm of thought what Roman
+statesmanship did for the nations,--it brought peace and order among
+warring elements, by the imposition of a rule which was often narrow and
+harsh, but which was firm, stable, and the foundation for fairer and
+freer growths.
+
+
+Already in Lucretius, and now again in Epictetus, we have passed from the
+Greek into the Roman world.  It is a change partly of race, partly of
+time, and it is in close analogy with the successive phases of the human
+spirit.  The mythology which satisfied the youth of the world had grown
+unlovely and unreal.  Plato's splendid imaginings had yielded neither a
+secure basis to the thinker nor a moral guidance to the common man.
+Lucretius's interpretation of all events as the product of material law
+had small power to sustain or cheer when the intellectual glow of the
+bold innovator had subsided.  Thoughtful men sought as their one supreme
+necessity an adequate and worthy rule of life.  So there was wrought out,
+or grew, the Stoic philosophy.  Based on an intellectual theory, its
+working strength lay in its consonance with the best habits and aptitudes
+engendered in the world's actual experience.  The Greek type was beauty,
+pleasure, thought, freedom; the Roman type was law, obedience,
+self-mastery.  The legion was the school of discipline and fidelity.  The
+forum was the theatre where classes and parties, through rude jostling,
+worked out an efficient political order.  A Greek thinker gave the mould,
+and Roman virtue gave the metal, of the Stoic type.
+
+We may best study that type in Epictetus,--once a slave, afterward a
+teacher; so careless of fame that he left no written work, and we have
+only the priceless notes taken down by a faithful scholar, making a book
+whose stamp of heroic manhood twenty centuries have not dimmed.
+
+"Man is master of his fate."  The true aim of life is goodness, and
+goodness is within the command of the will.  The lawgiver is Nature, and
+Nature bids us to be just, strong, pure, and to seek the good of our
+fellows.  Such was the essence of Stoicism.  As to deity, providence, or
+a hereafter,--belief and hope varied, according to the individual; but to
+the true Stoic the all-important matter was, Act well your part, here and
+now.
+
+In Epictetus is always the note of reality and of victory.  While
+actually a slave, he has learned the secret of inward freedom.  His
+essential doctrine is that good and evil reside wholly in the will, and
+the will is free.  As we choose, so we are.  And by the right choice we
+find ourselves in harmony with the universe.
+
+Though Epictetus continually appeals to reason, his basal word is to the
+will.  Be constant to duty--accept the order of things as good, and be
+true to the highest law--revere "nature," the established order; obey
+"nature," the ideal law.  Take all for the best, and you make all for the
+best.
+
+Most practical and inspiring are his counsels.  The war must be waged in
+the inmost thoughts.  The images that rise to seduce, the images that
+rise to dismay, are to be fought down and driven away.  "Be not hurried
+away by the rapidity of the appearance, but say, Appearances, wait for me
+a little; let me see who you are and what you are about; let me put you
+to the test.  And then do not allow the appearance to lead you on and
+draw lively pictures of the things which will follow, for if you do, it
+will carry you off wherever it pleases.  But rather bring to oppose it
+some other beautiful and noble appearance, and cast out this base
+appearance.  And if you are accustomed to be exercised in this way, you
+will see what shoulders, what sinews, what strength you have." [2]
+
+"Be willing at length to be approved by yourself, be willing to appear
+beautiful to God, desire to be in purity with your own pure self and with
+God.  Then, when any such appearance visits you, Plato says, Have
+recourse to expiations, go a suppliant to the temples of the averting
+Deities.  It is even sufficient if you resort to the society of noble and
+just men, and compare yourself with them, whether you find one who is
+living or dead."
+
+"This is the true athlete, the man who exercises himself against such
+appearances.  Stay, wretch, do not be carried away.  Great is the combat,
+divine is the work; it is for kingship, for freedom, for happiness, for
+freedom from perturbation.  Remember God, call on him as a helper and
+protector, as men at sea call on the Dioscuri in a storm.  For what is a
+greater storm than that which comes from appearances which are violent
+and drive away the reason?"
+
+Epictetus, compared with Plato, is the warrior philosopher beside the
+seeing philosopher.  He is in closest grip with the foe, and his calm is
+the calm of the victor holding down his enemy.
+
+His apparent unconcern as to the hereafter is in keeping with his whole
+attitude, which is that of cheerful acquiescence in the divine order,
+whatever it be.  "To be free, not hindered, not compelled, conforming
+yourself to the administration of Zeus, obeying it, well satisfied with
+this, blaming no one, charging no one with fault, able from your whole
+soul to utter these verses:--
+
+  "Lead me, O Zeus, and thou, too, Destiny."
+
+
+He vindicates Providence against injustice.  "The unjust man has the
+advantage,--in what?  In money.  But the just man has the advantage in
+that he is faithful and modest."
+
+"We ought to have these two principles in readiness, that except the will
+nothing is good nor bad; and that we ought not to lead events, but to
+follow them.  My brother ought not to have behaved thus to me.  No, but
+he will see to that; and, however he may behave, I will conduct myself
+toward him as I ought."
+
+"As a mark is not set up for the purpose of missing the aim, so neither
+does the nature of evil exist in the world."
+
+That is, it is inconceivable that the universe is a blunder.  This is one
+of the fundamental ideas of Epictetus.  The inference is, that man has
+only to define his true end and pursue it, which is the right action of
+the will, or as we should say, right character.  Pursuing this, he never
+finds himself thwarted or unfriended, never rebels or mistrusts the gods.
+
+The substance of his message is: "On the occasion of every accident
+(event) that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what
+power you have for turning it to use."
+
+"God has delivered yourself to your own care, and says, 'I had no fitter
+one to intrust him to than yourself; keep him for me such as he is by
+nature, modest, faithful, erect, unterrified, free from passion and
+perturbation.'"
+
+God, says Epictetus, has made me his witness to men.  "For this purpose
+he leads me at one time hither, at another time sends me thither; shows
+me to men as poor, without authority and sick; sends me to Gyara, leads
+me into prison, not because he hates me,--far from him be such a meaning,
+for who hates the best of his servants? nor yet because he cares not for
+me, for he does not neglect any, even of the smallest things; but he does
+this for the purpose of exercising me and making use of me as a witness
+to others.  Being appointed to such a service, do I still care about the
+place in which I am, or with whom I am, or what men say about me? and do
+I not entirely direct my thoughts to God, and to his instructions and
+commands?"
+
+Thus he falls back on the life of the spirit,--simple, sure, victorious.
+To place all good in character is the secret.  From virtue grows piety.
+It is desire set on externals, and so disappointed, that brings
+discontent, repining, impiety.
+
+Yet Epictetus has distinct and serious limitations.  He assumes that to
+avoid all perturbation is the aim of the wise man.  This can be
+accomplished only by the sacrifice of all objects of desire which lie
+outside of the control of the will, and he advises this sacrifice.  "If
+you love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love;
+for when it has been broken you will not be disturbed.  If you are
+kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being whom you are
+kissing, for when the wife or child dies you will not be disturbed."
+
+All joys but the purely moral are to be despised.  In going to the
+theatre one should be indifferent to who gains the prize.  This attempted
+indifference to all the great and little pleasures of life which have no
+distinct moral character, if successful, makes an ascetic, and of most
+men is liable to make prigs.  It is the vice of Puritanism.
+
+The modern world is riper and richer than the Roman world.  We say now,
+the ideal man is not "unperturbed."  Perturbations are inevitable to the
+man normally and highly developed, with sensibilities and sympathies
+keenly alive.  The true aim is to include composure, but not as sole and
+supreme.  This is a more complex development than the Stoic, less capable
+perhaps of symmetrical completeness, but grander, as a Gothic church is
+grander than a Greek temple.
+
+Again, the assumption of Epictetus and of all the Stoics that the will is
+wholly free, that man has only to choose and seek goodness and he can
+perfectly achieve it, misses the familiar and bitter experience of
+humanity, that too often man carries his prison and fetters within
+himself.  A Roman poet voiced it: _Meliora video proboque, deteriora
+sequor_.  Paul spoke it: "The good that I would, I do not; and the evil I
+would not, that I do."
+
+But Epictetus himself is one of the great souls who are not to be
+described by the label of any creed.  He has in himself the secret of
+spiritual victory, and he has a peculiar power to impart it.  The
+limitations of Stoicism as a creed are more plainly seen in Marcus
+Aurelius.  His character, revealed in the "fierce light that beats upon a
+throne," is of rare nobility and beauty.  To a man's strength he unites a
+woman's tenderness.  Just because of that tenderness, and the deep heart
+of which it is the flower, the philosophy he so bravely practices gives
+him but a bleak and chill abiding-place.  Through his Meditations--manly,
+wise, and gracious--there runs a deep note of sadness.  For this man's
+nature cried out for love, and not even faithfulest duty can take the
+place of love.
+
+Stoicism was the most distinct embodiment of the virtues of the classic
+world.  Those virtues shone in many who did not profess themselves to be
+of the Stoic school.  Plutarch's gallery of portraits is a part of the
+world's best possession.  His heroes belong not to their own time alone.
+They may be distinguished in some broad respects from the saints and
+sages of other lands and times; some advance of type may be traced in the
+highest products of the successive ages; but while one turns the pages of
+Plutarch, he scarcely asks for better company.
+
+Why, then, did Stoic philosophy fail of more wide or lasting success
+among mankind?  Because--we may perhaps answer--its chief weapon was the
+reasoning intellect, in which only a few could be proficient.  Because,
+fixing its ideal in imperturbability, it denied sensibilities of
+affection, joy, and hope, which are a large part of normal humanity.
+Because, in its lack of natural science, and its revulsion from the
+mythologic deities, it isolated man in the universe, claiming for the
+individual will a sovereignty which ignored the ensphering play of
+natural forces, and denying to the heart any outreach beyond the earthly
+and finite.  If we may venture to summarize the defects of ancient
+philosophy in two words--it lacked womanliness and it lacked knowledge.
+
+We are now to study the building up of another side of the ideal man.
+Philosophy had essayed a religion of the intellect and the will; now from
+Judaism sprang Christianity, a religion of the imagination and the heart.
+
+
+The highest outcome of the classic civilization was the clear conception
+and strenuous practice of right for its own sake.  The outcome of Judaism
+in Christianity was essentially the belief and feeling of an intimate
+union between man and a higher power, with love and obedience on the one
+side, love and providence on the other.
+
+In the vast tract of Greek-Roman history, we have looked at only a few of
+the highest mountain peaks--the noblest contributions.  But since the
+Christian church still treats the Old Testament as one of its charter
+documents, we need to enlarge a little upon the general outline and color
+of Jewish history, and we must recognize the shadows as well as the
+lights.
+
+The traditional interpretation of the Old Testament which is still
+current is based on successive misconceptions, overlaying and blending
+with each other like close-piled geologic strata.  Pious intent of the
+original writers, shaping their facts to suit their theories--later
+assumptions of inspiration and infallibility in the records--theologic
+systems quarried and built out of these materials--the supposed
+dependence of the most precious faiths of mankind upon these misreadings
+of history,--all these influences, with the lapse of time, have buried so
+deeply the original facts, that the exhuming and revivifying of the true
+story, or at least a tolerable similitude of its main lines, has imposed
+a gigantic task upon modern scholarship.  Of the results of this
+scholarship, we may give here only a kind of shorthand memorandum.
+
+The Old Testament as a whole, with precious exceptions, can only by a
+great stretch of imagination be claimed as an integral part of "_the_
+book of religion"--the title which Matthew Arnold asserts for the entire
+Bible.  The phrase can scarcely be applied to the Old Testament, unless
+it be read through a medium surcharged with association and
+prepossession.  Much of its morality has been outgrown; many of its early
+stories are revolting to us: much, of which the inner meaning is at one
+with our deepest life, is disguised under phraseology wholly alien to our
+modern thought and speech.  As a manual of devotion, or as a textbook for
+the young, the Old Testament can never again fill such a place as it
+filled to our fathers.  But we can still trace in it many of the upward
+steps of the race, and there are portions which still hold a deep place
+in the affections of the truly religious.
+
+The mind at certain stages personifies the Deity with the greatest ease
+and naturalness.  The primitive man interprets the whole world about him
+by the analogy of his own activity.  He sees in all the phenomena of
+nature the presence of personal beings,--beings who act and suffer and
+enjoy and love and hate as he does himself.  The sky, the sun, the wind,
+the ocean, represent each a separate deity.  Next, each clan, or city, or
+nation, comes to regard itself as under the patronage of one of these
+deities.  The national god of the Israelites, at the earliest time we
+know them, bore the name of Yahveh,--a name more familiar to us under the
+form Jehovah.  Originally he was probably the god of the sun and fire.
+His acts were seen everywhere, his motives guessed.  The heat and light
+of the sun--now illumining, now fructifying, now blasting--were his
+immediate manifestations.
+
+Later, he was conceived to favor certain kinds of human action.  He was
+at first appeased under the influences of analogies from the lower side
+of human nature,--Give him a present, something to eat, or to smell, or
+to see.  Then came the idea that he was the friend and favorer of the
+righteous,--of the merciful and just.  The turning-point in the history
+of Judaism--the birth-hour of religion as it has come down to us--is
+marked by that great dimly-seen personality, Moses, who taught that the
+worship of Yahveh forbade murder, adultery, theft, false witness,
+covetousness.
+
+The Jews had neither science nor logic; they had no intelligent induction
+as to nature,--hence they never got beyond the idea of supernatural
+intervention.[3]  Apparently they never challenged and sifted their
+fundamental ideas,--never raised the question as to the actual existence
+of Yahveh.  They saw and felt the incongruities of the world as a moral
+administration, and sometimes pressed the inquiry, as in Job, _Why_ does
+Yahveh thus?  But the denial of any ruling personal Will, as by
+Lucretius, was impossible to them.  They were imaginative, intense, and
+their imagination got the saving ethical impress especially from the
+prophets.
+
+Judaism as a religion grew from "the Law and the Prophets."  From almost
+the earliest historic time there existed some brief code of
+precepts,--probably an abbreviated form of what we know as the Ten
+Commandments.  Later came the impassioned preaching of the prophets.
+Still later, there was formulated that elaborate statute-book for which
+by a pious fiction was claimed the authority of Moses.
+
+The prophets spoke out of an exaltation of which no other account was
+given than it was the inspiration of Yahveh,--"Thus saith the Lord!"
+They did not argue, they asserted--with a passion that bred conviction,
+or at least fear and respect.
+
+It is here that the distinction between the Greek and the Hebrew method
+is most marked.  Socrates, for example, called himself the midwife of
+men's thoughts.  His maxim was, "Know thyself."  His cross-examination
+was designed to make men see for themselves.  That is, he taught by
+reason.  But the prophet's claim was, "Thus saith the Lord!"  He spoke
+out of his personal and passionate conviction, for which he believed he
+had the highest supernatural sanction.
+
+The heart of the typical prophetic message was that the Ruler of the
+world is a righteous ruler, and that the service he desires is
+righteousness.  The early prophets--such as Micah, Hosea, Amos--speak
+with scorn of the worship by sacrifices,--whether the fruits of the
+earth, or slaughtered beasts, or the ghastly offering of human life.
+Hosea cries: "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of
+God more than burnt offerings."  So Micah speaks: "Shall I come before
+him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves?  Will the Lord be pleased
+with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?  Shall I
+give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin
+of my soul?  He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the
+Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
+humbly with thy God?"
+
+Further, the prophets assumed to know and declare Yahveh's will on public
+affairs, especially on the government of the nation.  They tried to
+dictate the attitude of Judea toward other kingdoms--an attitude
+generally of proud defiance.  Often their counsel ignored the
+actualities, and helped to precipitate Judah and Israel into hopeless
+conflicts with their mighty neighbors.  When in these conflicts they were
+worsted, the prophets laid the disaster to the idolatry or other
+wickedness of the people.  Finally came utter defeat and dispersal, and
+an exile for generations in a foreign land.  Then the prophets rose to an
+intenser faith,--purer, tenderer, more spiritual.  Some time and somehow
+the Lord would surely be gracious to his people!
+
+But when the captives, or a part of them, were restored to their own
+land,--with lowered fortunes and humbled pride, half dependent still on a
+foreign master,--the prophetic enthusiasm no longer availed to give a
+fresh message from the Lord.  Instead, the leaders and founders of the
+restoration--Ezra, Nehemiah, and their associates and followers--built up
+a well-organized, well-enforced system of discipline.  They reshaped the
+old traditions, enlarged and codified them; they shaped the Pentateuch
+and book of Joshua, as we know them now; they purified and beautified the
+Temple service; they instituted synagogues in every town, where religious
+teaching should be regular and constant; they developed a class of
+"Scribes," or expositors of the Law; they multiplied ceremonial
+observances; they rewrote the national history, and invested their laws
+with the sacredness of divine oracles, under the august name of Moses;
+they imposed deadly penalties and bitter hatred on all who deviated from
+the established religion.  All this was the work of centuries, and its
+important result was that by a manifold and perpetual drill certain
+religious ideas were stamped upon the minds of the people, until beliefs
+and usages and sentiments ran in their very blood and were transmitted
+from father to son.
+
+
+As types of the Hebrew religion in its advancing stages we may note:
+first, Jacob, winning his way by craft and subtlety, gaining the favor of
+his god by a fidelity which expresses itself by vows and sacrifices and
+scarcely at all by morality; and hardly attractive except in the
+tenderness of his family relations.  A mythical figure, he is a marvelous
+embodiment of the persistent race-traits of the Jew--tenacity, craft,
+devoutness--in the early phase.  It is a very earthly phase, but with the
+germs of a marvelous development.  Later, we have David, the warrior
+king.  Still later comes Elijah, the prophet of a Deity who now stands
+for chastity and justice against gods of sensuality and cruelty, and
+defying wicked kings in the name of that God.  Then in the line of
+prophets we may pass to their greatest, Isaiah,--both first and second of
+the name,--each of whom in the deepest adversity of the people is
+inspired by a hope, vague in its expectation, but so deep, so fervid, so
+sweet, that to this day it lends its language to hearts which in darkness
+look for the morning.  Next we may take Ezra, rebuilding the shattered
+nationality, not on a political basis, but by a law of personal conduct
+in which a genuine morality is mixed with a ceremonial code.  And here
+really belongs the legislation ascribed to Moses and given in the
+Pentateuch; the law-giver having an original in some great, dim, historic
+figure, long treasured in the popular imagination, but rehabilitated by
+priestly art as the author of a great volume of minute legislation, to
+which dignity is lent by the legends of a personality sublime yet meek.
+We have then the flowering of the inner life, in the book of Psalms,--the
+single name of the Psalmist covering the products of many minds and
+successive generations.  In the course of affairs, the hero's place
+belongs next to Judas Maccabaeus, the patriot leader against the heathen
+Greek; and we may take the books of the Maccabees and the book of Daniel
+as giving the ideal thought of the period,--the matrix of belief and hope
+from which was to spring the crowning flower of Judaism.
+
+It will suffice for our purpose if from this series we touch upon David,
+the Psalms, the book of Job, Isaiah, and the literature of the Maccabean
+time.
+
+
+The real place of David is that of the warrior-king who gave
+independence, unity, and victory to the people of Israel.  It was he who
+broke the yoke of the Philistines which Saul had weakened, and slew in
+fight their gigantic champion.  He conquered and subjected the
+neighboring tribes; he put down the rebellions headed by his own sons; he
+made and kept Israel for a brief term a proud and victorious military
+monarchy.  Within a single generation after his death it was divided into
+two hostile fragments, and both of these gradually fell under foreign
+conquerors.  Very short was the period of Israel's warlike glory, and for
+a thousand years afterward the national heart turned in love and
+reverence to the hero of that time.  As the Saxons remembered Alfred, as
+Americans remember Washington, so the Israelites remembered David.  It
+was in his image and under his name that they pictured a future which
+should outshine their past.  Israel throughout the period when she is
+most distinctly before us was a subject people.  It was largely the
+presence of a foreign oppressor which gave to the national voice that
+tone of intense entreaty toward a divine friend and deliverer which runs
+its pathos through psalm and history and prophecy.  There had been a
+better day for Israel, before Assyrian and Egyptian trampled her.  There
+had been a day when Philistia and Edom quailed and fell before her, and
+the Lord wrought victory by the hand of David.  So it is David's history
+that stands out fullest and clearest in the whole record, from Abraham
+onward.  How much is true history and how much is imaginative addition
+must be largely guesswork.  But we see in David the ideal hero and type
+of that period of Jewish history as we see in Achilles and Odysseus the
+ideal types of primitive Greece.
+
+And the story of David is as deeply colored with the primal passions of
+humanity as are the songs of Homer.  There is the picture of the
+shepherd-boy, to which must be added the exquisite psalm which later
+traditions put in his mouth; the victory over the giant; the most
+pathetic story of the moody and wayward Saul--the power of music over his
+melancholy, the alternations of jealous rage and compunction; the
+friendship with Jonathan, more tender and pure than the friendships Plato
+pictures; the dramatic fortunes of the outlaw; the family tragedies full
+of crime and horror; the dark story of Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom; the
+passion of fatherhood in fullest intensity, with the agonized prayers for
+the sick child and the heartbroken lament over Absalom; the group of
+valiant captains and their chivalrous exploits; the risk of life to bring
+to their homesick chief a drink from the well of Bethlehem; the story of
+Bathsheba and Uriah--lust, treachery, and murder; the prophet's rebuke;
+the years declining under heavy shadows.  How full of lifeblood it all
+is!  Every chapter is an idyl, an epic, or a tragedy.
+
+It is largely this picturesque dramatic quality which made the English
+Bible in its early days the favorite book of the English people, and has
+kept for it always so high a place.  But the attempt to reduce a story
+like David's to terms of spiritual edification has been difficult above
+measure, ever since mankind advanced beyond the half-barbaric age in
+which the story was told.  Judged by our standards, the ethics of the
+story are often low, and its religion is largely a superstition.  What
+brings the Almighty on the scene is most frequently some great calamity,
+which priest or soothsayer interprets as a divine judgment.  Often there
+is attributed to him the quality of a jealous Oriental despot.  The
+justice he enforces is often injustice and savagery.  Take the story of
+the Gibeonites.  A three years' famine in Israel was explained by
+Yahveh's oracle as a retribution for the breach of faith by Saul, many
+years before, with the Gibeonites, whom he had persecuted in defiance of
+ancient compact.  David thereupon invited the Gibeonites to name the
+requital which would appease them, and they asked for the death of seven
+sons of Saul.  So David delivered the seven innocent men into their
+hands, "and they hanged them before the Lord."
+
+The Zeus of Homer is offensive to religious feeling because he fully
+shares the sensuality which we account one of the great defects of
+humanity.  From that blemish the Hebrew idea of God is always free.  The
+hostility between Yahveh and the heathen gods has its deep ethical
+significance in the struggle of chastity against licentiousness, to which
+the religious sanction brings reinforcement.  But the Hebrew God has a
+savage and vindictive quality, which only slowly and partially
+disappears.  Originally, it is probable, the God of the sun and fire,
+beneficent to illumine, malevolent to burn, he remains always in some
+degree a God of wrath.
+
+It was by one of the strange growths of the advancing popular thought
+that David, the valiant, passionate soldier-king, came to be conceived of
+as the writer of the book of Psalms.  Historically a misconception, it
+yet lent a continuity and ideal unity to the nation's self-interpretation.
+
+The book of Psalms, says Dean Stanley, is the selected hymns of the
+Jewish people, for a period as long as from Chaucer to Tennyson.  The
+service-book of the Second Temple is Kuenen's description.  Beyond any
+other single book, it shows us the heart of Judaism in its ripest, most
+characteristic development.  Its language has become saturated with the
+associations of many centuries.  In these intense, direct, and fervid
+utterances we can see the form and lineaments of a faith which was the
+ancestor of our own, yet is not the same.
+
+The religion of the Psalms has different phases.  We have here the
+experiences of many souls, with a certain kinship, yet with wide
+differences.  In many of these hymns one recognizes the religion in which
+Jesus was cradled.  Imagination and feeling have full scope.  The
+constant idea is of Yahveh, ruler of the world and its inhabitants, the
+judge of the wicked and friend of the good.  "Mark the perfect man and
+behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace."  "How excellent is
+thy loving-kindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust
+under the shadow of thy wings."  "Thy righteousness is like the great
+mountains; thy judgments as a great deep."  "The Lord redeemeth the soul
+of his servants, and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate."
+"Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that
+trusteth in him."
+
+The depth and passion of the struggle against sin is shown in the
+fifty-first Psalm.  "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy
+loving-kindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot
+out my transgressions."  "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned."  "Wash
+me, and I shall be whiter than snow."  "Make me to hear joy and
+gladness."  "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit
+within me."  "Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it.  The
+sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O
+God, thou wilt not despise."
+
+This passion against sin--this cry for inward purity--is the root of the
+religion of Jesus, the blessedness of the pure in heart; the warfare of
+Paul, the spirit against the flesh.
+
+In other psalms, again, is a poignant cry for help and deliverance.  It
+is the expostulation of the soul with Fate, the cry to a Power who should
+be a friend, but hides his face.  There, is a pathetic sense of man's
+frailty and mortality.  "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my
+cry; hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee and a
+sojourner, as all my fathers were.  O spare me, that I may recover
+strength, before I go hence, and be no more."
+
+Praise for God's greatness and awe for his eternity are joined with the
+sad sense of man's mortality.  "Wilt thou show wonders to the dead?
+Shall the dead arise and praise thee?  Shall thy lovingkindness be
+declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction?  Shall thy
+wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of
+forgetfulness?"
+
+Very often again the burden is the cry of the weak against the oppressor.
+Man, wronged by his fellow, cries to God, and can imagine no deliverance
+save by the ruin of his enemies.  The cursing is tremendous.  "O daughter
+of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheth
+them against the stones!"  At this point is the widest ethical difference
+between "them of old time" and our own religion.  In them, abhorrence of
+sin was not yet distinguished from hatred of the sinner, and the foes of
+the Psalmist or his nation were always identified with the foes of God.
+To hate thine enemy seemed as righteous as to love thy friend.
+
+In a sense we may say the Psalms are a cry to which Jesus is the answer:
+"Lord, save me, and destroy my enemies!"  "Love your enemies, and in
+loving you are saved."
+
+In the book of Psalms there blends and alternates with the old theory of
+reward and punishment a later idea,--that goodness carries its own
+blessing with it,--that better than oil and wine, flocks and herds,
+health and friends, is the peace of well-doing, the joy of gratitude,
+yes, even the passionate contrition in which the soul revolts from its
+own sin and finds again the sweetness of the upward effort and a response
+to that effort like heaven's own smile.  Not, goodness brings blessings,
+but goodness _is_ blessed; not, the wicked shall perish, but wickedness
+_is_ perdition; this is the deep undertone of the best of the Psalms.
+
+Among these hymns are some which are filled with a noble delight in the
+works of nature,--a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle of
+creation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among the
+hills, and the conies of the rock.  There is frank satisfaction in the
+bread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad.
+And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of nature
+never so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality.  It is
+everywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy and
+beneficent God.
+
+What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the most
+vivid and various play of human emotions,--sorrow, wrath, repentance,
+joy, dread, hope,--always exercised as in the presence of an Almighty
+being, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men.  In this is
+their abiding power,--this close reflection of the fluctuations in every
+sensitive heart under the play of life's experiences,--encompassed with
+an atmosphere of noble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power.
+
+
+In the story of the Jewish mind, the book of Job stands by itself.  It is
+not so much a stage in the progressive development of a faith, as a
+powerful and unanswered challenge to the current assertions of that
+faith.  The characteristic idea of Judaism was that God rules the world
+in the interest of the good man.  Not so, says Job, the facts are against
+it.  Hear the complaint of a good man to whom life has brought trouble
+and sorrow, without remedy and without hope!  So stood first the bold
+arraignment, the earliest voice of truly religious skepticism.  Job is
+skeptical, not from any want of goodness,--he has been strenuously good;
+even now in all his darkness, "my righteousness I hold fast and will not
+let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live."  His
+goodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, help
+to the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sense
+he has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies has
+his hate gone out; he has not "rejoiced at the destruction of them that
+hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have I
+suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul."  Yet, after a
+life of this sort, he finds himself bereft, impoverished, tormented.
+Where is the righteousness of God?  He turns to his friends for sympathy.
+"Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of
+God hath touched me."  His friends for reply justify God by blaming Job.
+Doubtless you deserve it all: you must have done all manner of wrong, and
+been a hypocrite to boot!  That is all the comfort they give him.  Dreary
+and desolate he stands, no good in the present, no hope in the future.
+"I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou
+regardest me not.  Thou art become cruel to me; with thy strong hand thou
+opposest thyself against me.  I know that thou wilt bring me to death,
+and to the house appointed for all living."
+
+Upon that gloom the curtain falls.  "The words of Job are ended."
+
+The later chapters of the book seem added by successive hands.  They
+introduce a fresh speaker, to help out the argument for God.  They make
+the Almighty speak in his own behalf.  His answer is simply an appeal to
+the wonders of physical nature.  Look, vain man, at my works; consider
+the war-horse, the behemoth, the leviathan; how can your petty mind judge
+the creator of these?  This strikes a note which is still heard in the
+music of to-day, the awe and reverence before the grandeur of nature
+which can sometimes soothe the restlessness of man and hush his
+anxieties, as the harp of David brought peace to the moody Saul.  Yet
+such thoughts do not suffice for the man whose personal suffering is
+keen.  They silence rather than answer the question which presses upon
+Job.
+
+The story must be otherwise helped out, so some kindly champion of
+orthodoxy put in a fairy-story climax,--Job got well of his boils, had
+more sheep and oxen than ever, had other children born to him.  And so
+the difficulty is happily solved!
+
+But the earlier and deeper words remain, with their unanswerable
+challenge to the comfortable creed that God will always make the good man
+happy.  The book stands, the expression of a typical, a mournful but
+sublime attitude of the human mind.  It is a facing of truth when truth
+looks darkest, rather than to take refuge in comfortable make-believe.
+And it shows man falling back on his innermost stronghold of all.  If God
+himself fail me,--if the power of the universe be cruel or
+indifferent,--yet "my righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go;
+my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live."
+
+
+The habitual weapon of the Prophets is denunciation.  They pour out on
+their opponents a wrath which is the hotter because it involves a moral
+condemnation, and the heavier because it claims the sanction of Deity.
+Among their exemplars are Samuel deposing Saul, and scaring him from the
+tomb, and Elijah slaying the priests of Baal.  Of the written prophecies
+the characteristic word is "Woe unto you!"  They are the prototypes of
+Jesus assailing the Pharisees and driving out the money-changers; of the
+book of Revelation; of Tertullian proclaiming the torments of the damned;
+of the mediaeval ban on the heretic; of Puritan and Catholic hurling
+anathemas at each other; of Carlyle, of Garrison.  But in the greatest of
+the prophets the threat is almost hidden by the promise, and instead of
+cursing there is benediction.
+
+Whoever would get at the heart of the Old Testament, and understand the
+spell which the religion first of Judaism and then of Christianity has
+cast upon the world for thousands of years, should ponder the book of
+Isaiah.  It blends the work of two authors, but their spirit is closely
+akin.  In each case the prophet is full of a conviction so intense that
+he propounds it with perfect confidence as the word of God.  By the
+boldest personification, he speaks continually in the name of God.  This
+was the characteristic method of Hebrew prophecy.  The prophetic books
+all stand as for the most part the direct word of God.  This way of
+thought and speech was possible only to men in an early stage of
+intellectual development and under the highest pressure of conviction and
+emotion.
+
+The traditional repute of these Jewish prophets and the record of their
+words were accepted by both Jews and Christians.  Their writings were
+taken as the authoritative voice of God.  The same credit came to be
+extended to all the ancient books of the Jewish religion,--psalms,
+histories, genealogies, ritual, and all.  But it is mainly the prophecies
+to which this character originally belonged.  The Psalms are, with few
+exceptions, purely human in their standpoint.  In them, it is avowedly a
+_man_ who mourns, rejoices, repents, prays, curses, or gives thanks.  But
+in the prophecies God himself is presented as the speaker.
+
+In both the earlier and later Isaiah, God appears as speaking to men in
+extreme need, in words of incomparable comfort, inspiration, and hope.
+To whatever special exigency of Israel they were first addressed, the
+language, stripped of all local references, comes home to the universal
+human heart in its deepest experiences.  To the divine favor this
+teaching sets only one condition: "Cease to do evil, learn to do well."
+"Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for
+the widow."  "If ye be willing and obedient."  "Say ye to the righteous
+that it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their
+doings.  Woe unto the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of
+his hands shall be given him."  On the one simple condition of turning
+from moral evil to good, the blessings of the inner life are promised in
+every tone of assurance, consolation, promise.  "Though your sins be as
+scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson,
+they shall be as wool."  "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your
+God.  Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her
+warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned."  "He shall feed
+his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm and
+carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with
+young."  "Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth, and break forth into
+singing, O mountains, for the Lord hath comforted his people, and will
+have mercy upon his afflicted."
+
+The most triumphant word in the New Testament, and its tenderest word,
+both are drawn from one verse in the elder Isaiah: "He will swallow up
+death in victory, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all
+faces."
+
+The distinctive word and thought of Jesus toward God is first found in
+the later Isaiah,--"our Father."  "Doubtless thou art our father, though
+Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not; thou, O Lord,
+art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting."  The word
+recurs, together with an image which by a later than Jesus was made the
+symbol of an arbitrary divine despotism, but which Isaiah first employed
+to blend the idea of omnipotent power with closest affection: "O Lord,
+thou art our father; we are the clay and thou the potter; and we are all
+the work of thy hand."  A similitude is used even gentler than a father's
+care: "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you."  "Can a
+woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on
+the son of her womb?  Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee."
+
+By the later Isaiah is shown the figure of an innocent sufferer, whose
+sorrows are to issue in the widest blessing.  This sufferer has been
+interpreted sometimes as typifying the few heroic souls among the people
+of Israel, sometimes as a prophet in Isaiah's day, last and most fondly
+as Christ.  Whomever the prophet had in mind, the idea goes home to the
+heart; somehow, undeserved sorrow borne blamelessly, bravely, even
+gladly, since for love's sake, is to have a celestial fruitage.
+"Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with
+grief;" "he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,"--and at last
+"he shall see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied."  Then the
+strain breaks into an exultant tenderness, weaving into one chord the
+deepest griefs and consolations of woman, the sublimities of nature, all
+the passion and all the peace of the heart.  "Sing, O barren, thou that
+didst not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didst
+not travail with child, for more are the children of the desolate than
+the children of the married wife, saith the Lord.  Fear not, for thou
+shalt not be ashamed.  For thy Maker is thy husband, the Lord of hosts is
+his name, and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel.  For a small moment
+have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.  In a
+little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting
+kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.  The
+mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall
+not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed,
+saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.  O thou afflicted, tossed with
+tempest, and not comforted!  I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and
+lay thy foundations with sapphires; and all thy children shall be taught
+of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children."
+
+To such words men and women in all times have clung, and always will
+cling.  For, so first spoke a voice in some soul which in the heart of
+the storm had found peace.  He called it the voice of God.  What better
+name can we give it?
+
+
+In the prophecies and the psalms we have seen the high-wrought poetry of
+Israel's religion.  For the requirements of daily life there needs a more
+prosaic, definite, and minute guidance.  This the Jew found in the body
+of usages and precepts which gradually grew up under the care of the
+priesthood.  The prescriptive sanction of habit attached to these
+observances was at certain memorable epochs exchanged for a belief in the
+direct communication of the code from heaven.  One such occasion was the
+finding of the "book of the Law" by the high priest, and its presentation
+and enforcement on king and people which is recorded in 2 Kings xxii. and
+xxiii.  The strong indications are that this was the book known to us as
+Deuteronomy, and that instead of the rediscovery of a forgotten book
+there was in truth a new book set forth, claiming the authority of Moses,
+and enlarging and enriching the traditional observances according to the
+most "advanced" ideas of the time.  A similar occasion, at a later
+period, is described at length in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.  The
+new legislation there imposed in the name of Moses and the fathers--or
+rather of Yahveh himself, as he spoke to the men of old--was probably in
+substance the regulations contained in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
+
+By our standards of judgment, these acts were pious forgeries.  The
+mental conditions under which they were done, the psychologic state which
+prompted them, the ethical standards which sanctioned them, are matter
+for curious study.  It would be crude to class them as the deliberate and
+inexcusable crimes which they would be in our day.  The claim of a divine
+authority for human beliefs--the idea that what is morally beneficial may
+be asserted as historically true--has worked in many strange forms.  We
+see it here in its early phase, among a people in whom, as in mankind at
+large, the virtue and obligation of truthfulness was a late and slow
+discovery.  The same instinct--to claim for what we wish to believe a
+sanction of infallible revelation--works in subtle forms to-day.
+
+As to the contents of the Law which thus gradually took form, a
+distinction may easily be traced even by the cursory reader.  The earlier
+code, Deuteronomy, is full of a generous and lofty temper.  It is one of
+the most impressive documents of the Jewish scriptures.  Here is that
+which Jesus named as the first and great commandment: "Thou shalt love
+the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
+thy might."  The teaching of the book is primarily the worship of
+Yahveh,--a holy, loving, and judging God,--who rewards his people with
+blessings or punishes them with disasters.  Promises and threats are
+equally distinct and vivid: never were blessing and cursing more
+emphatic.  The morality enjoined is charitable and pure.  With an equal
+insistence is enjoined a certain method and form of worship, including
+sacrifices at the temple, three yearly feasts, the observance of the
+Sabbath, the due maintenance of the priesthood, and the utter rejection
+of all other gods.
+
+When we turn to the other books of the Law, we come into an atmosphere
+less exalted, and with a multiplicity of ceremonial details.  There is
+endless regulation as to varieties of sacrifice, cleansing from technical
+uncleanness, and the like.  Interwoven with these, as if on an equal
+footing, are special applications of morality--inculcations of chastity,
+justice, and good neighborhood.  The principles of the Ten
+Words--themselves an inheritance from a very early day--are applied in
+many particulars.  Occasionally is a lofty sentiment, a clear advance.
+Thus we find in Leviticus the "second commandment" of Jesus, "Thou shalt
+love thy neighbor as thyself."
+
+The general increase in rigidity of ceremonial in these books is to be
+read along with the stern decrees of Ezra as to separation from family
+and friendly relations with non-Jewish neighbors.  It was, in a word, a
+Puritan reformation.  There was just the same combination of heightened
+moral conviction with urgency upon matters of form and detail, and
+hostility to all outside of one special church, which belonged to the
+Puritan.  But the Jewish reformer, unlike the English, enlarged instead
+of simplifying his ritual.  It is this interblending of outward
+observance with moral and spiritual quality which stumbles the modern
+reader at every page.  It was a confusion which needed the spiritual
+genius of Jesus to dissolve, and the leadership of Paul to definitely
+renounce.
+
+By the side of the ceremonial element in the Law there ripened gradually
+an expansion of its moral precepts.  The sacred books were expounded by
+the Scribes.  The preacher in the synagogue came to touch the people's
+heart often more closely and delicately than the priest with his bloody
+sacrifices and his imposing liturgies.  Spontaneity, inspiration,
+prophetic power, was no longer present, but in the guise of comment and
+interpretation there grew up a gentler, humaner morality.  The moral
+value of labor and industry came into recognition.  There were teachers
+like Hillel and Gamaliel in whom devout piety and homely practice went
+hand in hand.  In the ethics of Judaism--under all these various forms of
+"the Law and the Prophets"--the distinctive note, compared with the
+ethics of Greece and Rome, was chastity.  The ideal Greece represented
+wisdom and beauty; the ideal Rome was valor and self-control; the ideal
+Israel was the subjugation of sense to spirit, the approach of man to God
+by purity of life.
+
+The twofold service of Judaism was to impress this special note of
+chastity on human virtue, and to give to virtue the wings of a great
+hope.  The flowering of that hope was in Christianity; the preparation
+for it comes now before us.
+
+Under the rule of Alexander's successors the Jewish system, with its
+mixture of ethics and ritual, came in collision with the ideas and
+practice of degenerate Greek culture,--pleasure-loving,
+nature-worshiping, sensual, with gymnastics and aesthetics, tolerant and
+tyrannical.  The two systems were hostile alike in their virtues and
+vices.  The Greek ruler put down with a strong hand the religious and
+patriotic scruples of his Jewish subject.  The Jew bore persecution with
+the tough endurance of his race, then rose in revolt with the fierce
+courage and religious fervor of his race.  He won his last victory in the
+field of arms.  Brief was the independence, soon followed by inglorious
+servitude; but its sufferings and triumphs had fused the nation once more
+into invincible devotion to the Law of their God, and had rooted in their
+hearts a principle of hope which in varying forms and growing power was
+to change the aspect of human life.
+
+It seems natural to man to ascribe some impressive origin, some dramatic
+birth, to the beliefs that are dearest to him.  But if we trace back
+through Christian and Jewish lineage the idea of immortality, we are
+quite unable to discover the time or place of its beginning.  The early
+Jew thought of death much as did the early Greek,--as the extinction of
+all that was precious in life, and the transition to a shadowy and
+forlorn existence in the realm of shades.  The Hades of Homer seems much
+to resemble the Sheol of the Old Testament, though more vividly
+conceived.  The strong, ruddy, passionate life of the Hebrew found as
+little to cheer it in the outlook beyond death as did the energetic,
+graceful, joyful life of the Greek.  Ancient Egypt had, at least for the
+initiate, a noble teaching of retribution hereafter to crown the mortal
+career with fit consummation of joy or woe.  Ancient Persia had in its
+own form a like doctrine.  The Hebrews in their servile period caught not
+a scintilla of the Egyptian faith.  In their exile it is probable that
+they did get some unrecorded influence from their Persian neighbors.
+Unmistakably, their emigrants to Alexandria, meeting there the nobler
+form of Greek culture while the Palestinian Jews encountered its baser
+side, caught some inspiration from the philosophy which followed, though
+afar off, the noble visions of Plato.  Whether Persia or Greece was more
+directly the source of the new hope which crept almost unperceived into
+the stern bosom of Judaism is not certain.  But the first clear voice of
+that hope comes from the time of the martyrs.  In the second book of the
+Maccabees is told--probably by an Alexandrian Jew--the story of the men
+and women who faced a dreadful death rather than disobey the Law of their
+God.  In that last extremity--that confrontal of the soul by the
+bitterest choice, and its acceptance of death rather than
+wrong-doing--comes the sudden voice of a hope triumphant over the tyrant.
+"Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of the
+world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting
+life."  So in succession bear testimony the seven sons of one mother,
+herself the bravest of them all.  "She exhorted every one of them in her
+own language, filled with courageous spirit; and stirring up her womanish
+thoughts with a manly courage, she said unto them: 'I cannot tell how ye
+came into my womb: for I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was it
+I that formed the members of every one of you.  But doubtless the Creator
+of the world who formed the generations of man, and found out the
+beginning of all things, will also of his due mercy give you breath and
+life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake.
+Fear not this tormentor, but, being worthy of thy brethren, take thy
+death, that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren.'"
+
+Just as the death of Socrates inspired in Plato the out-reaching hope of
+a hereafter, so these Jewish martyrdoms quickened the doubtful guess, the
+dim conjecture, into fervid conviction.  From this period dates the
+settled Jewish belief in immortality.
+
+The form which that belief assumed is seen in the book of Daniel.  That
+book was a creation of this period, inspired by its sufferings,
+aspirations, and hopes.  The writer, assuming the name and authority of a
+traditional hero,--by that easy confusion of the ideal and the historical
+which we have seen before,--blends with stories of unconquerable fidelity
+and divine deliverance his own interpretation of the world's recent
+history and probable future.  It is an early essay in what we call the
+philosophy of history, the first recorded conception of a world-drama.
+Median, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies move their appointed course
+and pass away.  God's plan is working itself out, and the culmination is
+yet to come.  In vision the prophet beholds it: the "Ancient of days,"
+with garment white as snow and hair like pure wool, upon a throne like
+fiery flame, with wheels as burning fire.  Thousands of thousands
+minister before him: the judgment is set and the books are opened.  One
+like the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven, and there is given
+to him dominion and glory and a kingdom which shall not pass away.  In
+his kingdom shall be gathered the saints of the Most High.  Many of them
+that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever-lasting
+life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
+
+This was the figure in which the Jewish imagination clothed the Jewish
+hope.  The national and the individual future blent in one anticipation.
+The dead were to "sleep in the dust" until the day when the divine
+kingdom was established, and then were to rise again to life, and
+according to their deserts were to share the endless glory or shame.
+
+So philosophy makes its essay at the destiny of mankind.  So imagination
+fashions its pictures.  And back of philosophy and imagination we trace
+the elemental and highest forces of the soul.  It is martyrdom and
+motherhood that inspire the immortal hope.  Man faces the worst that can
+befall him--drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture--rather than be
+false to duty.  The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung from
+her own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service of the
+right and to an unseen keeping.  And to martyr and mother comes the
+voice, "All shall be well with thee and thine."
+
+
+Christianity, inheriting from Judaism the belief in immortality, gave it
+a more central place, and a more appealing force.  Of the older religion,
+the special characteristic--compared with the Greek and Roman world--was
+the impressing upon a whole people of a law of conduct, in which with a
+multitude of external ceremonies were bound up the fundamental principles
+of justice, benevolence, and chastity, enforced by the authority of a
+personal and righteous God.  We see the educational effect upon the
+religious Hebrew of this clearly personal God.  It constantly lifted him
+out of the littleness of self-consciousness, setting before his
+imagination the loftiest object.  It gave definiteness and impressiveness
+to his best ideals.  And, further, this anthropomorphism, as we name it
+now, was but the primitive expression of the principle which is central
+in all forms of religious faith, that man and the universe are in some
+deepest sense at one, and that man's closest approach to the secret of
+the universe lies through his own noblest development.  That is one way
+of saying what the Jew felt when his imagination gave to the sternest
+command and the highest promise the sanction, "Thus saith the Lord."
+
+
+The Hebrew religion was wrought out under constant pressure of disaster.
+It was the religion of a proud, brave people, who were constantly held in
+subjection to foreign conquerors.  Hence came a quality of intense
+hostility to these tyrannical foes, and also a constant appeal to the
+Divine Power which seemed often to conceal itself.  Hence--and from that
+sorrowful lot of the individual which often matches this national
+tragedy--hence comes the passionate, pleading, poignant quality through
+which the Old Testament has always spoken to the struggling and
+suffering,--with gleams of hope, the more intense from the clouds through
+which they shine.
+
+The note of the New Testament is exultant.  There is keen sense of
+present evil, endurance, struggle; but there is a deeper sense of a great
+deliverance already begun and to be perfected in the future.  The heart
+of this new energy, joy, and hope is love for a human yet celestial
+friend.  This love was awakened by a personality of extraordinary
+nobility and attractiveness.  The personal affection inspired imagination
+and ideality to their highest flights.  Its original object became
+invested with superhuman traits and elevated to a deity.  To trace with
+certainty and minuteness the historic lineaments of the real man is not
+altogether possible; but the essential truth concerning him is
+sufficiently plain.
+
+The biographies which we possess of Jesus were written from thirty to a
+hundred years after his death.  In these records memory and imagination
+are intimately blended.  On the one hand, the power and loftiness of his
+character and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly on
+the minds of his followers.  But on the other hand, he was so suggestive
+and inspiring--there were among his disciples natures so susceptible,
+responsive, yet untrained, and their community was soon fused in such a
+contagion of passionate feeling unchecked by reason--that the seeds of
+his words and acts fruited in a rich growth of imagination, which blent
+closely with the historic reality.  And with the central inspiration of
+his life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him,
+so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defies
+certainty of analysis.
+
+If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vivid
+impression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over natural
+forces for the benefit of mankind.  As he is described, Jesus is before
+all a worker of beneficent miracles.  He is a teacher, too, and an
+unexampled one.  But he enforces his teaching by means utterly
+transcending the credentials of other teachers.  He is a tender human
+friend, but he expresses his friendship by services such as no other
+friend can render.  He allays tempests by a word.  He creates bread and
+wine at will.  He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind.  He raises
+the dead.  In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power.  It is
+this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has
+distinguished him in the eyes of his worshipers.  What is the wisest word
+about immortality worth--what do we care for what Socrates or Plato
+said--when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself?
+What need for any argument or assurance about Providence, when here is
+one through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse of
+beneficent love?
+
+But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the
+growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in
+our time to a different conception.
+
+The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life.
+His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its
+interior harmony and its relations with the world about it.  _Love your
+enemies_,--in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of
+conduct.  _The pure in heart shall see God_,--with that he put in the
+hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision.
+
+The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chastity, justice, and
+piety.  Jesus sublimated this,--in him chastity becomes purity; in place
+of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a
+love embracing earth and heaven.
+
+Jesus taught in parables.  A story--an outward, objective fact, something
+which the imagination can body forth--often facilitates the impartation
+to another mind of a spiritual experience.  The soul has no adequate
+language of its own,--it must borrow from the senses and the imagination.
+
+The central idea of Jesus is expressed in the saying, "No man knoweth the
+Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son."
+That is, man is a mystery except to his Maker; he does not even
+understand himself.  And correspondingly, "No man knoweth the Father save
+the Son:" only the obedient and loving heart recognizes the Divinity.
+God is not known by the intellect: he is felt through the moral nature.
+Peace, assurance, sense of inmost reality, comes through steadfast
+goodness.
+
+Jesus impressed this idea by the figure of father and son.  What symbol
+could he have used more intelligible? more universally coming home?  Like
+all statements of highest truth, all symbols, it was imperfect; it did
+not furnish an adequate explanation of the workings of the universe.
+But, under the homeliest figure, under the guise of the nearest human
+relation, it expressed the greatest truth of the inner life.
+
+Further, Jesus threw his emphasis where men need it thrown,--not on
+abstract ideas, but on action.  His teaching was always as to conduct.
+Purity, forgiveness, rightness of heart were his themes.
+
+Above all, he lived what he taught.  He left the memory of a life which
+to his followers seemed faultless.  And ever since, those who felt their
+own inadequacy have laid closest hold on his success, his victory, as
+somehow the pledge of theirs.
+
+
+Jesus was a Jew, but in him there was born into the world a higher
+principle than Judaism.  The historic lineage is not to be too much
+insisted on.  When he said, "Love your enemies," "Forgive that ye may be
+forgiven," he brought into the traditional religion a revolutionary idea.
+Judaism was largely a religion of wrath.  Jesus planted a religion of
+love.
+
+The tender plant was soon half choked by the old coarse growth, and for
+many centuries the religion named after Christ had a vein of hate as
+fierce as the old Judaism.  But blending with it, and struggling always
+for ascendency, was the religion of love, symbolized by the cradle of
+Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary.
+
+
+Of the Judaic traits in Jesus, conspicuous was the prophetic feeling and
+tone.  He was possessed with an absolute fullness of conviction, and
+spoke in a tone of blended ardor and certitude.  "He taught as one having
+authority."  He rarely gave reasons.  If in his words we find appeal to
+precedent or argument, it is really as little more than illustration or
+picture to clothe his own intuition.  His followers believed his words,
+either because of some conscious witness in their breasts, or because
+their love and reverence for him won for his assertions an unquestioning
+acceptance.
+
+From Judaism he took the familiar idea of one all-powerful and holy God;
+a moral ideal which was chiefly distinguished from that of the
+Greek-Roman world by its greater emphasis on chastity; and also the
+belief in a constant divine interposition in human affairs, which soon
+was to culminate in the establishment of a divine kingdom on earth.
+
+Jesus woke in his followers an ardor for goodness, a tenderness for their
+fellow men, and a supreme devotion to himself.  His words went straight
+to the springs of character.  He brushed aside religious ceremonial as of
+no importance.  He sent the searching light of purity into the recesses
+of the heart.  He made love the law of life and the key of the universe.
+He interpreted love, as a principle of human conduct, by illustrations
+the most homely, real, and tender.  Love is no mere delicious emotion: it
+is giving our bread to the hungry, ourselves to the needy.  It is not a
+mere felicity of kindred spirits,--love them that hate you, pray for them
+that despitefully use you!
+
+Jesus was the greatest of poets.  To every fact, to every idea, he gave
+its most beautiful and spiritual interpretation.  When he speaks of God,
+his speech is the pure poetry of the soul.  Yahveh becomes to him the
+All-father.  His providence is over the lilies and the sparrows.  His
+rain and sunshine are shed on the unjust as on the just.  His inmost
+nature is set forth by the human father meeting his returning prodigal a
+great way off.  His very life is shared with his children.  It wells up
+in Jesus himself: the light in his eyes, the tenderness in his tones, the
+yearning in his heart,--it is _my Father_ ye know in me!
+
+How does that Divine Power appear in the procedure of the universe?  What
+real providence is there for the slain sparrow?  What is the actual
+destiny of those human lives which show only frustration and failure?
+Jesus does not answer these questions.  It does not appear that he tried
+to answer them.  His words are filled with a glad, unquestioning trust.
+He is not the philosopher seeking to measure life.  He is the lover
+living it, the poet delighting in it.
+
+The secret of Jesus lay in his sense of the "kingdom of God" within
+him,--of obedience, peace, and joy, which was in itself sufficient.
+Simply to communicate and impart that was to spread the Kingdom among men.
+
+A teacher like John the Baptist--possessed by the idea of righteousness,
+and of the world's deficiency, but without tranquillity in his own
+heart--could look only for a divine interposition, a catastrophe.  John
+is a sort of Carlyle.  But Jesus, hearing him, and brooding the deeper
+truth, goes about proclaiming a present heaven.
+
+The marks of this inner state defined themselves against the conditions
+of life he saw about him.
+
+Thus, he shows his estimate of wealth in the story of the young ruler.
+"Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor!"
+
+Toward the other prize which men most seek, reputation, his feeling is
+expressed to the two brethren asking chief places: "He that will be chief
+among you, let him be your servant."
+
+As to learning, intellectual attainment, his characteristic word is,
+"Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed
+them unto babes."  "Be as little children."
+
+The prevalent forms of religious observance he quietly acquiesced in,
+except where they barred the free play of human charity.  Then he set the
+form aside, as being only the servant of the spirit.  "The Sabbath was
+made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
+
+Such was his attitude toward wealth, honor, intellectual wisdom,
+ceremonial.
+
+
+Toward the outcasts, the publican and harlots, his attitude was of pure
+compassion.  Toward the Pharisees it was denunciatory.  Wealth of
+ceremony and poverty of spirit, self-complacency mixed with scorn for
+others and with hostility to new light and love, roused in him a wrath
+which broke in lightning-flashes.  "Woe unto you! whited sepulchres full
+of dead men's bones, children of hell!"
+
+In the ethics of Jesus chastity has a high place, yet he has few words
+about it.  His is an exalted and ardent goodness, of which purity is an
+almost silent element.  His effect is like that of a noble woman, whose
+presence is felt as an atmosphere.  When he speaks, his words set the
+highest mark,--"Be pure in _heart_."
+
+We may contrast the scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene with that
+between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota.  The philosopher is proof
+against allurement, and gives kindly advice, which clearly will have no
+effect; Jesus, without conscious effort, wakes a passion of repentance
+which transforms the life.  So again we may compare the check which
+Epictetus prescribes against undue tenderness, "Say while you kiss your
+child, he is mortal," with the habitual attitude of Jesus toward
+children,--taking them in his arms, and saying, "Of such is the kingdom
+of heaven."  It is in such scenes as these--in his relations especially
+with women and with children--that we best see the genius of the heart,
+the newness which came into the world with Jesus.
+
+While dwelling in an inner realm of joy, he had the keenest sense of the
+sin and sorrow in men's lives.  "He was filled with compassion for the
+multitude, as sheep having no shepherd."  Their epilepsies,
+leprosies,--the hardness of heart, the insensibility to the higher
+life,--these moved him with a great pity.  Scarcely save in little
+children did he see the heart-free joy, the natural freedom and
+happiness, which was his own.  The hard-heartedness of the rich, the
+scorn of the self-righteous for the outcasts, moved his indignation.
+Thus the holy happiness of his own life was mingled with a profound sense
+of the trouble of other lives.
+
+His reading of the trouble was very simple: there were but two forces in
+the world, moral good and evil, God and Satan, and God was shortly to
+give an absolute triumph to the good.
+
+Among the chief impressions he made was that of commanding power.  He
+must have been full of healthy and majestic manhood.  Women and children
+were attracted to him, as the weak are attracted by the strong.  In the
+storm on the lake, his spirit so rose above the elemental rage--as if
+upborne with delight by the sublime scene--that his companions forgot
+their fears, and in the remembrance it appeared to them that the sea and
+wind grew calm at his word.  His strength seemed to impart itself to the
+weak, his health to the sick.  The stories of marvel which richly
+embroider the whole story are partly the halos of imagination investing a
+personality which commanded, charmed, inspired.
+
+Sometimes evil was considered the work of wicked spirits,--so especially
+in cases of lunacy.  Over some such cases Jesus had a peculiar power.  He
+even imparted this power to some of the disciples, who caught his
+inspiration.  The disciples, and probably Jesus, believed that this power
+extended to other sicknesses.  Of the uniformity of nature there is no
+recognition in the New Testament.  Man's power over events is believed to
+be measured by his spiritual nearness to God.  "If ye have faith as a
+grain of mustard seed," ye can cast mountains into the sea.
+
+When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, it
+needs to see manifested there the divinity it has felt.  Jesus found this
+manifestation partly in his power through faith to do "mighty works,"
+partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom.
+
+These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul always
+and everywhere finds the divine presence.  Man himself masters the forces
+of nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher power
+working through him.  And he looks for a better future for himself and
+for mankind.
+
+But the peculiarity of Jesus--looked at from a modern standpoint--was
+that he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conduct
+with a simple belief that in the course of events only moral and
+spiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over nature
+in proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in God; and that
+the whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divine
+interposition.  These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with his
+ardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek and
+save the lost.
+
+In his teaching, God feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birds
+and clothes the grass.  There is no need that they should be anxious
+about their physical wants.  Their troubles will be banished if they will
+pray in faith.  Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish before
+the presence of the trusting child of God.  All the injustice and wrong
+of the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention of
+God.  It is the old anthropomorphic idea of God--the idea of the Prophet
+and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender,
+through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of
+exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary
+interpretation of the world.
+
+What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the most
+attractive human analogy.  If even an unjust human judge yields to the
+importunity of a petitioner, much more will the divine judge listen to
+the cry of the wronged and suffering.  If a human father gives bread to
+his children when they ask, much more will the divine father.
+
+We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and
+the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time.  The force in him
+which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the
+higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight.  This
+insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life.
+But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to the
+procedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science.  To the Jew
+of the New Testament period,--to Paul as much as to the fishermen of
+Galilee,--the world was directly administered by a personal being who
+habitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events.
+The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a different
+conception.  Thinkers like Aristotle had assumed the constancy of nature
+as the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it.
+But the great mass of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entire
+Jewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divine
+personality.  What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was that
+it attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied the
+highest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed multitude representing
+evil as well as good impulses.  All Jewish history was written on this
+hypothesis.  The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the Old
+Testament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or the
+individual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power.
+The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by the
+Jew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were only
+more marked and special instances of God's working.  That a man
+especially beloved of God for his goodness should be given power to heal
+the blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his loving
+compassion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall the
+hypocrite.
+
+It seems clear that Jesus, not less than his disciples, regarded his
+power over physical ills as just as truly an incident of his character
+and mission as was the power to inspire conduct and reclaim the erring.
+What differentiated him from them was that he held the physical marvels
+of far less relative account than they did.  Obscure as the detailed
+narratives must remain to us, it seems unmistakable that he habitually
+discouraged all publicity and prominence for his works of healing.  His
+spiritual genius showed him that the stimulation of curiosity and
+expectation in this direction diverted men from the principal business of
+life, and the essential purport of his message,--to love, obey, and trust.
+
+The point at which the idea of divine intervention most seriously
+affected his work seems to have been in his growing expectation of a
+speedy consummation which should in a day establish on earth the kingdom
+of truth and righteousness.  His earlier teachings include striking
+utterances upon the gradual development of character in man, the slow
+ripening of society, as in the parables of the leaven and the sower.
+Here he was on the firm ground of his own observation and consciousness.
+But as the problem of his own mission pressed for an explicit solution;
+as the lofty passion of the idealist, the yearning tenderness of the
+lover of men, were thwarted and baffled by the prodigious inertia of
+humanity,--so he was thrown back more and more on that promise of some
+swift catastrophic judgment and triumph which was the closing word of
+ancient prophecy, and which seemed to answer the cry of his soul.
+
+The later chapters of the synoptic Gospels are intensely colored with
+this anticipation of a divine judgment close at hand.  The promise, the
+threat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the early
+church.  They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church.  But that
+modern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment of
+all its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away from
+all this millennial prophecy; to weaken or ignore its significance, or to
+attribute it to the misconception of the disciples.  This modern
+Christianity fastens its attention on those teachings of purely spiritual
+and universal truth in which Jesus indeed spoke as never other man spoke.
+This exclusive insistence on the ethical and spiritual element may
+suffice for those to whom Christ is an ideal or a divinity.  But if we
+are to study the historical development of our religion, and not merely
+its present form, it seems necessary to recognize this belief in the
+Judgment and Advent as a very important factor in the story.
+
+Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstanding
+almost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom the
+prophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divine
+kingdom on earth.  The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospels
+is pervaded by this idea.  The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, the
+splendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents of
+teaching and event, the overstrained eagerness,--which will not suffer a
+son to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculous
+fruit,--all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with this
+tremendous expectation.
+
+That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this anticipation seems
+due to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elements
+which somehow mingle with human destiny.  He was not thinking chiefly of
+himself,--not even though he was to be God's vicegerent.  What filled his
+heart, was the destiny of men.  He wept over Jerusalem,--he mourned for
+those who would go away into darkness.  The realities of human
+experience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him.
+
+It seems plain--so far as anything can be plain in the details of the
+story--that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritual
+idealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the established
+religion.  He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy would
+there take an acute form, with the gravest issues.  At times the presage
+rose of his own defeat and death.  Suppose that were to happen?
+Still--so spoke his victorious faith--God's cause would triumph.  And it
+would triumph speedily and visibly.  So he heartened his followers for
+any event.  "Be prepared--you who are to me brothers and sisters and
+mother--be prepared even for my death.  All the same, my truth will
+vindicate itself, God will triumph, you shall be saved!"
+
+Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther.  Gorgeous
+buildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it a
+mass of greed, formality, worldliness.
+
+A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure.  The disciples
+childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes
+him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not one
+stone be left upon another."
+
+His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act which
+shall blaze upon the dull multitude the sense of their sinful state.  He
+goes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers and
+merchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade.
+This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handle
+against him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and they
+speedily bring about his ruin.
+
+The life of Jesus culminates in the scenes of the last night.  At the
+supper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing self-devotion
+expresses himself in that poetry of humble objects which was
+characteristic of him, and with passionate intensity.  "This bread is my
+body."  "This wine is my blood."  "I give myself for you."
+
+The scene in Gethsemane shows the dismay and recoil of the hour when his
+ardent faith met full the stern actuality.  God was not to interfere,
+defeat and death were before him.  All was hidden, save a fate which rose
+upon his imagination in dark terror.  "O my Father, if it be possible,
+let this cup pass from me!"  Then comes the victory of absolute
+self-surrender, "Not my will, but thine, be done."
+
+
+The birth-hour of the religion of Jesus was that in which he began to
+declare forgiveness to the outcast and good tidings to the poor.  But the
+birth-hour of Christianity, as the worship of Jesus, was that in which
+Mary Magdalene saw her master as risen and eternally living.
+
+The impulse which caught up and gave wings to his work just when it
+seemed crushed came from the heart of Mary.  In a spiritual sense the
+mother of Christianity was a woman who had been a sinner, and was
+forgiven because she loved much.  The faith that sent the disciples forth
+to conquer the world was the faith that their Lord was not dead but
+living, not a memory but a perpetual presence.  That conviction first
+flashed into the heart of Mary.  It was born of a love stronger than
+death, the love of a rescued soul for its savior.  It sprang up in a mind
+simple as a child's, incapable of distinguishing between what it felt and
+what it saw, between its own yearning or instinct and the actualities of
+the outward world.  It took bodily form under a glow of exaltation that
+knew not itself, whether in the body or out of the body.  It crystallized
+instantly into a story of outward fact.  It communicated itself by
+sympathetic intensity to other loving and credulous hearts.  They too saw
+the heavenly vision.  Its acceptance as a reality became the corner-stone
+of the new society.  About it grew up, in ever increasing fullness and
+definiteness of outline, a whole supernal world of celestial
+personalities.  But the initial fact was the heart's conviction--Jesus
+lives!  Our friend and master is not in the grave, nor in the cold
+underworld; he is the child of the living God, and he draws us toward him
+in that divine and eternal life.
+
+To get some partial comprehension of how the belief in Jesus'
+resurrection took possession of the disciples' minds, we are to remember
+that during the last months of their master's life he was in a state of
+tense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them.
+Something wonderful was just about to happen.  There was to be a sudden
+and amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of God
+was to triumph and thenceforth to reign.  But the way to this
+consummation might lead through the valley of the shadow of death.  In
+the soul of Jesus a sublime hope and a dark presage alternated and
+mingled.  It is not to be supposed that he held a definite and unchanging
+conception.  Cloud-shadows and sunbursts played by turns across him, with
+the intensity natural to a soul of vast emotions.  Constant through it
+all was the fixed purpose to be true to his mission, and with victorious
+recurrence came his confidence in the divine issue.  His sympathetic
+disciples were vaguely, profoundly stirred by this elemental struggle and
+victory.  They too became intensely expectant of some great catastrophe
+and triumph.  After the first shock of the Master's death, all this
+emotion surged up in them afresh, with their love heightened as death
+always heightens love, with the fresh and vivid memories of their leader
+sweeping them on in the current of his purpose and hope and faith.  His
+words were true,--he must, he will, conquer and reign.  If he has gone to
+the underworld, he will live again.  "Will,"--nay, is he not here with us
+now?  Is he not more real to our thought and love than ever before?  And
+first in one mind, then in another, the conviction flashes into bodily
+image.  Mary has seen the Master!  Peter has seen him!  And for a little
+time--for "forty days"--the electric air seems often to body forth that
+luminous shape.  The story, as it grew with years, took on one detail
+after another, became definite and coherent, was accepted as the charter
+and foundation of the little society.
+
+To rightly understand the faith of the disciples in the risen Christ, we
+must look below the stories of sense-appearance in which that faith
+clothed itself.  What they essentially felt--what distinguished their
+faith from a mere opinion or dogma--was not a mere expectation, "The dead
+_will_ rise;" not a mere fact of history, "Some one _did_ rise;" it was
+the conviction and consciousness, "Our friend _is living_."  It was an
+experience--including and transcending memory and hope--of present love,
+present communion, present life.
+
+Sight and speech lent their forms to clothe the ineffable experience of
+Mary and the disciples.  For us, the story of outward events--the visible
+form, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating up
+into the clouds--all this fades away as a mirage.  The reality below this
+symbol--the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life--this
+abides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as an
+instance and counterpart of the message which in every age comes to the
+bereaved heart--of a love greater than loss, a life in which death is
+swallowed up.
+
+The religion of the followers of Jesus became a centring of every
+affection, obligation, and hope, in him.
+
+For the first few years all this was merged in the eager expectation of
+his return.  While this lasted in its fullness, even memory was far less
+to them than hope.  They did not attempt any complete records of his
+earthly life,--what need of that, when the life was so soon to be
+resumed?  The bride on the eve of her marriage is not reading her old
+love-letters,--she is looking to the morrow.
+
+That first eager flush had already passed when the earliest gospels were
+written.  By that time hope had begun to prop its wavering confidence, by
+looks turned back even to a remote past.  Hence the constant appeals to
+the supposed predictions of the Old Testament; hence even the imagining
+of special events in the life of Jesus to fulfill those predictions.
+
+The Old Testament as conceived by the writers of the New is fantastically
+unlike the original writings.  The Evangelists found Messianic prophecies
+everywhere.  The writers of the Epistles, Paul and the rest, dealt with
+ceremonies and histories as a quarry out of which to hew whatever
+allegory or argument suited their purpose.
+
+In Luke's Gospel we first see fully displayed the idea of Christ which
+took possession of the common mind, and has largely held it ever
+since,--a personal Savior,--a gracious, merciful, all-powerful deliverer.
+It is a gospel of the imagination and the heart--inspired by the actual
+Jesus, but half-created by ardent, adoring imagination.
+
+This conception grew up side by side with Paul's.  It is far closer to
+the popular mind and heart than Paul's idea,--his was philosophic and
+metaphysic; this is pictorial.  Paul has been studied by theologians, but
+the Gospels have given the Christ of the common people.
+
+The early church was divided into two parties, of which one was led by
+Paul, who stood for the free inclusion of all who would accept Jesus as
+the Messiah, and would impose no further requirement of ceremony or
+dogma, trusting all to the guidance of "the Spirit"--the Spirit of which
+the sufficient fruit and evidence was "love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
+gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance."  The other party, led
+by disciples who had known and followed Jesus himself, maintained that
+the entire Jewish law was still in force, and treated Paul as a dangerous
+heretic.  To narrate the struggle and the final reconcilement is beyond
+the purpose of this book, but we must pause a moment on the figure of
+Paul.
+
+It marks the extraordinary force and vividness of Paul's character, that
+in a few pages of letters, in which the autobiography is only brief and
+incidental, he has so displayed himself that few historical characters
+are more familiar.
+
+We see him,--deep-hearted, vehement, irascible, tender, self-assertive;
+intensely bent on the higher life; thwarted in that aspiration by unruly
+passion,--lust of the flesh and pride of the spirit; stumbling,
+stammering, conquering; a nature full of internal conflict, brought into
+harmony by one sublime spiritual affection; thenceforth throwing its
+whole energy into the diffusion of a like harmony throughout this world
+of troubled conflict.
+
+We see a mind guided in its deepest workings by the realities of personal
+experience, but wholly untrained in logic, unversed in accurate
+knowledge; acquainted with history only through the Old Testament;
+ignorant of the philosophy of Greece; taught by intimate association with
+many men and women in their deepest personal experiences; familiar by
+travel and observation with the broad life of the time, and judging it
+from a lofty ethical standpoint; wholly credulous as to miracle; wholly
+confident in its own theories--theories gendered in the strangest wedding
+of fact and fancy; using constantly the form of argument, which often is
+pure fantasy; illumined by gleams of spiritual insight, which sometimes
+broaden into pure radiance; striving always to express the conscious fact
+of a great freedom of the soul which binds it fast to all duty; aiming at
+a human society dominated wholly and solely by the same spiritual
+principle; but often clothing both the personal and social ideal in forms
+of thought which have become obsolete, so that for us to-day his truth
+has to be stated in other language, and broadened by other truths.
+
+Where Paul has always touched men closest is in the earnestness and
+difficulty of his struggle for the good life, and in the sense of a
+celestial aid,--he calls it "the love of Christ,"--which somehow brings
+habitual victory in the conflict, and sheds peace in its pauses, and
+gives assurance of ultimate triumph and perfect fruition.
+
+The main theme for which Paul contends in most of his epistles was vital
+to the life of the early church,--that its members were not to be held to
+observance of the Jewish ritual.  In support of that theme, Paul develops
+his philosophy of the universe.  The main lines of that philosophy are
+essentially these: that when God had created man, man's sin incurred the
+penalty of death; that God chose the Jews as his peculiar people, and
+gave them the code of laws contained in the books of Moses; that the law
+was too difficult for weak human nature to perfectly obey, so that death
+still reigned on earth, with dire penalty impending in the afterworld;
+that God then had recourse to another plan.  He sent his Son into the
+world, who became a man, taking on him that fleshly nature which is the
+occasion and the symbol of human transgression, but which he wore in
+perfect holiness.  God then caused this fleshly nature of Jesus to die
+upon the cross, while the spiritual nature outlived the perishing body,
+appeared in radiant form to men, and returned to the eternal realm.  By
+this visible sign God made proclamation to mankind, "Die unto sin by
+forsaking sin, and I will give you holiness which issues in eternal life.
+The death and resurrection of my son, Jesus Christ, are the token and
+promise of my free gift, which only asks your acceptance.  Accept it, by
+turning from sin, and you shall receive the sense of companionship with
+Christ, and the consciousness of a divine power working in you and in the
+world.  Of set laws you have no longer need; rites and ceremonies were
+but the type of the reality which now is freely given to you.  Your sole
+obligation is to love; your fidelity to that shall constantly merge in
+the sense of joyful freedom; the imperfect attainment of earth shall
+issue into the eternal felicity of heaven."
+
+In such language we try to restate Paul's philosophy.  Thus, or somewhat
+thus, he thought.  Just how he thought we can never be sure, nor does it
+matter.  The mould of his belief was so different from ours that all
+which closely concerns us is to discern if we can what was the kernel of
+genuine experience, the permanent reality and truth, which vivified this
+world-scheme.
+
+In Paul before his conversion we see the man who struggles to conform to
+a standard of conduct so high, exacting, and minute, that it touches
+every particular of life, and who yet is beset by a constant sense of
+failure and disappointment.  From this slough of despond he is
+lifted--how?  By the sense of a love which extends to him from the unseen
+world.  It takes form to him as the personal love of one who has lived,
+has died, and in some inexpressible way still lives.  This friendship in
+the unseen world is the sufficient, the absolute pledge of a God who
+loves and saves.  No matter what be the theory about it, of incarnation
+or atonement, here is the reality as it comes home: the man Jesus,
+highest, noblest, dearest, makes himself real and present to me, though
+long ago he died and was laid in the grave.  This one fact carries answer
+enough for all the craving of heart and soul.  That I shall at last
+triumph over all besetting evils, that the ruler of the universe is my
+friend, that earth is the vestibule of heaven,--all this I can joyfully
+believe when once I have the sense of that single human friend still
+befriending me in the unseen world.
+
+This was what the risen Christ meant to the early church.  This was the
+common belief that bound its two parties, the Jewish and the Pauline
+Christians, at last into one.  This was what gave the full meaning to all
+the stories of Jesus told over and over and at last written down.  This
+was what fired the common heart of mankind as not the wisdom of Plato nor
+the nobility of Epictetus had touched it.
+
+Paul's experience is the more remarkable because he had never even seen
+Jesus in the flesh.  He had borne in a sense a personal relation to him,
+in the fact that he had hated and persecuted his followers.  The
+conviction that he had been in the wrong came to him with a tremendous
+revulsion of feeling.  The poignancy of remorse was followed by an
+exquisite sense of forgiveness, which shed its depth and tenderness on
+his whole after-life.  In him we first see the power of the personality
+of Jesus to touch those who never had seen him.
+
+At such points we feel how shallow is the plummet-line with which our
+so-called psychology measures the "soul" it deals with.  The influence,
+the presence, the living love, of one who has died,--how paradoxical, how
+unintelligible, to our human science; how significant to our human
+experience!
+
+What concerns us historically as to Paul is that he was the conspicuous
+agent in transforming this sentiment into a moral force.  The belief that
+Jesus was risen had great emotional power, but that emotion might easily
+waste itself, might even undermine the solid foundations of character.
+Paul held the belief in its literal form, but it had for him a further
+significance, as the symbol and type of the soul's experience in its
+every-day walk.  The death we are most concerned about is the extinction
+of evil act and desire.  Life--the only life worth thinking of, here or
+hereafter--is lofty, pure, and tender life.  Die to sin, live to
+holiness, and present or future is safe with God.
+
+Paul's theology is in one sense a passage in a long chapter of
+pseudo-science.  It is one of a series of attempts to explain the
+universe from a starting-point of fable.  These have been the
+accompaniment--sometimes as help, sometimes as obstacle--of a spiritual
+life far deeper than the stammering language they found.  And it is to be
+noted that Paul himself when at his best rises above his theology or
+forgets it.  The words of his which have lodged deepest in the world's
+heart are the vital precepts of conduct, and the utterances of love and
+hope.  In one matchless passage, he celebrates "charity"--simple human
+love--as the one sufficient, supreme, and eternal good.
+
+Some misconceptions in his philosophy became the fruitful seeds of
+mischievous harvests.  One such seed was the ambiguous sense of
+"faith"--the confusing of intellectual credence with moral fidelity.
+This misconception--which underlies much of the New Testament--was an
+almost inevitable incident of a religion generated as this was.
+Christianity based itself, in its own theory, on the bodily resurrection
+of Jesus from the dead.  This was offered as a basis for the whole appeal
+which the church made to the world.  Thus Belief--or Credulity--usurped
+the place among the virtues which of right belongs to Truth.
+
+Another misconception lay in the use of "flesh," the antithesis of
+"spirit," as the name of the evil principle.  Paul indeed uses "the
+flesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin.  With him it equally
+includes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride and
+self-seeking.  But the nomenclature and the way of thought which it
+reflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man.  In that
+stigma lay the germ of asceticism, hostility to marriage, depreciation of
+some vital elements of man's nature.
+
+Paul's conception of the church never was fully realized.  He expected to
+see the whole body of believers filled with a "holy spirit," a
+divine-human inspiration, which should of itself guide them into all
+truth and duty.  Outward law or doctrine there needed none, beyond the
+acceptance of Christ as God's son who had lived and died and risen.
+Accept that, and the divine spirit would be given you.  No need then of
+circumcision or sacrifice, of Sabbath or fast, of written code or human
+ruler.  The saint is free from all law but that of love; the company of
+saints needs no control or guidance but that.
+
+The beautiful ideal shattered itself against a stubborn fact.  Love of
+Christ did not guide his followers into all truth, or into harmony with
+each other.  Paul's life was half spent in a bitter contest with men who
+loved Christ as well as he did.  His epistles are full of the struggle
+with that great party of Christ's followers who called him a heretic and
+sought to win away his converts.  Suppose any one had asked him: "You say
+the spirit of Christ will guide his followers into all truth,--why does
+it not guide these Christian Jews and you into so much of truth as will
+make you friends instead of foes?"
+
+Paul was hoping too much.  The new impulse in the world--sublime,
+beautiful, full of power and promise--was by no means sufficient to lead
+the world straight and sure to harmonious perfection.  There was no such
+gift of "the spirit" as to supersede all search, all struggle, all human
+leadership and human groping.  That hope was almost as exaggerated as the
+expectation--with which in Paul's mind it mingled--of Christ's bodily
+return.  The road to be traveled by mankind was still long and arduous.
+
+
+Any complete history of the early church must deal largely with the
+stubborn and bitter contest between the Jewish and Pauline parties,--the
+champions of the law and the champions of liberty.  That contest gave its
+stamp to the epistles of Paul, and was indeed their most frequent
+occasion.  At a later time the attempt to harmonize the two parties seems
+to have given birth to the book of Acts, in which history mixes with
+fiction.  But we are here concerned only with such features of the
+history as made the most vital and permanent contributions to religion,
+and for this purpose we need only specify the Epistle to the Ephesians.
+
+This epistle opens the heart of the early church.  It assumes to be
+written by Paul, but there are some indications that this name was
+borrowed by the real author.  This assumption of a great name, so common
+in this age, as in the books of Daniel, Wisdom of Solomon, Enoch, and
+others, marks a timidity, a deference to authority of the past.  Only the
+greatest, like Jesus and Paul, dared to speak in their own name.
+
+Primarily the epistle is a plea for unity between Jewish and Gentile
+Christians,--broadening into an appeal for unity between all classes and
+individuals, an appeal for purity and holiness, in the name of Christ the
+head.  Occasional sentences and phrases will sufficiently show its tenor
+and spirit.
+
+"That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye, being rooted and
+grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the
+breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ,
+which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of
+God."
+
+"There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of
+your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all
+who is above all and through all and in you all."  "Endeavoring to keep
+the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
+
+Each has his appointed place, some as apostles, some as prophets, some
+for humbler service,--for "the building up of the body of Christ," "till
+we all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son
+of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the
+fullness of Christ."
+
+"Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are
+members one of another."  "Let him that stole steal no more, but rather
+let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he
+may have to give to him that needeth."
+
+The note of purity is far higher than in Stoic or Platonist.  Uncleanness
+is spurned with the horror which pure love and holiness inspire.
+
+"Fornication, and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be once
+named among you, as becometh saints.  Neither filthiness, nor foolish
+talking, nor jesting, which are not becoming, but rather giving of
+thanks.  For this ye know, that no whoremonger nor unclean person nor
+covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of
+Christ and of God.  Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because
+of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of
+disobedience."  "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled
+with the spirit."
+
+There is a tender exhortation to husband and wife, based on the likeness
+of their union to Christ and his church.  There is a special word to
+children, servants, masters.  The sweetness is matched by the strength.
+"Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his
+might."
+
+The epistle is full of the spirit of a present heaven.  There is scarcely
+any thought of the future, no reference to the second coming, no dwelling
+on the hereafter.  It is all-sufficient, all-uniting love,--Christ, a
+spiritual presence, as the head--God the Father of all.  The love of
+Christ is a pure spiritual passion.  There is no theorizing about him,
+not even much personal distinctness,--only the consciousness as of some
+celestial personality.  The seen and unseen worlds seem to blend in a
+common atmosphere.
+
+Even as an ideal, this transcends the philosophy of Epictetus, and
+outshines the vision of Plato.  As one of the charter documents of a
+society which had come into an actual existence,--as the aim toward which
+thousands of men and women were struggling, however imperfectly,--it
+marks the coming of a new life into the world.
+
+
+The Pauline idea of Christ is shown as it worked itself out in the brain
+and heart of Paul himself.  In the Fourth Gospel we have, not the
+experience of an individual, but an idealized portrait of the Master.
+
+The germ may have lain in some genuine tradition of his words, as they
+were caught and treasured by some disciple more susceptible than the rest
+to the mystical and contemplative element in Jesus.  These words, handed
+down through congenial spirits, and deeply brooded; these ideas caught by
+minds schooled in the blending of Hebraic with Platonic thought,--minds
+accustomed to rely on the contemplative imagination as the discloser of
+absolute truth; the waning of the hope of Messiah's return in the clouds;
+the growth in its place of a personal and interior communion with the
+divine beauty and glory as imaged in Jesus; a temper almost indifferent
+to outward event, too full of present emotion to strain anxiously toward
+a future, yet confident of a transcendent future in due season; an
+assumption that in this belief lay the sole good and hope of humanity,
+and that the rejection of this was an impulse of the evil principle
+warring against God; the crystallization of these memories, hopes, and
+beliefs into a dramatic portraiture of acts and words appropriate to
+Christ as so conceived; a temper in which a portraiture so inspired was
+identified with actual and absolute truth--some such genesis we may
+suppose for the Gospel which bears the name of John.
+
+The writer shows no such close contact with the actual struggle of life
+as vivifies the other biographies of Jesus and the impassioned pleadings
+of Paul.  He is a pure and lofty soul, but he writes as if in seclusion
+from the world.  His favorite words are abstract and general.  The
+parable and precept of the early gospels give place to polemic and
+metaphysic disquisition.  The Christian communities for which he writes
+have left behind them the sharp antagonisms of the first generation, and
+have drawn together into a harmonious society, strong in their mutual
+affection, their inspiring faith, and their rule of life, and facing
+together the cruelty of the persecutor and the scorn of the philosopher.
+To this writer, all who are outside of the Christian fold and the
+Christian belief seem leagued together by the power of evil.  The secret
+of their perversity and the seal of their doom is unbelief.  Let them
+accept the Christ he portrays, and good shall supplant evil in their
+hearts.  The ground of the acceptance is to be simply the self-evident
+beauty and therefore the self-evident truth of the Christ here set forth.
+
+And so we have a portrayal of Christ which at many points profoundly
+appeals to the heart, yet which constantly dissipates into a metaphysical
+mythology; together with the admonition that only a full belief can save
+the soul and the world from ruin.  The ethical and emotional elements of
+the new religion have thoroughly fused with the elements of dogma and
+exclusiveness.
+
+A kind of self-exaltation is by this writer imputed to Jesus, which is as
+much less attractive than his attitude in the Synoptics as it is less
+genuine.  "All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers"--this is
+the word of an idolatrous worshiper; far different from him whose only
+sense of superiority was expressed in a longing to impart his own
+treasure: "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will
+give you rest."
+
+But the writer rises to a lofty plane where he conceives the parting
+words of Jesus to his friends.  Here he is on the ground of what we know
+did in some wise really happen--a last interview between the Master and
+his disciples, when clouds of defeat and death lowered close before him,
+and his words deepened in their hearts the devotion which animated all
+their after-lives.  That parting scene, preserved elsewhere in
+delineations brief and impressive, was now expanded by the brooding,
+creative thought of some one in closest sympathy with the occasion and
+with the vital impulse it had given.  Literal and historical fidelity the
+description may lack, but it is in close accord with the realities of
+experience.  The tender assurances, the prophecies beyond hope, which the
+Master is here supposed to speak, had indeed been fulfilled.  The loss of
+his earthly presence had been more than made good to those in whose lives
+he had been felt as a saving power.  The Comforter had truly come.  The
+mutual love of the disciples, and their loyalty to the Master as they
+understood him, had planted a new social force in the world, and was
+working slowly to transform the world.  Thoughts which had been the
+possession of philosophers in the schools were become working forces in
+the lives of common men and women and children.  That deliverance from
+the fear of death which thinkers had vainly sought had been won even by
+the poor and lowly.  All this and more was set forth as in a psalm or
+prophecy, in the parting words ascribed to Christ.
+
+"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world
+giveth give I unto you."  "Ye shall see me again, and your hearts shall
+rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you."
+
+
+The predominant notes of the New Testament are tenderness and ardor, but
+inwrought with these is a vein of terror and sometimes of fierce wrath.
+It is like the denunciation in the Old Testament, to which the vision of
+a future world has added a more lurid hue.  "Asia's rancor" has not
+disappeared, even in the presence of "Bethlehem's heart."  Among the
+words attributed to Jesus are the threat of that perdition where the worm
+dieth not and the fire is not quenched.  To him is ascribed (whether
+truly or not) the story of Dives in hell, and father Abraham in whose
+bosom Lazarus is reposing denies even his prayer for a drop of water to
+cool his tongue.  Here is the germ of all the horrors of the mediaeval
+imagination.  The germs bore an early fruitage in that book which bears
+the name of "Revelation."  It mirrors the passions which spring up amid
+the heats of faction and of persecution.  Fell hatred fills its pages for
+the persecutor and for the heretic.  The few gleams of Paradise for the
+saved are pale in comparison with the ghastly terrors.  It is the first
+full outbreak of that disease of the imagination, bred of disease of the
+heart, which was to be the curse of Christianity.
+
+
+We have dwelt upon the central facts and ideas in which Christianity took
+its rise.  We shall pass with a few brief glances over a tract of many
+centuries.  Our special concern in this work is with the birth-periods of
+the vital and lasting principles of man's higher life.  One such phase
+was the Greek-Roman philosophy of which the best outcome was Stoicism.
+Another critical era was the birth of Christianity from its immediate
+lineage of Judaism.  The next great epoch is the marriage of rational
+knowledge with the spiritual life--which is the story of these last
+centuries, in mid-action of which we are standing.
+
+Viewing man's higher life upon its intellectual side, the common
+characteristic of the period between the time of the Apostles and our
+immediate forefathers is the prevalence of what may be called the
+Christian mythology.  In other words, the moral rules and spiritual
+ideals were almost inextricably bound up with and based upon the
+conception of a supernatural world, certainly and definitely known, and
+disclosed to mankind through a series of revelations which centred in the
+incarnation of God in the man Jesus Christ.  Upon this basis was reared a
+vast intellectual and imaginative structure--embodied in many creeds,
+pictured in visions of Dante and Milton and Bunyan, enforced by
+multitudinous appeals to emotion and reason, to love, hope, and terror.
+
+It is the dissolving of this elaborate supernaturalism, and the growth of
+a different conception of the spiritual life, which is now going on
+before our eyes.  To measure the essential significance of the change, we
+need not linger long upon the successive steps by which the mythology
+expanded and solidified itself.  We have seen its germs in the story of
+Judaism, of Jesus and his immediate successors.  The method and nature of
+its growth may be briefly indicated.
+
+We are following only a single thread in the vast web of history.  All
+the threads work in together, but we must be well content if we can trace
+the general line of one or two.  It is the history of the moral ideas
+which have most directly and closely influenced the life of men, that we
+are trying to pursue.  There was a wonderful embodiment and outshining of
+such ideas in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.  The truth he
+taught and lived was in some ways made more applicable and transmissible
+by his followers, and in some ways lowered.  There grew up the society of
+the Christian church.  Gradually it took its place among the important
+forces of the Roman empire.  It won at last the nominal allegiance of the
+civilized world.  Aiding or thwarting it, coloring and changing it, were
+a thousand influences,--side-currents from other religions and
+philosophies, social changes, Roman law and tradition, the new life of
+the barbarians; old ingrained habits of blood and brain; the constant
+push of primal instincts--hunger and sex; tides of war and trade and
+industry; slavery and serfdom; strong human personalities, swaying a
+little the tide that bore them; all the myriad forces that are always at
+work in history.
+
+One can scarcely pass by a leap of thought from the age of Paul to the
+age of Dante without an instant's glance at the intervening tract.  There
+are the early Christian communities, bound together by tender ties of
+brotherhood; storms of persecution fanning high the flame of courage and
+faith; a new purity and sweetness of domestic life spreading itself like
+the coming of the dawn.  There are wild vagaries of the mind, taking
+shape in fantastic heresies.  There is the degeneracy of a faith held in
+pureness and peril into a popular and fashionable religion.  There are
+enthroned monsters like Nero and Commodus; "Christian" emperors, like
+Constantine, ambitious, crafty, and blood-guilty; and noble "heathen"
+emperors like Trajan and Aurelius.  There is the peace of the Empire in
+its best days, with some wide diffusion of prosperity and content.  There
+are incursions of barbarians--the strange, little-known life of nomadic
+tribes--with pristine virtues of valor and chastity, half-pictured,
+half-imagined, by Tacitus.  There is conquest, rapine, subjugation,
+suffering.  There are ages in which violence is master, and in the
+disordered struggle of the violent among themselves the weak are trampled
+under foot.  There are scenes of humble happiness and content, the toiler
+in the fields, the family about the hearth-stone, which scarcely are seen
+by the chronicler busy with kings and popes.  There are superstitions and
+mummeries; wild fears of spectres and devils; sentimental piety handed
+with cruelty and debauchery.  There are inward struggles, sorrows,
+achievements; rapturous glimpses, tender consolations; the ministry of
+faithful priests; the comforting of women and the purifying of men by the
+thought of the Virgin Mother and the saints.  There are civilizers in
+state and church,--Alfred, Charlemagne, Hildebrand.  There is the
+emergence of a social and ecclesiastical order; the ranking of kings,
+barons, and vassals; of priests, bishops, and popes; the establishment of
+laws and charters; the growth of liturgies and cathedrals.
+
+The contrast is great between the simplicity of a high moral ideal, like
+that of Jesus or Paul, which claims, and with such show of reason and
+right, the whole allegiance of man, and the vast complexity of good and
+evil in which the ideal works only as one obscure and partial element.
+How simple, how clear, how sweetly inviting sounds the call,--how strange
+and discordant the response!
+
+That inconsistency was explained by the church fathers, like Augustine,
+as due to the inherent badness of human nature.  That universal badness
+flowed from one sin of the common ancestor.  That sin was induced by the
+machinations of Satan, arch-enemy of God, and practically dividing the
+rule of the universe with him.  A logical and symmetrical explanation in
+its day, but it no longer explains.
+
+Neither does it explain, but it may profit, if the wondering inquirer
+turns his thoughts for a moment on his personal history.  He has had his
+hours of clear vision and high resolve,--why have they borne such poor
+fruit in his actual life?  His own riddle is one with the riddle of
+history.
+
+Again we may say, with no pretense of probing the mystery in its depths,
+but as gaining a touch of side-light, it is plain that what we look at as
+the strictly moral forces of mankind--the clear thinking, the definite
+purpose, the pure aspiration--must be reckoned with as only a part of the
+volume of force that carries along the individual and the race.  Other
+elements of that force are the physical needs; the push and play of
+passions ingrained in human nature; the inherited bias; the strength of
+habits formed before childhood had begun to reflect,--the thousand forces
+which blend with reason and choice to make up our destiny.  Man's noblest
+aim is to make reason and purpose the rulers in his little republic, but
+at the best those rulers must deal with a set of very vigorous and often
+mutinous subjects.
+
+Let us not at least wonder, though for the moment we sigh, that neither
+did the kingdom of God at once establish itself on earth, as Jesus hoped,
+nor did the Spirit guide mankind by a brief and sure path into full
+felicity and holiness, as Paul hoped.
+
+The disappointment is a blank contradiction only for those who assume a
+superhuman revelation in Scripture or in church, and then have to
+reconcile this infallibility with that most fallible groping by which
+alone mankind gets along.  Unembarrassed at least by that difficulty, let
+us note one natural cause of the imperfect progress of Christianity,
+namely, the substitution of fancy for clear and sound knowledge of nature
+and man, which was inwrought from the beginning in its creed.
+
+We may recall the piercing question of Socrates, "Can virtue be taught?"
+Can the best life be so clearly shown and so skillfully inculcated, that
+it may be transmitted from man to man and from generation to generation
+as surely and safely as the knowledge of a mechanical art or a physical
+science?  Socrates owned that he knew of no such way to teach
+virtue,--that while Pericles could teach his son to be a good horseman,
+he could not so guide him but that he became a bad man,--and Socrates
+himself found no sure way to guide men into the heroic path he walked
+himself.
+
+Now Christianity offered a sort of knowledge as the proper training to
+produce virtue.  Its knowledge included certain genuine and precious
+elements, such as the essential blessedness of purity and love; the trust
+and peace which flow from duty done; the hope which springs from the
+grave of a holy man;--ideas not new in substance, but wonderfully
+vivified and vitalized.  But along with this genuine knowledge,
+Christianity blended in ever-growing volume a pseudo-knowledge.  It had a
+professed explanation of the nature of Deity, the nature of humanity, and
+their mutual relation, which was so unreal that when applied to the
+conduct of human life its fruit was often as ashes and the east wind.
+
+To sum up the method by which Christianity wrought: its vital ideas of
+character were infolded in a triple crust of Authority, Ceremony, Dogma.
+Its ideas could scarcely have been propagated except under some such
+incrustation.  Pure gold must be mixed with alloy before it can be
+worked.  The new society would have quickly dissolved into chaos if it
+had not had established laws and usages and discipline and rulers.  The
+craving of the average man for definite symbols fastened eagerly on the
+cleansing water of baptism and the bread and wine of the love-feast.  The
+thoughtful mind must needs seek to assign to the Master his true place
+and relation as between God and man.  Here were the germs of hierarchy,
+ceremonial, and dogma.  Internal order, self-protection against
+persecuting emperors and then against barbarian invaders, led to a
+gradual strengthening and perfecting of the organization.  The craving
+for intellectual consistency and symmetry urged on the elaboration of the
+creed.
+
+That development of the Christian creed,--in one view, how natural and
+inevitable a process; yet what enormous waste of intellect, what
+diversion from sound inquiry!  The original hypothesis being pure fancy,
+all the ingenious deductions are mere excursions into cloudland.
+
+We need not follow in any detail these speculations.  A certain purity
+and loftiness marks their early stages, in which the Greek theologians
+were occupied in blending a sort of Platonic theory of deity with the
+historic fact of a noble human personality.  With the emergence of the
+church from persecution to power, we see that the intellectual degeneracy
+has set in along with the moral.  The first great council, that of
+Nicaea, occupied itself in settling by a majority of votes whether Christ
+was of _like_ substance with the Father or of the _same_ substance with
+the Father.  The assertion of his full equality was in due time followed
+by a similar definition of the personality and equality of the Holy
+Spirit, with the full doctrine of the Trinity; the double nature of
+Christ; the rank of the Virgin Mary.  The authoritative interpretation of
+human nature had its source in the personal experience and later
+theorizing of Augustine.  Himself emergent after long struggles from the
+tyranny of evil desire, by a transcendent experience in which he saw the
+hand of God,--he in effect generalized from this to the inherent and
+utter depravity of all mankind, and its entire dependence on a divine
+grace which might with equal justice be given or withheld.  The lurid
+hell which had always shared with a radiant heaven the imagination of the
+church took from Augustine a grimmer horror: in the fearful thought of
+men, its foundations were now deep sunk in eternal justice, man being
+himself from birth a wretch so abominable that hell was his natural
+destiny, save as mercy might by inscrutable selection deliver some
+portion of mankind.
+
+Later ages brought their own problems.  What was the nature of the
+atonement,--a compact between God and the Devil, by which Christ was made
+a ransom for man, the Devil being unexpectedly cheated of his pay?  Or
+was Christ's death simply the transfer of a debt on the books of divine
+justice?  The sacraments, again, what was their precise nature?  And so
+the scheme was worked out in all its details.
+
+The triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit; a hierarchy of angels; the
+creation of man, his seduction by a revolted and fallen angel, and the
+exposure of his entire posterity to the just retribution of everlasting
+misery; an arrangement between the persons of the Trinity by which the
+incarnation and death of the Son became a ransom for mankind; the
+establishment by Christ of a visible church, divinely guided to reveal to
+men the truth, and impart to them the divine grace; the offer of
+salvation upon condition of faith, repentance, and obedience; sacraments
+which were channels of divine grace; an endless heaven of bliss for the
+submissive and obedient, an endless hell of torment for the negligent or
+rebellious,--this was the universe as it existed to the belief and
+imagination of the Christian world for many centuries.
+
+Thus Christianity, instead of following a true inquiry into the facts of
+the moral life,--in place of cultivating that sound knowledge of man in
+which Socrates led the way, or that knowledge of the natural world in
+which Aristotle and the Greek physicists had wrought,--instead of such
+study, the church based its ideals, its appeals, its helps, on a purely
+fanciful interpretation of the universe.  Its refined and ingenious
+speculations were wasted upon a fantasy.
+
+This want of sound knowledge has for us here a twofold significance.  It
+points to one cause of the imperfect success of the ideals of Jesus and
+of Paul.  And by its defect it points us forward to a fulfillment, when
+at a later age Virtue and Knowledge should be wed.
+
+
+But we need to distinguish and to reverence the deep utterances of the
+human heart which spoke with stammering tongue in these crude symbols.
+
+The Catholic church was a second Roman empire in its extent and power,
+and with an inspiration loftier than that of the empire.  For, judged by
+what was most essential to it, the Catholic church--human to the core,
+human in its errors and sins, human in its upward striving--was, at its
+best, a society for disciplining men in the higher life.  And that creed
+which sounds so strange to our ears, we may best translate thus:
+_Eternity bids you to goodness_.  However much there was of error, of
+misapplied force, of moral injury, there was a vast, multiform, mighty
+culture of men in chastity, in charity, in the victories and the joys of
+the spirit.  The church set the Virgin Mother as a heavenly consoler, and
+showed as the divinest thing a man who died for love of men.  Before the
+imagination of the oppressor, the robber, the licentious, it set a
+flaming sword of retribution.  To the poor, the sorrowful, the
+broken-hearted, it offered the blessed assurance, _This world and the
+next are God's_.  It opened to them a communion in thought and feeling
+with holy and blessed souls in the invisible realm.  Life was hard and
+troublous; priests and bishops sometimes made the trouble worse; but
+there was the sense of a heavenly rule over all, the struggle toward a
+heavenly attainment.
+
+The whole moral appeal of the church rested on the superterrestrial world
+which it asserted and pictured.  It was a world whose existence was
+vouched solely by an inward assent of the mind.  For outward government,
+there were bishops and popes, kings and magistrates.  But all moral
+authority, all incitement to holiness, all spiritual joy and hope, rested
+on this unseen world as accepted by the mind.  Disbelieve, and all was
+lost!  And so, of necessity, _belief_ was the fundamental, the essential
+thing.  Obey the church, believe the creed,--that was the supreme double
+requirement.
+
+
+That imaginations when believed as these were believed exercised a mighty
+power is beyond question.  That the power was in a degree for good is
+also clear.  But the vast dislocation between the supposed and the real
+worlds involved enormous failure and waste.
+
+On the one hand, the whole tremendous imagery of the supernal world
+simply slipped off altogether from a great proportion of the men and
+women whose time and thought were absorbed in the toils and sorrows and
+pleasures of the world about them.  To make a future heaven and hell take
+any hold of them at all, the church had to translate its mysteries and
+sublimities into a very material and crude ceremonial.  It brought in
+penalties of a substantial sort,--penance and excommunication, the rack
+and the stake.  It constantly appealed to fear.  And after all, there
+remained always an enormous amount of stolid and mostly silent
+indifference and unbelief.  The priest said these things were so,--the
+priests all said so,--and the priest was backed by the bishop, and the
+bishop by the Pope.  Well, perhaps they knew--and perhaps they did n't.
+The chance that they were right made it worth while to go to church on
+Sunday, and to confession sometimes; to have one's children baptized; to
+avoid giving offense to the clergy; and to make sure of their good
+offices when one came to die.  But the belief in their heaven and hell
+was not strong enough to very much expel the greed, sloth, lust, avarice,
+pride to which men were prone.
+
+That same silent practical unbelief has been equally prevalent under all
+the forms of Protestant supernaturalism.  Part of it, no doubt, may be
+referred to the difficulty with which human nature responds to any appeal
+to look much beyond the immediate present.  But in great part too it
+springs from a suspicion of unreality in that supernatural world which
+the preacher so fluently and fervently declares.
+
+It may be said that in a more ignorant and credulous age the mass of men
+did believe unquestioningly in the teachings of the church.  But what
+hardly admits of debate is the misconception which the mediaeval church's
+doctrine involved as to some of the cardinal facts of life.
+
+This religion dealt with such primary facts of real life as the human
+body and its laws, the passion of sex, productive industry, the
+organization of society,--in short, with all the impulses, instincts, and
+powers of man,--through a cloud of misapprehension.
+
+The central misconception was the idea that this life is only significant
+as the antechamber to another.  Hence its occupations, responsibilities,
+joys, and troubles are of little account except as they are directly
+related to the other life.  This naturally bred a false attitude toward
+many of the subjects which both actually and of right do largely engage
+the attention of men.
+
+The body was regarded as not the servant but the enemy of the spirit.
+The highest state was celibacy, and marriage was a concession to human
+weakness.
+
+Study of nature was an unprofitable pursuit.  The charter of divine truth
+was the Bible, and its interpreter was the church.  Since this world was
+only the scene of a brief discipline, and was itself to pass away, it was
+idle to spend much study on it.
+
+Speculative thought was profitable only so long as it was a mere
+elucidation of the dogmas of the church.  As soon as those dogmas were
+even remotely questioned, the thinker's soul was in peril.  In repressing
+heretical suggestions by the sternest measures, the church was
+discharging a plain duty.
+
+Earthly pleasure was dangerous, but in suffering lay medicinal virtue.
+One mark of the saint was self-inflicted pain.  The highest symbol of
+religion was the cross, emblem of torture and death.
+
+The belief in a hell of endless suffering was the parent of a monstrous
+and ghastly brood of imaginations.  How far the dread thus inspired acted
+as a wholesome deterrent we can only guess.  Too well we know the torture
+it wrought in sensitive and apprehensive natures, the pangs of fear which
+mothers suffered, the sense of a curse overhanging a part of mankind,
+which even in our own day darkens many a life, and which in a more
+unquestioning age rested like a pall on countless hearts.
+
+Such were among the beliefs, the consistent and logical beliefs, of the
+mediaeval churchmen.  Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society had
+their roots partly in that conception of religion which in other
+directions bore noble fruit.
+
+
+Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging from
+it a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of the
+master-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently.
+
+There is in Dante a boundless terror and a boundless hope.  Compared with
+the antique world there is a new tenderness and a new remorse.  Hell,
+Purgatory, Heaven are the projections of man's fear, his purification,
+his hope.
+
+Dante shows the vision which had grown up and possessed the belief of
+men--a terror matched with a glory and tenderness.  But in Dante is a
+force beyond this theologic belief--the spiritual love of a man and
+woman.  It is personal, intense, pure, sacramental.  Thirteen hundred
+years of Christianity had inwrought a new purity.  Out of chivalry,
+half-barbaric, had grown a new sentiment toward woman.  If was truly a
+"new life."
+
+Through Dante's early story,--the vestibule by which we are led to the
+"Divina Commedia,"--through this "Vita Nuova," there runs a poignancy
+which has almost more of pain than pleasure.  Under an earthly symbol it
+is the vision of the ideal--the unattainable--the passion of the soul for
+what lies beyond its full grasp.
+
+In form Dante reproduces the Catholic theology.  In reality he lives by
+the ideal relation with Beatrice.  For him the true Purgatory is his
+self-reproach in her presence.  The boundless joy of reunion after a
+lifelong separation is checked on the threshold, that the intense light
+of that moment may illumine the soul's past unworthiness, and touch it
+with a remorse deeper than all the horrors of hell could awaken.  The
+anguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong is
+absolutely forgotten.  Then comes the full fruition, and the mated souls
+traverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches its
+reflection in the eyes of Beatrice.
+
+Yet, what does Dante show as the actuality of the world after thirteen
+centuries of Christianity?  He shows evil existing in its worst forms and
+in wide extent.  The horrors of the Inferno are the retribution which
+seemed to Dante appropriate for the crimes going on about him.  The sin
+whose punishment he depicts is not a figment of the theologians, an
+imaginary participation in Adam's trespass, or the mere human shadows
+against a dazzling ideal of purity.  In the men of his own time and in
+his own community he saw flagrant wrong of every sort,--lust, cruelty,
+treachery.  The physical hell he imagines in another world is the
+counterpart of the moral hell he sees about him in this world.  In his
+Inferno, Hate and Horror hold high carnival.  Much of it is to the modern
+reader like a frightful nightmare of the imagination.
+
+
+In the progress of the centuries, along with the growth of ethical and
+spiritual ideals has been the movement of coarser forces--often seeming
+to destroy the ethical, yet giving power for the upward movement.
+
+In the reconstruction of European society, the first power was that of
+military force.  Out of this grew feudalism,--a kind of order, with its
+own code of duties; and chivalry, with an atmosphere of noble sentiment
+running into fantasy.
+
+Next came the powers of wealth and of knowledge.  Wealth grew first by
+the association of craftsmen,--the guilds, the free cities.
+
+Then commerce spread, as in the trade of Italy and the Low Countries with
+the East.
+
+A succession of discoveries and inventions in the physical world advanced
+society.
+
+Gunpowder helped to overthrow feudalism.
+
+Printing made the Reformation possible.
+
+The Copernican theory had its practical result in the stimulation of
+discovery and commerce; its intellectual issue in the weakening of the
+church's cosmogony, and a discredit of the church's claim to real
+knowledge.
+
+The growing wealth of the middle class gave freedom to England,--the
+merchants and cities were the strength of the Puritan and Parliamentary
+party.
+
+A series of inventions has within the last century multiplied wealth--the
+use of canals, textile machinery, steam, electricity.  This has created a
+new class of rich.  It has improved the condition of the laboring man,
+not enough to satisfy him, but enough to strengthen him to demand more.
+
+Thus, military force giving strength; its organization as feudalism,
+giving the chivalric virtues and training an upper class; commerce,
+discovery, invention, raising first the middle class and then the
+lower,--these forces, not on the surface ethical, have cooperated to
+realize the ideal.
+
+
+Luther led a revolt which in its issue freed half Europe from the Roman
+court.  He made the quarrel on a moral question.  No man, he said, could
+sell a license from God to commit sin.  If the Pope said otherwise, the
+Pope was a liar and no vicegerent of God.  So he put in the forefront of
+the revolting forces a moral idea.
+
+He showed that the spiritual life, with all its aspirations, struggles,
+and victories, was open to man without help from Pope or priesthood.  He
+gave the German people the Bible in their own tongue.  He taught by word
+and example that marriage was the rightful accompaniment of a life
+consecrated to God.
+
+He had many of the limitations of the peasant and the priest.  He was
+wholly inadequate to any comprehensive conception of the higher life of
+humanity.  His ideal of character was based on a mystical experience,
+under the forms of an antiquated theology.  He was narrow; he confounded
+the friends with the foes of progress; he had no clear understanding of
+the social and political needs of the time; he was full of superstition,
+and saw the Devil present in every mischief; he was often violent and
+wrathful.  But he had a great and tender heart; he had the soldierly
+temper which prompted him to strike when more sensitive and reflective
+men held back; and he won the leadership of the new age when against all
+the pomp and power of Emperor and Pope he planted himself on the truth as
+he saw the truth: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me!"
+
+
+Copernicus died in 1543--two years before Luther.  For thirty-six
+years--all through the Reformation struggle--he was quietly working out
+his theory.  The book containing it he did not venture to publish, till
+under Paul III. there was a lull in the storm.  He was a loyal Catholic,
+but his teaching was sure to conflict with the church.  He kept alive
+just long enough to see his book come from the printers--dying at the age
+of seventy.  Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo came later.
+
+
+The Protestants in the name of religion defied and set aside the Catholic
+church.  They were impelled to do it because they saw that the church,
+claiming infallibility, was practically fallible and faulty in its
+morals, as in the matter of the indulgences.  They found courage to do
+it, because men like Luther learned by experience that the sense of
+pardoned sin, of a divine communion, of peace and joy, of which the
+church had claimed the exclusive possession, were possible to them wholly
+without the church's intervention.  That was one side of the revolt: the
+other side was that the civil society, as in England, had grown strong
+enough, and the monarchical and national temper bold enough, to be
+impatient of any foreign control.
+
+But the Protestant reformers in an intellectual sense simply remoulded a
+little the old creed, detaching so much only as was inextricably blended
+with the authority of the Roman priesthood.  Theirs was in no sense an
+intellectually creative movement.  Politically and socially it had great
+effects.  Intellectually it did hardly more than _to set the door open_.
+Even this it did unconsciously and unwillingly.  The early Protestants
+found themselves face to face with elemental forces of human
+nature,--with misery, sin, and greed, with passions stimulated by the
+sense that authority was weakening.  They saw no other resource, their
+own minds prompted no other thought, their spiritual experience brought
+no other suggestion, than to continue the old appeal to the supernatural
+world.  The creed of Calvin is harsher than the creed of Rome; its
+spiritual world no less definitely conceived and authoritatively taught;
+its insistence on _belief_ no less absolute.  The traditional Protestant
+orthodoxy is only the Catholic theology a little shrunken and dwindled.
+Its appeal to the reason is hardly stronger, and its appeal to the
+imagination is less strong.
+
+
+But for more than three hundred years the whole conception of a
+supernatural universe has been growing weaker and weaker in its hold on
+the minds of men.  Shakspere paints the most various, active, and
+passionate world of humanity,--a humanity brilliant with virtues, dark
+with crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almost
+unaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world.  On Hamlet's
+brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation.  No hope of a
+hereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia.  Macbeth,
+hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of
+future retribution,--assure him only of success _here_, and
+
+  "We 'd jump the life to come."
+
+
+It is impossible to pass the exhaustless Shakspere without some further
+word of inadequate comment.  Apparently no one in his day guessed that
+among the jostling throng of soldiers, statesmen, and philosophers this
+obscure playwright was the intellectual king.  But Time has more than
+redressed the wrong, for now he is not only reverenced as a sovereign but
+sometimes worshiped as an oracle.  The prime secret of his power,
+compared with the men before him and about him, is his return to reality.
+It is the actual world, the actual men and women in it, that he portrays,
+and not the puppets or shadows of a made-up world.  It is a change of
+standpoint such as Bacon made when he recalled philosophy from abstract
+speculation to the study of concrete facts, and calmly told men that
+their past achievements were as nothing compared to the truth they were
+to attain with the new weapons.  Shakspere has no thought of mankind's
+advance, no method or system to offer, but as seer and artist he beholds
+and portrays the universe about him.  We get some idea of what the change
+means when we compare the humanity which he depicts with the account of
+mankind given by a logical theologian like Calvin; the simple, sharp
+division between saints and sinners, against the mixed, particolored,
+genuinely human people who touch our tears and laughter on the
+dramatist's page.  Or again, contrast his world with Dante's, where the
+profoundest imagination and sensibility project themselves into a
+phantasmagoria.  In the change to Shakspere we are tempted to say that we
+have lost heaven and escaped hell, but have taken fresh hold on earthly
+life and found in it unmeasured richness and significance.
+
+In reading Shakspere we are never confused or weakened as between virtue
+and vice.  In simply showing us this life as it is acted out by all kinds
+of people, he shows perpetually the beauty of courage, truth, tenderness,
+purity, and the ugliness of their opposites.  Measure him at the most
+critical point, chastity.  His plays have plenty of coarseness; they have
+touches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they always
+leave us with the sense that purity is noble and impurity is evil.  It is
+striking to note the tone in this respect of his successive productions.
+His youthful poem, "Venus and Adonis," is touched with the disease which
+had blighted the literature and the life of southern Europe,--the
+infection of the imagination by sensuality, a sort of intellectual
+putrescence.  In the frank daylight of the early dramas this nightmare
+has disappeared, yet in the generally clean atmosphere there occurs
+sometimes a touch of depraved Italian manners, as in "All's Well that
+Ends Well," the deliberate seduction attempted by Bertram, bringing
+little discredit and no punishment.  Later in the great plays the note of
+chastity is always clear and firm.  In his women, purity is nobly
+depicted; in his men there appears no such attainment, but often a
+passionate abhorrence of vice.  In only one play, "Antony and Cleopatra,"
+it might superficially appear that there is a glorification of lawless
+love; but in the action of the story their lawlessness ruins Antony's and
+Cleopatra's fortunes; then, with the imminence of death, their passion,
+escaping from the thralldom of flesh, soars into a sublimation that
+redeems Antony's error and half transforms Cleopatra.
+
+In Shakspere's world the supernatural sanctions have almost disappeared,
+but the moral law is still supreme.  Yet in some ways it is a very
+unsatisfying world.  In its deeper aspects woe predominates over joy.
+All phases of suffering and anguish find their language here; but of
+rapture there are only transient glimpses, of great and abiding happiness
+there is almost none, and there is scarcely a suggestion of "the peace
+that passeth understanding."  We sometimes feel the sharpest pressure of
+the problems to which Christianity had addressed itself, unlightened by
+any solution.  There is the echo of Paul's cry, "O wretched man that I
+am, who shall deliver me from this body of death!"--as in the king at
+prayer, in "Hamlet;" but nowhere is Paul's note of triumphant
+deliverance.  We see men overwhelmed by temptation, as Macbeth and
+Angelo; we nowhere see men rising over conquered temptation to higher
+manhood.  Man in Shakspere is generally the creature of Fate.  Man's
+confrontal by the mystery of existence is the real theme of "Hamlet."
+The true unity of that drama is not in the action nor in the characters;
+it is the underlying and unanswered problem,--man, in his finest
+sensibilities and noblest aspirations, beset by a world of trouble, of
+confusion, of unfathomable mystery.  The ghost from the other world is a
+mere piece of stage scenery; to the real sentiment belongs the frank
+paganism of Hamlet as he holds the skull,--_this_ is the end of Yorick,
+and that anything of Yorick may still live except these mouldering bones
+does not even occur to Hamlet as a question.  Yet when he is tempted to
+take refuge in suicide, the possibility of "something after death" is
+sufficient to deter him.  The thought suggests no hope, only a vague
+restraining fear.  But to the guilty king there is a terrible reality in
+the divine law which he has broken; he struggles to reconcile himself
+with heaven, but his will seems paralyzed to retrace the path of
+wrong-doing.  The incapable will, the baffled intellect, cast a gloom
+over the whole drama.
+
+It is not only a clew to man's relation with the unseen and eternal that
+we miss in Shakspere.  He fails to show one trait which belongs to human
+nature as truly as Hotspur's courage or Falstaff's drollery.  He nowhere
+depicts a life controlled by a moral ideal, deliberately chosen and
+resolutely pursued.  His world is rich in passion, but deficient in clear
+and high purpose and soldierly resolve.  The metal of mastery is lacking.
+He shows us life as a wonderful spectacle, but he does not directly aid
+us to live our own life.  His amazing treasury of wisdom seldom lends a
+phrase that flashes comfort into our sorrow, hope into our dejection, or
+strength to our wavering will.
+
+Yet when this has been said, it remains true that Shakspere's atmosphere
+is wholesome and even invigorating.  We are helped in our higher life by
+many influences besides direct moral teaching.  One takes a twenty-mile
+tramp over moor and mountain, and no word of admonition or guidance comes
+from rock or tree, but he comes back stronger and serener.  So from an
+hour among Shakspere's people one may well emerge with a fuller, happier
+being.  It is the inscrutable power of real life truly seen, even though
+seen but in part.
+
+The wish is as inevitable as it is hopeless that we might know the
+personality of Shakspere, the medium through which the light passing was
+thus colored.  We get but rare and slight glimpses; the boyhood in the
+sweet Avon country; the stumble on the threshold of manhood in his
+marriage; the plunge into roaring London; the theatrical surroundings;
+the great encompassing drama of Elizabeth's England; the slow winning of
+a competence; the quiet years at the end, a burgess of Stratford town.
+There is a rich, tantalizing disclosure of a phase of the inner life in
+the Sonnets; what they seem to convey is a passion delicate and profound,
+striving to sublimate and satisfy itself, but baffled by unworthiness in
+the object, and perhaps by some unworthiness in the lover.  More distinct
+is the outward closing scene; the retirement to the native country town,
+the modest prosperity, the business-like making of the will.  Prosaic
+enough it sounds, yet in substance it has this significance, that this
+great genius and passionate soul bore himself among the materialities,
+where so many make shipwreck, with a practical sense and steadiness which
+brought him to the haven at least of a comfortable and honorable age.  So
+much Shakspere certainly had in himself,--this homely yet vital
+self-command.  With this is to be taken that he had also that
+intellectual mastery of himself of which the highest proof is the
+creation of great works of art.  Self-control, prudential and
+intellectual, was one element of Shakspere, one secret of his sanity and
+strength.
+
+One loves to see in "The Tempest" the crowning utterance of his maturity.
+How wise, how noble it is, and the wisdom and nobility set forth in what
+exquisite play of fancy and wealth of humor!  As in Hamlet we seem to see
+Shakspere in his mid-life storm and stress, so in Prospero we think we
+recognize the ideal of his ripeness.  There is the wise man torn from
+books and reverie, and rudely thrust upon treachery and the stormy sea;
+there is control gained over airy powers and ethereal beauties; struggle
+with bestial evil; forgiveness of the wrong-doer; happiness in the
+happiness of his child, and willing surrender of her to her lover; the
+admonition that love perfect itself by the mastery of passion.  So wise,
+so beneficent, so lofty is Shakspere's latest creation.  A shadow flits
+across, in the thought of mortal transiency:--
+
+          "We are such stuff
+  As dreams are made of, and our little life
+  Is rounded by a sleep."
+
+
+Yet instantly Prospero marks this as the utterance of a disturbed moment:
+"Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled;" the coming encounter
+with Caliban has shaken him.  Most Shaksperean, too, is this: alternating
+impulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led "by Providence
+divine;" an instinct of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and again, the
+mood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness and the end.
+
+Those elements which in Shakspere are absent or dim,--the belief in a
+divine rule and celestial destiny, and a high and fixed moral
+purpose,--these appear in full strength in men of Shakspere's time, the
+men of religion; but in their minds inextricably blent with a scheme of
+the universe which it is plain was to Shakspere as unreal as the
+mythology of the Greeks, and which he treats in much the same way, merely
+borrowing it for a dramatic purpose.  The men of religion had no such
+consummate expression in literature as Shakspere, though they had their
+Taylor and Herbert and Milton; but to appreciate them we must look at
+them in action, and we may take the Puritan as their type.
+
+But first let us note that in Catholicism as early as in Protestantism
+appeared the sharp rift between intellect and belief.  Montaigne, a man
+of the world, is outwardly a conformist, but a real skeptic.  A nominal
+Catholic, he corresponds to Shakspere, a nominal Protestant.  Montaigne
+reveals the world of one personality as, frankly as Shakspere pictures a
+world of humanity, and in each the purely religious element is almost
+totally absent.
+
+
+Shakspere shows the widest reach of the mind apart from a definite
+religious purpose or a strong religious faith.  In contrast with him is
+the Puritan effort to apprehend and follow a divine rule and achieve a
+divine destiny.  The typical Puritan addressed himself to man's
+foes,--all griefs and sufferings culminating in Death; all wrong-doing,
+as Sin; and the retribution and woe hereafter, as Hell.  To escape from
+these was his supreme object, and to win what he as firmly believed
+in--Holiness, Life, and Heaven.
+
+The creed was accepted as the form of this truth, but the earnest men
+sought to know its truths experimentally,--to take home the full sense of
+them.  This was found in the consciousness of man's supreme need; and,
+responding to that, a divine command, an invitation, and a threat.  The
+result of this was to set man upon a struggle so intense that it was
+indeed a warfare,--first, against his own lusts, then against the evils
+in the world around him.  These evils were to him embodied--in the Pope,
+the head of a false religion, the oppressor of God's people; in the
+imitation and approach to Popery in the church of England; in all false
+belief and error, all wrong-doers, and Satan himself.
+
+The Puritan believed that the sublimest possibility was open to man, and
+purposed at every cost to achieve it.  "Man's chief end is to glorify God
+and enjoy him forever."  There was also the most dreadful possibility to
+be shunned.  All earthly pleasure he held in suspicion, as a bait of the
+great adversary of souls.
+
+The belief of serious men in the seventeenth century was that theology
+was the guide to heaven.  They believed this as modern men believe that
+science is the guide to human life.  Hence, an infinite diversity of
+sects, and hence the attempts to enforce each by authority.
+
+The Bible fed the deeper substratum of the Puritan life.  It touched and
+fired the imagination of the common people.  The dominant idea on which
+the English Puritan laid hold was the Old Testament idea of God's chosen
+people,--separate from the rest of the world, given a code of written
+laws, led by a divinely appointed priesthood and prophets, disciplined by
+a constant intervention of rewards and punishments.  This conception they
+transferred to the faithful of their own time; and against them was
+Antichrist, in the Roman church, to which the English prelates seemed
+traitorously to incline.  They proposed to purify and maintain the church
+in England, or, failing there, to transplant it to America.
+
+The typical Puritan character, as most fully worked out in Scotland and
+New England, was a mixture of intense idealism and sternest practicality.
+The idealism aimed to control every action of life, and to base itself on
+the ultimate reality.  It renounced the aid of art and embodied
+imagination; it renounced human authority; it had no aid from material
+beauty, none from knowledge of nature.
+
+This religion had an appalling side.  Foremost among its teachings was
+man's depravity and the terrible wrath of God.  The worst cruelty of the
+Iroquois was mercy compared to God's dealing with sinners.  This was an
+inheritance from an older religion.  But the condition of salvation in
+the Catholic church--and in all high church religion--was practically
+obedience to the church.  But the Puritan required a conscious change of
+heart, which to many was impossible.  The utmost pains were taken that
+the most laborious right-doing should count for nothing, unless
+accompanied by this mystic experience.
+
+Catholicism put man under guardianship through the hierarchy, the
+confessional, the whole church system.  Calvinism threw him on his own
+resources,--set him face to face with God.  It, too, set a church to help
+him, but even the minister of the church exhorted him to make his own
+peace with God.  This responsibility weighted men heavily, and made them
+sombre.  It crushed the feeble, but made strong men stronger.
+
+The first half of the seventeenth century was full of religious
+enthusiasms, which carried high expectations.  Milton looked for a
+wonderful advance in truth.  The Puritan sought to build a church simple
+in forms, austere in morals and manners, exacting personal holiness of
+its members, and subjecting the ungodly to a rule of the saints.  Charles
+the First and Archbishop Laud believed in a religious monarchy; that the
+king should be chief in church and state; that beauty of ritual should go
+along with the encouragement of festivity and joyousness; and that the
+ultimate aim was a reunited Christendom.
+
+The wave passed, and these expectations had failed.  But the force of the
+Puritan movement had accomplished certain things.  It had turned the tide
+of the English civil war, it had leavened the more serious portion of the
+nation, and it had planted the New England colonies.
+
+In England the Puritan zeal gave force to overthrow despotism, but it
+then plunged the nation into chaos; it could not rule or harmonize the
+composite forces of national life; constitutional monarchy was
+established at last under William of Orange, by men of less fervent and
+lofty temper than the Puritans, but better conversant with the wants and
+possibilities of the actual world.
+
+
+Milton was a man of heroic mould.  He governed himself by a deliberate
+and lofty moral purpose.  The thirst for "moral perfection" inspired and
+ruled his life.  He was far from the narrowness of the typical Puritan.
+He was open on all sides to the noblest influences.  The heroic antique
+temper, the beauty and richness of the Greek, the religious seriousness
+of the Puritan, the English love of freedom, all met in him.  He was at
+heart a poet and scholar, but he threw himself into the active life of
+his time.
+
+Yet his genius was cramped by his theology.  He could not fuse the
+conflicting elements of thought,--just as the heroes of the Revolution,
+Pym and Hampden and Cromwell and Falkland, could not blend the elements
+of English political society.  He is like his own lion "struggling to get
+free."  His epic is a story of disaster.  His deity is undivine.  There
+is more that touches sympathy and admiration in his Satan than in his
+Jehovah or Adam.
+
+The best thing he gives us is his own noble personality, imbuing the
+majestic rhythm with a kind of moral power.  Servant and friend of
+Cromwell, sacrificing all scholarly delight to his country's need,
+champion of freedom, worshiper of truth, building in neglected solitude
+his epic,--his works are less than Shakspere's, but _he_ is greater than
+the imaginary Hamlet, Othello, or Brutus.
+
+Cromwell is in action the counterpart of Milton in thought,--a heroic
+nature struggling with irreconcilable elements.  Each is confronted by a
+situation as difficult as Hamlet's; but though they cannot fully master
+it, they deal with it like men.
+
+Here is the true advantage of the men of religion over Shakspere and his
+creations,--here is the greater world than Shakspere saw,--men grappling
+with their fate and in the struggle working out heroic lives.
+
+
+The finest type of the New England colonists is seen in the Winthrops,
+father and son.  When the migration is determined on, the son writes:
+"For myself, I have seen so much of the variety of the world that I
+esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns,
+whereof the traveler that hath lodged in the best or the worst findeth no
+difference when he cometh to his journey's end; and I shall call that my
+country where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my dearest
+friends.  Therefore herein I submit myself to God's will and yours, and,
+with your leave, do dedicate myself (laying by all desire of other
+employments whatsoever) to the service of God and the company herein,
+with the whole endeavors both of body and mind."
+
+The elder Winthrop is shown to us in the Journal or chronicle of the
+Massachusetts colony, a sombre record of seemingly petty events; in his
+religious diary of an earlier period; and in his domestic letters, which
+are full of manly strength and sweetness.  He combined some of the chief
+elements of greatness,--loftiness of aim; a character disinterested,
+patient, modest, brave; deep religious experience; and personal
+tenderness.
+
+To a man like Winthrop, the heart of his creed was that man's true aim is
+moral perfection and a living relation with a Divine Lover.  The sense of
+a Divine Presence--inspiring, ruling, gladdening--is what his religion
+means to him.  In this quiet country gentleman, portrayed in his private
+diary, is an intense play of feeling and imagination, concentrated on the
+attainment of a personal and social ideal.
+
+All this introspective fervor merged into a public enterprise,--the
+transplanting of a church and colony to Massachusetts Bay.  The last half
+of his life was spent in the most assiduous, minute, exacting labors.
+The self-watchful diary gives place to a public chronicle, prosaic as a
+ship's log-book--and, like the log-book, the shorthand record of
+adventures, heroisms, and sublimities.
+
+In the Puritan of Winthrop's type the flame of spiritual emotion was
+harnessed and made to serve.  The drudgery of founding New England was
+done by men whose hearts were touched with fire,--men such as Lowell
+sings of:--
+
+  "Who, dowered with every gift of passion,
+  In that fierce flame can forge and fashion
+  Of self and sin the anchor strong;
+  Can thence compel the driving force
+  Of daily life's mechanic course."
+
+
+Winthrop set out with a great ideal--shown with statesmanlike breadth in
+the "Considerations," and with apostolic fervor in the "Model of
+Christian Charity."  His conception was cramped into conformity with the
+far narrower views of the ministers who were the leaders in the colony.
+Yet it was his ideal and his personality which gave most to success.
+
+The letters between Winthrop and his wife are an example of human love
+perfected by a higher love.  He writes to her: "Neither can the sea drown
+thy husband, nor enemies destroy, nor any adversity deprive thee of thy
+husband."  Shakspere has no note like that.  Margaret writes from her
+country home to her husband in London: "My good husband, cheer up thy
+heart in the expectation of God's goodness to us, and let nothing dismay
+or discourage thee; if the Lord be with us, who can be against us?  My
+grief is the fear of staying behind thee, but I must leave all to the
+good providence of God."  She was obliged to stay behind in England,
+awaiting the birth of a child.  On the eve of sailing he writes her: "I
+purpose, if God will, to be with thee upon Thursday come sen'night, and
+then I must take my leave of thee for a summer's day and a winter's day.
+The Lord our good God will (I hope) send us a happy meeting again in his
+good time.  Amen!  Being now ready to send away my letters, I received
+thine; the reading of it has dissolved my head into tears.  Can write no
+more.  If I live, I will see thee ere I go.  I shall part from thee with
+sorrow enough; be comfortable, my most sweet wife, our God will be with
+thee.  Farewell."
+
+A few months later, across the pages of the Journal, full of the cares
+and anxieties of the struggling colony, shines a ray of pure joy.
+Margaret has come!  And the whole community rejoices and makes cheer,
+with homely and hearty feasting, for the happiness of their good governor.
+
+The actual conditions nourished homely virtues,--industry, thrift,
+self-reliance, family affection, civic responsibility.  The greatness of
+early New England is partly measured by the fact that there were
+comparatively no dregs, no mass of ignorance and vice.  It was not the
+individuals who rise into sight at this distance who were superior to the
+prominent men of England or France,--it was the lower stratum which was
+above that elsewhere.  Two prime causes worked to this elevation,--the
+spiritual estimate of man and the economic conditions which offered
+independence to every one on the condition "work and save."  The social
+and political conditions were largely shaped by these underlying facts.
+
+The wrestle for a livelihood under stern material conditions was a prime
+factor in the making of New England.  Whatever the creed might say, in
+practice Work was the equal partner of Faith in building manhood and the
+state.  The soil was to their bodies what Calvinism was to their
+souls,--yielding nourishment, but only through a hard struggle.  Its
+sterility drove them to the sea for a livelihood; they became fishermen;
+then, carrying their fish and lumber abroad, they grew into commerce.
+They traded along the coast, to the West Indies, to Europe, and so into
+their little province came the winds of the larger world.  They learned
+the sailor's virtues,--his courage, his mingled awe and mastery of
+elemental forces, his sense of lands beyond the horizon.  Well might
+Winthrop name the first ship he launched "The Blessing of the Bay."
+
+The austere land had small room for slaves, dependent and incapable.  One
+of the first large companies included some scores of bondmen; they landed
+to face a fierce and hungry winter, and straightway the bondmen were set
+free,--as slaves they would be an incumbrance; as freemen they could get
+their own living.  The thrifty colonists of a later generation did a
+driving business in African slaves for their southern neighbors, but they
+had small use for them at home.
+
+Winthrop's constant effort, as shown in his Journal, is for reason and
+right.  It is the arguments for and against any course that he
+elaborates.  Scarce a word of their sufferings or of his own
+feelings--but to know and do the right was all-important.  The greatness
+of his own ideal is shown when he draws with a free hand, in the
+"Conclusions" or the "Model."  In the Journal, he is laboring toward this
+under the iron conditions of actualities.  He and his associates had to
+be strong-willed and stern; they were warring against tremendous
+difficulties--more tremendous to them because interpreted as the work of
+Satan, while even their God was an awful being.
+
+Superstition throws a dark shadow over the chronicle.  Even Winthrop was
+deeply infected by it.  Disasters small and great were interpreted, on
+the Old Testament idea, as divine judgments.  A boy seven years old fell
+through the ice and was drowned while his parents were at lecture, and
+his sister was drowned in trying to save him.  "The parents had no more
+sons, and confessed they had been too indulgent towards him, and had set
+their hearts overmuch on him."  A man working on a milldam kept on for an
+hour after nightfall on Saturday to finish it, and next day his child
+fell into a well and was drowned.  The father confessed it as a judgment
+of God for his Sabbath-breaking.
+
+There is not unfrequent mention of some woman driven by religious
+brooding to frenzy, sometimes to murder.  The awful possibilities of hell
+for herself and her children wrought the mother-heart to madness.  The
+religious guides of the people used unsparingly the appeal to fear.  The
+belief in witchcraft, which long had scourged Europe, broke out in a
+panic of fear and cruelty.  It was a tragic culmination of the worst
+elements,--superstition, malignity, ministerial tyranny.  Then came the
+reaction, and with it a triumph of the wiser sense, the cooler temper,
+the layman's moderation, which thenceforth were to guide the commonwealth
+on a humbler but safer road.
+
+In a dramatic sense the turning-point of the story--and the revelation of
+the saving power at the heart of this grim people--was when, after the
+witchcraft frenzy had subsided, Samuel Sewall, the chief justice of the
+colony, rose in his place in the meeting-house and humbly confessed
+before God and man that he had erred and shed innocent blood.
+
+In the more prosaic temper of the next stage, a sturdy manhood sometimes
+flashes into poetry.  So John Wise, a minister but the leader of the
+popular party in church government, strikes the high note of courage: "If
+men are trusted with duty, they must trust that, and not events.  If men
+are placed at the helm to steer in all weather that blows, they must not
+be afraid of the waves or a wet coat."
+
+In personal religion there was from the outset the intense struggle for
+an inward peace and joy, with tears and groanings,--the victory sometimes
+found, sometimes missed.  There was a resolute facing of what was held as
+truth.  The ministers and laymen battled with the problems of the
+infinite.  The issue after two centuries was an open break from Calvinism
+in Channing, and the glad vision of Emerson.
+
+A feature in the story is the New Englander's relation with Nature as he
+found her,--first like a terrible power of destruction, by cold and
+hunger; this he conquers by endurance.  Then for generations he wrings a
+hard livelihood out of her.  Then by his wits he makes her serve him more
+completely.  At last her beauty is disclosed to him,--a beauty which has
+its roots in the very struggles he has had, and the contrasts they
+afford,--no child of the tropics loves Nature as he does.
+
+So of the sea: first he dares it as explorer and voyager; then he makes
+it his feeding-ground--catches the cod and chases the whale; in his ships
+he does battle against pirate and public foe; he makes the deep the
+highway of his commerce; and at last he feels its grandeur, into which
+enters the reminiscence of all his combats.
+
+Elements which Puritanism had renounced came in later from other sources.
+The fresh contact with truth and reality was given by Franklin.  The free
+joy of religion, its aggressive love, came in Methodism.  Beautiful
+ritual returned in Episcopacy.  The frank enjoyment of life developed in
+the South, transmitted from the country life of the English squire and
+mellowed on American soil.
+
+At the outset of the story of America stands the Puritan, his heart set
+on subduing the infernal element and winning the celestial; regarding
+this life as a stern warfare, but the possible pathway to an infinite
+happiness beyond; fierce to beat down the emissaries of evil,--heretic,
+witch, or devil; yet tender at inmost heart, and valiant for the truth as
+he sees it.  After a century, behold the Yankee,--the shrewd, toilful,
+thrifty occupant of the homely earth; one side of his brain speculating
+on the eternities, and the other side devising wealth, comfort, personal
+and social good.  And to-day, successor of Puritan and Yankee, Cavalier
+and Quaker, stands the American, composite of a thousand elements, with a
+destiny which seems to hover between heights and abysses, but amid all
+whose vicissitudes and faults we still see faith and courage and manly
+purpose working toward a kingdom of God on earth and in heaven.
+
+
+The Protestant way of salvation was through "experimental religion."
+This meant the appropriation as a personal experience of the truths of
+human guilt and divine mercy.  A man must not only believe but intensely
+feel that he was wholly guilty before God and in danger of everlasting
+damnation.  He must then have a vivid appreciation that Christ out of
+pure love had died for him, and that on this ground alone God offered him
+pardon and salvation.  This offer he must consciously accept, with
+emotions of profound remorse for his wrong-doing, gratitude for his
+deliverance, and absolute dependence upon divine grace for help against
+future sin and for final reception to an endless heaven.
+
+To attain this experience was the aim and goal of the religious man,
+under all the more strenuous forms of Protestantism.  Until it was
+reached, all good actions, all fair traits of character, were worthless.
+Without it there was no escape from the unquenchable fire.  If it came as
+a genuine experience, it was the passage from death unto life.  But as
+there was great possibility of self-deception in the matter, the mind was
+constantly thrown back on self-examination, and in sensitive natures
+there was often an alternation of terrors and transports.
+
+This experience of saving faith, of experimental religion, must be
+translated for us into very different language and symbols from those
+which our ancestors used before we can have any sympathy with it.
+Perhaps the truest account of the matter for us is something like this:
+the Christian theology was a system of myths, which had grown out of
+facts of human experience.  The initial fact was a good man whose love
+went out to bad men, and woke in them a sense of their own wrong along
+with a new joy and hope.  From this centre the influence spread in
+widening circles, and was gradually transformed in the expression,--mixed
+too with earlier notions, with crudities, with sophistications,--until
+Justice and Love and Punishment and Forgiveness were personified and
+dramatized and a whole cloud-world of fancy built up.  Already in the age
+of the Reformation the human intellect was sapping the foundations of the
+structure.  But the religious imagination was still intensely
+susceptible, and when the moral sense was sharply awakened by the
+reformers both within and without the Catholic church, it fell back on
+the imagination as its familiar ally, and clothed with new life the
+ancient forms.  The Catholic turned with fresh ardor to mass and miracle
+and holy church.  The Protestant fell back on a more personal and inward
+experience; he conceived that in each heart and mind the whole drama from
+Eden to Calvary and on to the Judgment Day must be realized and
+appropriated as the working principle of life.
+
+To the mystical, the sentimental, the self-confident, it was a welcome
+and uplifting exercise.  To the timid and self-distrustful it was a
+terrible ordeal.  To the intellectual it was a perpetual challenge to
+skepticism.  Even Bunyan puts as his first and worst temptation, "to
+question the being of God and the truth of his gospel."  To the prosaic
+and practical minds it made the whole business of religion a dim and
+far-away affair.
+
+
+Experimental religion was the core of Protestantism for more than three
+centuries.  It was blended with other elements in a series of great
+movements.  In Puritanism it united with an ascetic and militant temper,
+a metaphysical theology, a stern rule of life, and a conception of the
+nation as under a divine law like that of ancient Israel.
+
+Then came Quakerism, a religion of the quiet, illumined heart, and the
+peaceful life.  Next, Methodism, a wave of aggressive love, seeking to
+save others where Puritanism had been self-saving, appealing less to the
+head and more to the heart.  Following this, in England, came
+Evangelicalism, a revival of self-conscious experience, but flowing out
+now not only as in Methodism into a crusade to save souls, but into
+labors for criminals, for slaves, for the poor, under such leaders as
+Howard and Wilberforce and Shaftesbury.
+
+These phases are from English and American history.  They might largely
+be paralleled elsewhere.  And along with them, it is to be remembered,
+went always not only a party imbued with the Catholic or high church
+idea, but also a moderate party, holding a more broadly and simply
+religious view.
+
+
+Perhaps the most effective type of Christianity has been the simple
+acceptance of the familiar laws of goodness, having in the Bible their
+express sanction, with a great promise and an awful warning for the
+future, and the embodiment of holiness, love, and help, in Christ.  This
+has been the religion of a multitude of faithful souls, manly men and
+womanly women, who did not concern themselves with any elaborate
+theology, but went along their daily way, strong in obedience to duty,
+trustful in a divine guidance, and with serene hope for what may come
+after death.  Their souls have been nurtured on whatever was most vital
+and most tender in the words of Scripture and the services of the church,
+and whatever was unintelligible or innutritions they have quietly passed
+by.  This is the essential religion of humanity, made definite and vivid
+by accepted symbols and rules, and made warm by the sense of fellowship
+with a great company.
+
+
+Recurring to the successive phases of religious thought, the next
+development of Protestantism, while in a sense world-wide, may be most
+clearly seen in America.  By Jonathan Edwards there was begun the
+application of a rationalizing process to the theology of Calvin and to
+experimental religion.  In Edwards almost the only result was a more
+lurid and tremendous affirmation of the old dogma and the old
+requirement.  But the New England mind, speculative, practical, and
+intense, worked rapidly on.  In Channing and his associates came the
+renunciation of Depravity, Atonement, and the Trinity.  In the next
+generation, Unitarianism expressed itself through Theodore Parker as
+simple theism.  A little later than the Unitarian movement, the old
+Orthodoxy itself became transformed into a new Orthodoxy.  The foremost
+interpreters of the transformation were Bushnell and Beecher; Bushnell
+translating the Atonement into terms of purely natural goodness,--not as
+a transaction, but an expression; and Beecher finding in Christ simply
+the truth that Love is sovereign of the universe.  To Bushnell and
+Beecher the historical Christ remained in a unique sense an incarnation
+of God.  By later voices of the new Orthodoxy--for example, Phillips
+Brooks--he is spoken of rather as the one actual instance of perfect
+humanity, and in this sense a manifestation of God and the spiritual
+leader of mankind.
+
+
+But for three centuries men have been studying the facts of existence
+from an entirely different side from that whence the church takes its
+outlook.  They have been finding out all kinds of curious facts, totally
+unconnected with any supernatural sphere.  First, they made such
+discoveries as that the world is not flat, but round; not stationary, but
+doubly revolving.  And so they went on.  The stars, the plants, the
+animals, the human body, yielded all manner of curious knowledge.  New
+powers came into men's hands through this knowledge; new avenues to
+happiness were opened.  Facts wove themselves together in wider and wider
+combinations.  Orderly procedure was found where there had seemed such
+confusion as only capricious spirits could occasion.  It is learned, too,
+that even as the individual man has grown up from babyhood, so the race
+of man has grown up from the beast.  The globe itself has grown from a
+simple origin into infinite diversity and complexity.  There has been a
+universal, orderly growth,--what we name "Evolution."  And it is learned
+that all mental phenomena, so far as we can explore them, stand in some
+close relation to a physical basis in the brain, and to a train of
+physical antecedents.
+
+And now the men who have come up by the path of this knowledge stand face
+to face with the men who have been climbing in the path whose signboards
+are such as "Duty," "Worship," "Aspiration;" and the question arises, Do
+our paths lie henceforth together, or do they separate, and is the one
+party losing its travel?
+
+
+Perhaps the best example of the union of the two pursuits in one man is
+given by Benjamin Franklin.
+
+Franklin worked out, through a very genuine, homely, and personal
+experience, the conviction that _moral perfection_ is the only true aim.
+He reached this conviction while still a young man, and in the main tenor
+of his life he was faithful to it.  He made no vaunt of his religion,
+founded no sect, gave his words and deeds chiefly to practical affairs;
+and perhaps few guessed, until at the close of his life he told his own
+story with consummate charm, that the secret motive and mainspring of his
+life had been the same that animates the saints and saviors,--the thirst
+for moral perfection.  The motive and method had been hidden, but the
+result had long been clear to the eyes of the whole world.  Franklin's
+character was reverenced alike in the court of France and the farmhouses
+of Pennsylvania and New England.  To the Old World he seemed the heroic
+and coming man of the New World, side by side with Washington.  The
+Virginian embodied the highest traditional virtues of the race,
+self-mastery, patience, magnanimity, devotion to the common good; the
+Pennsylvanian, if less called on for the heroic forms of antique virtue,
+added to its substance new traits of wisdom, progress, and
+happiness,--signs of a better age to be.
+
+Moral perfection was Franklin's secret and ruling principle.  But his
+life was conspicuously engaged in the fields of science and of
+statesmanship.  He was a leader in exploring the material world, skillful
+to trace its secrets, fertile to apply them to human use.  He was a
+pioneer and founder of the new nation, projecting its union before others
+had desired or dreamed of it; sharing in its first hazardous fortunes;
+winning by his personal weight and wisdom the foreign alliance which
+turned the scale of victory; laying with the other master shipwrights the
+keel and ribs of the new Constitution.  Moral perfection for himself,
+and, as the outcome to the world, not a new church or a theology or a
+missionary enterprise, but a winning of the forces of nature to the
+service of man, and a shaping of the social organism for the benefit of
+all.  That is the originality of Franklin,--that he carries the old moral
+purpose into the new fields of science and of social ordering.  His
+desire for moral perfection and his confidence that the universe is
+ordered rightly are not dependent on any visionary scheme of heaven and
+hell; they rest not on any doubtful argument; they bring sanction from no
+transport mixed of soul and sense.  He walks firm on the solid earth.  He
+has found for himself that goodness is the only thing that satisfies.
+That this is an ordered universe comes home to him with every step of his
+study of actuality.  What need of a supernatural religion to a man who
+finds religion in his own nature and in the nature of the world?
+
+Such confidence and such purpose are as old as Socrates.  But come, now,
+let us go where Socrates did not go; let us put the ideas of Jesus and
+Paul to some further application; let us use our freedom from pope and
+tyrant for some solid good!  And so he goes on, cheerfully and
+delightedly, to question the thunder-cloud and make acquaintance with its
+wild steeds,--presently some one will put them in harness.  He is always
+inventing.  Now it is a stove, now it is a fire-brigade,--a public
+library,--a post-office,--a Federal Union!  And be his invention smaller
+or greater, he takes out no patent, but tenders it freely into the common
+stock.
+
+
+The prophets introducing this age are Carlyle and Emerson.  Carlyle sees
+the disease--he convinces of sin.  Emerson sees the solution.  Carlyle
+reflects in his own troubled nature the disorder he portrays.  He is
+physically unsound; his dyspepsia exaggerates to him the evils of the
+world.  Emerson's disciplined and noble character mirrors the present and
+eternal order, and forecasts its triumph.
+
+Carlyle and Emerson give two different phases of life as experienced.
+Carlyle gives the experience of good and evil,--the tremendous sanctions
+of right against wrong, wisdom against folly.  He is not triumphant, but
+he is not hopeless.  "Work, and despair not" is to him "the marching
+music of the Teutonic race."  Emerson, from the height of personal
+victory, sees all as harmonious.  One shows the struggle up the mountain
+path, the other the view from the summit.
+
+Carlyle's gospel is summed up in "_Work_, and despair not."  "Work" was
+his own addition to Goethe's line.  "Do the duty that lies nearest thee;"
+action, as the escape from the puzzles of the intellect and the griefs of
+the heart, is his special message.
+
+Emerson is a precursor of the day when "No man shall say to his
+neighbors, Know ye the Lord, for all shall know him, from the least unto
+the greatest."  He is the first of the prophets to rise above anxiety as
+to the success of his mission.  He lives his life, says his word, sheds
+his light--concerned to be faithful, but wholly unanxious as to personal
+success.
+
+As the tribes of ancient Israel stood arrayed, the one half on Mount
+Ebal, the other on Mount Gerizim,--the one to pronounce the blessing, the
+other to utter the curse,--so Emerson is like an embodied promise and
+Carlyle a perpetual warning.  In Emerson we see the hero triumphant and
+serene.  Carlyle shows him at close grips with the devil.  "Pain, danger,
+difficulty, steady slaving toil, shall in no wise be shirked by any
+brightest mortal that will approve himself loyal to his mission in this
+world; nay, precisely the higher he is the deeper will be the
+disagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks
+laid on him; and the heavier, too, and more tragic, his penalties if he
+neglect them."
+
+
+The background for Emerson is the life of early New England.  The secret
+of New England's greatness was the combination from the first of the
+profoundest interest in man's spiritual destiny with the closest grip on
+homely facts.
+
+In Calvinism, and in Christianity, the universe was at eternal war within
+itself; this was man's projection upon the world of his own moral
+conflict.  Emerson sees the universe as a harmony.  Many influences have
+contributed to this idea; it becomes distinct and vivid in a man whose
+own life is a moral harmony.  Himself truly a cosmos, he recognizes the
+answering tokens of the greater cosmos.
+
+The religious sentiment had become so inwoven with institutions, creeds,
+usages, conventionalisms,--each man believing because his neighbors do,
+or his father did,--that it was necessary to take a new observation.
+What says the heart of man at its highest?  For this Emerson is singled
+out; for him an ancestry is trained through generations; he is drawn
+apart from the church, set aside from government and all institutional
+work; practical functions are denied him; he is made an eye,--an organ of
+pure vision.
+
+To him God is not afar off but in himself.  The heart in its own purity,
+tenderness, and strength recognizes the Divine Presence.  "The soul gives
+itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure,
+who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it."
+The order of physical nature is the symbol and the instrument of a moral
+order.  The beauty and sublimity of nature are the manifestation through
+sense of the Divine Reality.
+
+So high a revelation can come at first only to souls which in their
+greatness are isolated, as the highest mountain peaks stand alone in the
+earliest sunbeams.  It is for a later time to fit such truth to all the
+conditions of human life, to fully assimilate it with older lessons, to
+weave it into the warp and woof of society.
+
+It is Emerson, child of the Puritan and disciple of the new knowledge, in
+whom joy is most abiding--its roots are in faithful living, brave and
+high thinking, the spirit of love, oneness with nature and humanity.
+
+Emerson dwells in an ideal yet real world.  He cannot give the password
+that will certainly admit; inheritance and temperament must contribute to
+that.  But he sees that one principle is the rightful sovereign in his
+inner world and in the universe,--allegiance to highest known law.  It is
+a sublimation of the idea familiar to the religious mind, but he gives it
+a new and larger interpretation; for, in place of the written Word,
+beyond the social and civic obligation, greater than the accepted
+moralities, superseding the ecclesiastical virtues, wider than the
+overworked altruism of Christianity, is the complete ideal of Man, from
+his roughest force to his finest perception.
+
+Talk about duty had become wearisome.  "Thou shalt not preach!" says
+Emerson.  So he discourses as the observer of man and nature, and bids
+men to look at realities.
+
+His imitators were beguiled into a theoretical exposition of the
+universe.  A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of their
+talk, because it is not, like Emerson's, in constant touch with active
+duty and fresh observation.
+
+His ideal includes worship, but to this he brings above all the quality
+of sincerity.  He will not observe a sacrament which has lost its
+significance to him.  He will not use language of a personal God which is
+not natural to him, nor affirm a certainty as to immortality when his
+conviction is not always clear.  But he has the profoundest sense and the
+simplest expression of that reality which we call "the presence of God in
+man."  In him it is not involved with miracle or metaphysic; it is a
+personal experience, the source of humility, energy, and peace.  "I
+recognize the distinction of the outer and inner self; the double
+consciousness that within this erring, passionate, mortal self sits a
+supreme, calm, immortal mind, whose powers I do not know, but it is
+stronger than I; it is wiser than I; it never approved me in any wrong; I
+seek counsel of it in my doubts; I repair to it in my dangers; I pray to
+it in my undertakings.  It seems to me the face which the Creator
+uncovers to his child."
+
+Emerson represents thought in its highest form--perception, vision.  The
+world interpreted by such vision supplies motive, support, and rapture.
+He is essentially and above all a poet, and to whoever can follow him he
+opens a celestial world in which the homeliest earthly fact is irradiated
+by indwelling divinity.
+
+Emerson's escape from evil is by rising to such a height of contemplation
+that evil is seen as only an element of good.  He sits like an
+astronomer, viewing the procession of the worlds in their sublime
+harmony.  For most men, the jar and dust of daily life largely shut out
+that glorious view.  They catch hope and strength from the voice of the
+seer upon his heights.  But they need other help; they need some one by
+their side; they need the love of a stronger brother, who takes their
+hand.  This men found in Jesus the friend of sinners, who went about
+doing good; they idealized it as Christ--a divinity who took upon him the
+form of a servant.  The higher stooping to the lower is still the world's
+salvation.
+
+
+In teaching, Emerson generalized for all men from his own experience.  He
+said, "Be yourself!  Follow the law of your own nature.  Trust the
+all-moving Spirit.  Be above convention and rule, above vulgarities and
+insipidities.  Give way to the God within you!"
+
+Literally obeyed, it was insufficient advice for most men, for it ignored
+what Emerson's modesty forbade him to recognize,--the vast difference
+between his own nature and bent and that of most men.  When ordinary men
+and women tried to imitate him the result was sometimes a lamentable
+failure.  But _he_ was genuine and lofty always.  He failed in no homely
+duty.  The great trial and discipline to him was the alternation in
+himself of the commonplace with the high.  In individuals he was forever
+disappointed, always looking for heroes, saints, and saviors, and seldom
+finding them.  His own work bore little visible fruit; his own teaching
+fell for a long time on scornful ears.  This perpetual disappointment he
+took with perpetual constancy, always serene under disappointment,
+gracious to the dull, indifferent to fame, careless of his own obscurity.
+The typical man of letters has his own besetting sins,--neglect of homely
+duties, self-consciousness, vanity,--from all of which Emerson was free.
+
+The faults we allege against his philosophy--its scanty recognition of
+sin and sorrow--were the natural incidents of his character and work.
+They do not debase, though they sometimes limit, his influence for good;
+his is always the speech of an angel; it strengthens, uplifts, gladdens
+us.  There are other angels to whom we must listen,--others, perhaps, who
+speak more nearly the speech of our own experience,--but his music always
+chords with theirs.
+
+In Emerson, a soul inheriting centuries of Catholic and Puritan training,
+until obedience was its instinct and purity its native atmosphere,--a
+soul endowed with genius,--spread its wings and flew with the suddenness
+and joy of a young bird's first flight.  He saw good everywhere, beauty
+everywhere, and was glad with the gladness of a seer and savior.  He is
+one of those of whom he speaks, as belonging to a better world which is
+yet to come, and who touch us with a sense of a heaven on which we are
+just beginning to enter.
+
+Though he professes an idealist philosophy, and that way of thinking can
+be traced in all his writings, he never makes of it a creed or dogma.
+His children are welcome to worship in the church which has lost its
+attraction for him.  The skeptic may freely question immortality,--nay,
+Emerson himself sometimes feels uncertainty.  The personal God, and man's
+personal immortality, which the idealist is wont to affirm as definite
+certainties, Emerson will not explicitly avow or define.  Universal good,
+beauty, order,--these he sees, feels, is sure of.  What form belongs to
+them, let each imagine as best he can.  So free, so generous, so simply
+true is he that not only men of an idealist way of thinking, but all
+strong and high souls own impulse from him,--the scientist, the
+positivist, the churchman.
+
+His distinctive note is not self-abnegation, but it is the note which
+with that makes a perfect harmony.  Joy in God and self-sacrificing love
+are the two wings of the angelic life.  Long have the preachers taught
+self-sacrifice,--now let one child of God sing the joy of God!
+
+
+The latest chapter in the story of the higher life is the conception of
+man and the world which has grown up under the influence of modern
+science.  The most original and effective expression of this philosophy
+is given by Herbert Spencer.  What new light does the evolutionary
+philosophy throw on man's chief problem, the right conduct of his own
+life?
+
+First, it defines with clearness two great forces which bear on the
+individual life, as Heredity and Environment.  Next, it defines the ideal
+to be sought, by reaffirming in substance the familiar conception of
+human morality, showing its sanctions on purely natural grounds, and
+giving new applications and extensions of its principles.  And finally,
+compared with the traditional theology, it leads to a new conception of
+the relation between man and the higher power, and necessitates, what
+Spencer does not supply, a new expression of the religious life.
+
+The discovery of Darwin, supplying the final link to the growing proofs
+of the evolutionary development of man, opened an amazing panorama of the
+past history of the planet's inhabitants.  The predecessors and
+successors of Darwin added to the panorama one after another scene of
+wonder.  The standpoint of thought seemed wholly changed, and a
+readjustment necessary which threatened overthrow to all the old creeds
+and standards.  Spencer, who has been the most successful in generalizing
+the new knowledge, comes back to the inquiry, By what law shall man guide
+his own conduct?  His answer is substantially a reaffirmation of the
+principles which good men have acknowledged for many ages.  Whatever else
+is changed, it remains true that justice, fidelity, chastity, honor,
+regard for others, are man's safest guides and his lawful rulers.
+Altruism is only a new word for the golden rule.  But the advance of
+society has brought wider and finer applications: the claim of the whole
+community comes closer home; the principles which have been recognized
+within the church and the neighborhood must be carried on to reshape
+institutions, industries, the whole social organism.
+
+The moral idea is thus reaffirmed and extended, but how can man attain
+that ideal?  By using his free will, said the Stoic.  By the grace of God
+obtained through prayer, said the Christian.  Is man then free, or is he
+the passive creature of a greater power, and of what nature is that
+power?  Now, where theologians have sought to define the Deity, and to
+conceive his government of his creatures in terms of a personal affection
+and will, scientists, contenting themselves with observation of facts,
+have shown that each man is what he is and does what he does partly
+because of what his parents and remoter ancestors were and did before
+him, and partly because of the forces of climate, institutions,
+education, companionship, event, which surround him from his birth to his
+grave.  Heredity and Environment, these are
+
+        "the hands
+  That reach through Nature, moulding Man."
+
+
+It looks at first as if the old dispute between free will and necessity
+were settled at last, and man were indeed a creature of inscrutable fate.
+Yet, in the very act of acknowledging certain ideals of character as
+desirable, we become conscious of an impulse and initial effort--call it
+automatic or call it voluntary--toward attaining those ideals.  As a
+matter of practice, we speedily recognize that both Heredity and
+Environment are in a degree under human control.  If they are deities,
+they are accessible to prayers, the prayers which are watchfulness and
+obedience.  Man is always at work to better the environment of himself
+and his fellows.  As he sees more clearly that his true good is character
+and the noble self, he shapes his environment more intelligently and
+resolutely to that end.  As to heredity, while the individual is
+powerless over his own lot, he is in a degree potential over those who
+are to succeed him.  The conception of duty is enlarged by the
+obligations of marriage and parenthood, in a wise selection and
+thoughtful care for the future offspring.
+
+Heredity and Environment, then, are partly the servants of man.  Yet
+largely they are his lords and masters.  In a degree, but only in a
+degree, do we make ourselves what we are.  And while the degree of that
+self-determining power can never be known, we learn to be charitable
+toward others and exacting toward ourselves.
+
+The new philosophy has its chief bearing on conduct, not in abstract
+conceptions about fate, free will, and responsibility, but in the
+stimulus it gives to find new tools and weapons of moral achievement.
+How shall we make men good?  No longer by the mere appeal to reason; no
+longer mainly by promise of heaven and threat of hell.  Still appealing
+to reason, to hope and fear, to imagination, we must go on to put about
+men all stimulating influences, all guiding appliances.  We must begin in
+the formative stage.  The hope of the future is in the child; we must
+educate the child by putting him in true touch with realities,--realities
+of form, color, and number; of plant and animal life; of play and
+pleasure; of imagination; of sympathetic companionship; of a miniature
+society; of a firm yet gentle government.  The education must go on
+through youth, and must introduce him to industry not as drudgery but as
+fine achievement.  So of every phase of humanity.  The criminal is to be
+met not with mere penalty but with remedial treatment.  In the sordid
+quarter must be planted a settlement which shall radiate true
+neighborhood.  The state must be so ordered as best to promote the
+material good and the essential manhood of its citizens.  The church must
+serve some distinct purpose--of ethical guidance, of emotional uplift, of
+social service--in character-building.  Such are the forces to which we
+now are turning.  Where ancient philosophy appealed through the lecturer
+at his desk, where Christianity sent its missionary to proclaim a faith,
+or set its priest to celebrate mass, or its minister to preach a
+sermon,--in place of these partial resources we now realize that every
+normal activity of humanity is to serve in building up man, and that "the
+true church of God is organized human society."
+
+The church of God,--but has man a God?  There is, says Spencer, some
+inscrutable power from which all this vast procedure springs; its nature
+we know not and cannot know.  The thought of it moves us to wonder and
+awe,--and this is the legitimate satisfaction of the religious sense.
+And here it is that his philosophy utterly fails to satisfy.  Yet it
+marks the passing away of the attempt to interpret Deity in terms of
+exact knowledge.  Whatever form religion may hereafter wear, the old
+precision of statement must be abandoned; the intellect must be more
+humble.  And further, the Spencerian view is wholly different from
+atheism.  It leaves the door open.  It recognizes that some supreme
+reality exists beyond and above man.  That reality is not intelligible to
+the intellect which analyzes and generalizes.  But may it not be
+approachable through another side of man's nature,--accessible through
+gates like those by which one human spirit recognizes another human
+spirit?  The evolutionary philosophy, in an enlarged construction, raised
+no barrier against the access to divinity through the noblest exercise of
+humanity.
+
+Live the personal life toward the highest ideals, with the faithfulest
+endeavor,--and peace, trust, hope, spring up in the soul.  So does man
+find access to the supreme power; so does he find himself encompassed and
+upborne by it; so is he drawn into closest union with his
+fellow-creatures and with the divine source of all.  It is the old answer
+and the new; it is figured in the Hebrew's assurance that the Lord loveth
+the righteous; it gives strength and courage to Epictetus; it inspires
+the confidence of Jesus, the loving and holy soul finding its heavenly
+Father; it speaks with glad voice in Emerson,--"contenting himself with
+obedience, man becomes divine."
+
+The essential truth is old, but in our day it is being disencumbered of
+the husk of myth and dogma which obscured it; while by the growth of new
+powers and finer sensibilities in man his access to highest reality
+becomes more intimate.
+
+As the evolutionary philosophy has already reaffirmed, clarified, and
+enriched the moral life, so, blending with the clearest interpretation of
+man's deepest experience, it is to reaffirm, purify, and deepen the
+religious life.
+
+
+One disciple of Spencer has applied herself with great genius and art to
+creative fiction.  George Eliot is a thorough Spencerian, and she is
+constantly, effectively, almost with over-insistence, a moralist.  Life
+may be ruined by self-indulgence,--that is her perpetual theme.  Of wide
+range and variety, she is powerful above all in picturing the appeal of
+temptation, the gradual surrender, the fatal consequence.  Shakspere does
+not show the inner springs of the fall of Macbeth or Angelo so clearly as
+she shows the catastrophe of Arthur Donnithorne, of Tito Melema, of
+Gwendolen Harleth.  Readers from whom the threat of hell would fall off
+as an old wife's tale, feel the dark power of reality in the mischief
+which dogs each of her wrong-doers.  More scantly, and with growing
+infrequence, there are scenes of a natural gospel of redemption and
+salvation,--Hetty reached in her misery by the Christian love of Dinah,
+Silas Marner won back to happiness by the little child, Gwendolen saved
+from her selfishness through dire disaster and a strong man's help.
+
+The prevailing atmosphere of George Eliot's later books is sad, and the
+sadness deepens as they go on.  A labored, over-strenuous tone increases;
+the style loses in simplicity and is overburdened with reflection.  The
+note of struggle is everywhere present, and shuts out repose, freedom,
+joy.  The sensitive reader can hardly escape an undertone of
+suggestion,--yes, life must be made the best of, but it seems scarcely
+worth the cost.  Is it the entire absence of any outlook beyond this life
+which makes the gloom of the later works?  Yet this seems only partially
+to explain.  One seeks inevitably the clew to the writing in the life.
+George Eliot's story as a woman is an open one.  She took as her life
+companion a man who was legally united to another woman.  Her
+justification apparently was that they were suited to each other, and
+that with the support of this mutual tie they could best do their work.
+Stated in plain terms, the moral question involved seems hardly to admit
+of any debate.  There is no more vital point in social morality than the
+relation of the sexes, and George Eliot's own teaching reverts most often
+to this topic, and always with its emphasis on restraint.  Her actual
+course assumed that the established and accepted law of society may be
+set aside by a man and woman upon their own judgment that their need of
+each other is paramount to the social law.  A position more contradictory
+to her avowed principles could hardly be stated.  It was no new claim of
+immunity; it had been professed and preached, especially on the
+Continent, with results patent to all, of the subversion of social
+foundations; it marks the especial danger-point of a time of swiftly
+changing standards.  It is impossible not to feel that her course was a
+precedent and example in flat contradiction of the teaching she so
+assiduously gave.  Doubtless she persuaded herself she was right, but
+such persuasion must have involved, the most dangerous sophistication
+which besets man in his groping struggle,--a claim by a leader for
+exemption from the common obligation on the plea that his welfare (that
+is, his comfort) is especially necessary for the good of mankind.  As one
+reads George Eliot's pages with her own story in mind, the shadows are
+heavy.  In the over-active, restless reflections, one feels the working
+of a mind incessantly exercised by its own self-defense.  The suggestion
+comes to us of a nature which has lavished all its energies on thinking,
+and lacked strength for living, and so has failed of that vision which
+comes not from thought but from life.  The cramping horizon, the low sky,
+the earthly limit within which love saddens and hope dies,--all seem to
+bespeak that loss of truest touch with the universe which comes when one
+is not true in act to the law he acknowledges.  The sense of a tragedy in
+herself, more pathetic than any she has depicted, touches us with awe,
+with tenderness, with compunctious thought of our own failures.  We are
+"purified by terror and by pity."
+
+
+The largest wisdom and the finest insight of our age are blended in
+Tennyson's "In Memoriam."  Written half a century ago, its truth not less
+than its beauty stands unshaken by the later thought and knowledge.
+Antedating the work of Darwin and Spencer, it accepts the principles of
+Evolution.  Its atmosphere is wholly modern.  It is pervaded by the
+sentiment of Christian faith, but it does not lean for support on dogma
+or miracle.  The difficulties it encounters are neither the terror in the
+old view of the hereafter nor the problems incident to the supernatural
+theology.  The poet stands before the amazing spectacle of nature as seen
+by science, beholding along with its prodigal beauty its appalling
+destruction and its unswerving march.  It is no longer hell, but
+extinction, which seems to threaten man.
+
+The intellectual problem of the universe is faced, but the medium through
+which it is seen is the experience of a human heart filled by a sacred
+love and then struck by bereavement.  It is the old, typical, deepest
+experience of man,--love confronted by death.
+
+The poem moves like a symphony, weaving together requiem, cradle-song,
+battle-march, and psalm, to a consummation of tender and majestic peace.
+As the recurrent theme which governs the whole may be taken this:---
+
+  "How pure at heart and sound in head,
+    With what divine affection bold,
+    Should be the man whose thoughts would hold
+  An hour's communion with the dead."
+
+These are the conditions,--fidelity, sanity, divinely bold affections;
+this is the fruition, the sense of a mystic communion with the unseen
+friend.
+
+One passage gives the reconciliation between the evolutionary view of the
+universe and a divine possibility for the individual.  The evolutionary
+process of nature is regarded as the type of the development of the
+soul:---
+
+  "Contemplate all this work of Time,
+    The giant laboring in his youth;
+    Nor dream of human love and truth,
+  As dying Nature's earth and lime;
+
+  "But trust that those we call the dead
+    Are breathers of an ampler day
+    For ever nobler ends.  They say,
+  The solid earth whereon we tread
+
+  "In tracts of fluent heat began,
+    And grew to seeming-random forms,
+    The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
+  Till at the last arose the man;
+
+  "Who throve and branched from clime to clime,
+    The herald of a higher race,
+    And of himself in higher place,
+  If so he type this work of time
+
+  "Within himself, from more to more;
+    Or, crowned with attributes of woe
+    Like glories, move his course, and show
+  That life is not as idle ore,
+
+  "But iron dug from central gloom,
+    And heated hot with burning fears,
+    And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
+  And battered with the shocks of doom
+
+  "To shape and use.  Arise and fly
+    The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
+    Move upward, working out the beast,
+  And let the ape and tiger die."
+
+
+Thus do the moral purpose and the immortal hope define themselves in the
+terms of the new philosophy.  How are they related to the terms of the
+old religion?  The poet's attitude toward the historic Christ is wholly
+reverent.  Incidents of the gospel story are vivified by a creative
+imagination.  But Christ is no longer an isolated historic fact; he is
+the symbol of all divine influence and celestial presence,--"the Christ
+that is to be."  The resurrection story is reverently touched, but it is
+not upon this as a proof or argument that the poet dwells in regaining
+his lost friend under a higher relation.  That experience is to him
+personal, at first hand.  His comfort is not solely that in some future
+heaven he shall rejoin his Arthur.  The beloved one comes to him now in
+moments of highest consciousness; associated profoundly, mysteriously,
+vitally, with the fairest aspects of nature, with the loftiest purposes
+of the will, with the most sympathetic regard of all fellow creatures.
+
+In the experience which is supremely voiced in "In Memoriam," but which
+is also recorded in many an utterance which the attentive ear may
+discern, we recognize this: that the sense of the risen Christ which
+inspired his disciples and founded the church was in truth an
+instance--clad in imaginative, pictorial form--of what proves to be an
+abiding law of human nature--the vivid realization of the continued and
+higher existence of a noble and beloved life.
+
+We may believe that in the progress of the race this faculty is being
+developed.  In its first emergence it was confused by crude
+misinterpretations.  A single instance of it was for two thousand years
+construed as a unique event, the reversal of ordinary procedure, and the
+basis of a supernatural religion.  Now at last we correlate it with other
+experiences, and interpret it as a part of the universal order.
+
+Tennyson expresses that present heaven which is sometimes revealed to the
+soul:--
+
+  "Strange friend, past, present, and to be;
+    Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
+    Behold, I dream a dream of good,
+  And mingle all the world with thee.
+
+  "Thy voice is on the rolling air;
+    I hear thee where the waters run;
+    Thou standest in the rising sun,
+  And in the setting thou art fair.
+
+  "What art thou, then?  I cannot guess;
+    But though I seem in star and flower
+    To feel thee some diffusive power,
+  I do not therefore love thee less:
+
+  "My love involves the love before;
+    My love is vaster passion now;
+    Though mixed with God and Nature thou,
+  I seem to love thee more and more.
+
+  "Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
+    I have thee still, and I rejoice;
+    I prosper, circled with thy voice;
+  I shall not lose thee though I die."
+
+
+Two men beyond all others in America have interpreted the higher life.
+Emerson revealed it through the medium of thought, beauty, and joy.
+Lincoln showed it in action, sympathy, and suffering.
+
+Lincoln had the deepest cravings of love, of ambition, and of religion.
+His love brought him first to bereavement which shook his reason, then to
+the daily tragedy of an unhappy marriage.  His ambition--he said when he
+entered his contest with Douglas--had proved "a failure, a flat failure."
+In his crude youth he exulted in the rejection of Christianity; then he
+felt the pressure of life's problems, and was powerless before them.  He
+could believe only what was proved,--all beyond was a sad mystery.  He
+bore himself for many years with honesty, kindness, humor, sadness, and
+infinite patience.  He did not for a while rise to the perception of the
+highest truth in politics, but he was faithful to what he did see.  He
+lived in closest contact with ordinary men and knew them thoroughly.  His
+training was as a lawyer and a politician.  This brought him in touch
+with the every-day actuality and all its hard and mean facts.  He was
+disciplined in that attempt to reach justice under a code of laws which
+is the practical administration of society, distinct from the idealist's
+vision of perfection.
+
+The time came when in the new birth of politics he rose to the perception
+of a great moral principle,--the nation's duty toward slavery.  At the
+same time, his ambition again saw its opportunity.  He had a strong man's
+love of power, but he deliberately subordinated his personal success to
+his convictions when he risked and lost the fight with Douglas for the
+senatorship by the "house-divided-against-itself" speech.
+
+In the anxious interval between his election and inauguration, he went
+through, as he said long afterward, "a process of crystallization,"--a
+religious consecration.  He made no talk about it, but all his words and
+acts thenceforth show a selfless, devoted temper.
+
+He bore incalculable burdens and perplexities for the sake of the people.
+He met the vast complication of forces which mix in politics and war--the
+selfishness, hatred, meanness, triviality, along with the higher
+elements--with the rarest union of shrewdness, flexibility, and
+steadfastness.  His humor saved him from being crushed.  The atmosphere
+he lived in permitted no illusions.  "Politics," said he, "is the art of
+combining individual meannesses for the general good."
+
+He came to the sense of a divine purpose in which he had a part.  He grew
+in charity, in sympathy, in wisdom.  His private griefs, such as the
+death of his boy, deepened his nature.  He bore burdens beyond
+Hamlet's,--a temperament prone to melancholy, the death of the woman he
+loved, a wife who was little comfort, an ambition which long found no
+fruition and no adequate field, a baffled gaze into life's mystery; then
+the responsibility of a nation in its supreme crisis, and the sense of
+the nation's woe.  Through it all he held fast the clew of moral fidelity.
+
+A lover of peace, he was forced to be captain in a terrible war.  "You
+know me, Voorhees," he said to an old friend; "I can't bear to cut off
+the head of a chicken, and here I stand among rivers of blood!"
+
+Under overwhelming perplexities and responsibilities, amid a ceaseless
+drain on his sympathies, he learned and practiced a higher fidelity and
+deeper trust.  At the outset was "the process of crystallization;" at the
+end came "malice toward none, charity for all," "fidelity to the right as
+God gives us to see the right."  At last the sunrise of the nation's new
+day shone full upon him.  Then suddenly, painlessly, he passed into the
+mystery beyond.  He was loved by his people as they never loved any other
+man.  The world prizes its happy souls, but it takes to its inmost heart
+him who is faithful in darkness.
+
+
+
+[1] Jowett's translation.
+
+[2] I have followed George Long's translation of Epictetus.
+
+[3] In the language of Renan: "By this word [supernatural] I always mean
+the _special_ supernatural act, miracle, or the divine intervention for a
+particular end; not the general supernatural force, the hidden Soul of
+the Universe, the ideal, source, and final cause of all movements in the
+system of things."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+GLIMPSES
+
+The virtue of truth-seeking is a modern growth.  The love of
+speculative truth, indeed, shines far back in antiquity, in individuals
+or in little companies.  But the truth-seeking quality has had its
+special training through the pursuits of physical science.  The
+achievements of three centuries in this direction have been made under
+the constant necessity of attention to reality, at whatever cost to
+prepossession or desire.  Watchfulness, patience, self-correction are
+the requisites.  There is the discipline of what Huxley calls "the
+perpetual tragedy of science,--the slaying of a beautiful theory by an
+ugly fact."  This courage, patience, humility of the intellect, long
+exercised on secondary problems, wrought into habitual and accepted
+traits of the explorer, are called on at last to face the direst
+ordeal.  The human mind confronts the question, "Are my dearest faith
+and love and hope based on reality?"  To face that question, and face
+it through; to yield to no despondency, however dark the answer; to
+hold sometimes the best attainable answer, whether of affirmation or
+denial, as only provisional, and wait for further light, whether it
+come now or in a remote future, whether it come to him or to some
+other,--this measures the greatness of the human spirit.
+
+It is in this respect that our moral standards, compared with those of
+Christendom for eighteen hundred years, have in a sense undergone not
+merely a development but reversal.  In that passage upon charity in
+which the genius of early Christianity wings its highest flight, one
+note alone wakes no response in us.  "Charity beareth all things,
+hopeth all things, endureth all things."  Amen!  But at "believeth all
+things" we draw back.  For us, the word must read "proveth all things."
+
+So long as moral obligation was based solely on the sanction of a
+supernatural world; so long as the condemnation of murder and theft and
+adultery was supposed to rest on the fact that God gave two tables of
+stone to Moses; so long as brotherhood and hope and trust ascribed
+their charter to an incarnate Deity,--so long a _belief_ in the charter
+and its history seemed the first requirement, the necessary condition
+of morality.  But to the modern mind the first and great commandment is
+to see things as they are.  The foundation of our morality, our
+happiness if we are to be happy, our trust and worship if we are to
+have a trust and worship,--in any event, our rule of life, our guide
+and law,--must be, _follow the truth_.  No sect monopolizes that
+principle.  It was orthodox old Nathaniel Taylor who used to bid his
+students, "Go with the truth, if it takes you over Niagara!"
+
+The question presents itself to man: "Is the Power that rules the
+universe friendly to me?"  It certainly does not offer the kind of
+friendship which man instinctively asks.  It does not give the
+friendship which saves from pain, which insures ease, pleasure,
+unchecked delight.  Not an indulgent mother, certainly.
+
+The starting-point for getting the question truly answered must be a
+practical acceptance of the highest rule and ideal known to man.
+Accepting that and following it, he rises higher and higher.  He feels
+himself in some inward accord with the moving forces of the universe.
+The prime requisite is for him to obey, to do the right, be the heavens
+kindly or hostile or indifferent.  Just so, long before man knew
+anything of the general laws of nature, he planted and reaped,
+struggled for food and clothing, took care for himself,--he must do
+long before he comprehends.  So he must work righteousness and love,
+God or no God.  And in the summoning voice within him, the play upon
+him of powers forever urging him to choose the right,--powers to which
+he grows more and more sensitive as his effort is earnest,--in this he
+comes to recognize some reality which has to him more significance and
+impressiveness than any other thing in the world.
+
+The working principle of the modern mind is that the universe is
+orderly.  Everything has its place and meaning.  Man discerns in his
+personal life this much of clear meaning, that he is to strive toward
+the noblest ideal.  As he accepts that, the conviction comes home to
+him that in the highest sense the universe is friendly, for it is
+attracting, urging, compelling him to the realization of his highest
+dreams.
+
+
+The highest intellect is always serene.  Shakspere and Emerson stand at
+the summit of human thought and vision; unlike as they are, both view
+the spectacle of life with an intense interest, and a great though
+sober cheer.  If we analyze the elements which Shakspere portrays, we
+might incline to judge that the sadness outweighs the joy.  But the
+impression left by his pages is somehow not sad.  Some deeper spirit
+underlies and penetrates.  Back of Lear's heartbreak, Hamlet's
+bewilderment, Othello's despair, we feel some presence which upholds
+our courage.  It is the mind of the writer, so lofty and wise that it
+is not daunted by all the terrors it beholds, and which conveys to us
+its own calm.
+
+
+In a like mood, we may often look for ourselves on the drama of real
+life, profoundly stirred by its comedies and tragedies, but not
+overwhelmed,--least overwhelmed when our sight is clearest.
+
+The sense of assurance--not of mere safety from special harm, but the
+uplift of some unspeakable divine reality--comes in presence of the
+grandest scenes of nature,--mountain or ocean or sunset.  They supply
+an external image, answering to some faculty in the soul.  And when
+through failure of sense or spirit the vision is obscured, the soul
+becomes conscious in itself of that to which mountain and ocean are but
+servants,--the reserve power to endure and to conquer which springs to
+life at the stern challenge.
+
+The deepest assurance comes not as an intellectual view nor as an
+impression from the sublimities of nature.  It is the outcome of the
+severest conflicts and the heaviest trials.  We cannot explain the
+process, but we see in others or feel in ourselves this: that out of
+the hardest struggle in which we have held our ground comes the deepest
+peace.  What serenity is to the intellectual life, that to the moral
+life is this "peace which passeth understanding," this blending of
+gladness and love.  It is not a passive condition, but of the highest
+potential energy,--the parent of all great achievements and patient
+fidelities.
+
+
+The soul learns to draw courage, trust, joy, and hope from its resolute
+encounter with realities, without leaning on any explanation.  It is
+the onlooker only who despairs.  Literature, so much the work of
+on-lookers, exaggerates the depression.  Men of action, toilers,
+helpers, fathers, mothers, saints,--these do not despair.  The world as
+a whole, and the best part of the world, lives a life of action,
+feeling, exercise of every faculty,--which generates courage, strength,
+tenderness.  Under all the confusion and wrong, there are still the
+deep springs of that same experience, that "peace of God" which always
+fed the highest life.
+
+There is an experience sometimes felt of perfect assurance, peace, and
+joy.  It is "love which casteth out fear,"--the sense of being "God's
+child;" it is communion with the Highest.
+
+This is the heart of religion.  It is known to "babes and sucklings,"
+unknown to many otherwise very learned people.  It speaks with an
+absolute authority the message of love and peace, of joy and hope.
+
+The mind is wont to clothe this message in some crude form, which
+serves to convey it to others, but is like the alloy which makes the
+pure gold workable, yet debases it.
+
+This gladness of the spirit was the gospel of Jesus.  He had it as no
+one ever had it before.  His followers caught it.  They debased,
+necessarily, but they spread it.  They worshiped it in him, made him
+their leader, master, and finally their God.  They loved him as a
+present reality, while they treasured the record of his human words.
+In such exaltation, like the intoxication of a heavenly wine, the
+untrained mind is creative in its ecstasy; hence the beautifully
+conceived and easily believed stories of announcing angels, miracles of
+healing, bodily resurrection.
+
+Then came a long development of dogma and church,--much of obscuration,
+much of degeneracy.  Through it all survived the truths that love is
+supreme, and that the law of life is goodness sublimed to holiness.
+
+The revivals of religions have been the rediscovery of the glad truth,
+freed each time from some accompanying error.
+
+The discovery of Luther was that the soul's life in God was possible
+outside of the Catholic church.  Others had found this, too, but he
+made it a militant truth, and successfully revolted.
+
+Calvinism was partly a reversion; its emphasis on sovereignty was
+tyrannical, but it trained the mind in exact and intense thought.
+
+Fox, after long searchings amid sects and parties, made the new
+discovery again,--God's spirit given directly, freely to man!  Hence a
+sort of intoxication in the early Quaker, sobering to a sweet religion.
+
+Always, in the various churches,--Roman, English, Genevan,
+Lutheran,--was something of the divine fire, though often hidden and
+choked.
+
+In the Wesleys, the saving and seeking love of Christ was the form the
+revival took; and with this went "free grace," as against fatalism
+which crushed the will.
+
+Edwards had something of the love-element, but it was fettered by his
+Calvinism.  His main service was to stimulate religious thought, which,
+from a Calvinistic basis, worked out through Hopkins to Channing.
+
+The revival in Liberal Orthodoxy is essentially a recognition of the
+true character of Jesus, and an idealization and enthronement of this
+as the sovereign ideal, with a clinging as yet to the supernatural
+basis, which inevitably grows weaker.
+
+Meanwhile, new "ways into the Infinite" have been opened,--through
+nature, as by Wordsworth; through humanity by Emerson.
+
+Science has swept away the whole supernatural machinery with which this
+inner life of the soul has been connected in men's minds.  It finds
+everywhere order, growth, a present rooted in the past and flowering
+into the future.  Opening immense vistas for the race, it sometimes
+seems to shrivel the individual to a transient atom.
+
+But still there wells up in the heart of man the mysterious, profound,
+irresistible gladness in its Divine source,--the love that casts out
+fear.  We may look at it soberly, assign it place, limit it in a way;
+it can no longer give us a cosmogony, but unimpaired is its message,
+"Obey and rejoice!"  We correlate its impulse with the sense of moral
+obligation and the code of ethics which has grown up in the world's
+sober experience.  We learn to cultivate the religious sense more
+wisely than of old.  We make bodily health its minister.  We administer
+and reorganize civil society, instead of confining ourselves to the
+church.  We open our hearts to the revelation of nature and humanity.
+And we wait patiently the slow coming of the Kingdom; the slow growth
+of religion in our own character; the slow upbuilding of human
+societies.
+
+Side by side with this slow process lies always the present heaven into
+which at times the soul enters and finds perfect peace,--a peace which
+embraces past, present, and future, time and eternity.  We study and
+practice obedience, diligence, patience; and at unforeseen moments,
+under shocks or in highest tranquillity, comes the divine revelation.
+
+The belief that the perfect life had actually been lived by Christ was
+a help to men whose aspiration felt itself unsuccessful,--the very
+height of the aspiration deepening the sense of failure.  The mind
+fastened on an actual and perfect goodness outside of itself.  The
+Stoic ideal kept a man self-watchful, giving him no higher personality
+to look up to.  There was in Christianity the feeling that the perfect
+life has been lived, and this somehow may help to save me.  This was
+the core of the Atonement.  All theories of it--ransom, substitution,
+and the like--were intellectual explanations of the fact of experience.
+
+Forgiveness is the soul's delighted sense that its sin is not mortal.
+It comes only after sin has been felt as a burden.  Conscious of
+wrong-doing, man feels helpless and even accursed,--imagines or credits
+stories of a fall, of measureless guilt, and an endless hell.  What
+gives poignancy to these ideas is the real sense of wrong-doing, which
+projects a monstrous and exaggerated shadow.
+
+The sense of duty, constantly worked, breeds in sensitive souls the
+despair of an unattainable perfection.  The outward ceremonial does not
+help or enrich,--the moral and spiritual ideal tantalizes by its
+impossibility.  This happens even to the strenuously righteous.  In the
+gross wrong-doer, especially if he falls under the ban of society,
+there is wrought a despair which probably expresses itself in a
+hardened recklessness.
+
+Among these "lost sheep" came Jesus as a friend.  His love divined the
+deeper soul within them,--its yearning for the good it had perhaps
+ceased even to struggle for,--its untouched possibilities.  He said,
+"Be of good cheer!  Thy sins be forgiven thee!  Go in peace!"  At his
+word and touch, a new life sprang up in them,--a new force lifted
+humanity in its lowest depths.
+
+To this new sense of life out of death Jesus gave the name of _Your
+Father's love_.  He typified it in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
+And as the appropriate attitude for this recovered sinner, he set, not
+merely a glad and thankful acceptance of the gift, but the passing of
+it on to others.  He bound inseparably the receiving and the giving.
+"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
+
+Just the experience of the pardoned miser or harlot came to Paul when
+he saw that in his pride and willfulness he had been persecuting the
+holy and innocent, yet felt himself reached and loved and restored by
+that same innocent and holy soul.
+
+The experience was constantly repeated in the early church.  It was the
+most striking of all those genuine "miracles"--the wonders of spiritual
+creation and growth--which were the wealth of the Christian society.
+
+At the most dark and depressing hour of that society; when in gaining
+dominion it had lowered its purity, and before the barbarian invasion
+the whole social fabric shook,--that same miracle of a divine love,
+realized as a saving and transforming force, was wrought in the great
+personality of Augustine, and inspired through him anew the life of the
+church.
+
+The intellectual vestment of this experience--the form under which the
+crude thought of these men gave it body and substance--was the
+Incarnation and the Atonement.  Those doctrines have lasted through all
+changes, even until this day, because of the pearl of truth cased in
+their rough shells.
+
+When now we try to express that truth in its simplicity--finding always
+a great difficulty in putting in articulate words the deep things of
+the spirit--we say that the man who sees and sorrows for and seeks to
+escape from his wrong deed or habit may come into the consciousness
+that he will escape,--may feel with a profound assurance that he is
+upborne by some power of good which will save him and bless him.  He is
+recoverable; he is lovable; he is loved, and shall be saved.  And the
+way in which that consciousness is awakened is oftenest by the contact
+of some soul which the sinner reverences as better than himself, which
+knows his guilt and loves him in spite of it, and declares to him that
+he shall live and recover.  The minister of forgiveness may be a mother
+or a wife; it may be the sincere priest speaking to the sincere
+penitent; it may be Christ or Madonna; it may be the unnamed Power
+whose token is the sunset, or the rainbow, or the voice within the
+heart.
+
+
+The especial limitation of Christianity at its birth was the
+expectation of the speedy ending of the existing order.  Hence an
+indifference to such subjects, belonging to permanent human society, as
+industry, government, knowledge, the control of the forces of nature.
+
+As to all these, the limitations of Christianity hindered its progress;
+as to each, the natural and secular world exercised an influence
+unconfessed or striven against; as to each, the perception was reached
+that it must be recognized by religion, until in our day the _Here_ and
+_Now_ takes the foreground in place of the _Hereafter_.  The personal
+life in its present relations, the human society under earthly
+conditions,--these give to us the main field and problem.  The
+hereafter of the individual gives background and atmosphere.
+
+
+For "holy living and dying" we put simply holy living.  To give
+fullness and perfection to each day, each act, is all and is enough.
+The thought of death should not swerve or alter a particle.  When the
+last hour of life comes, what retrospect shall we wish?  Only to have
+filled life with the best.
+
+
+The religious emotion will often and freely personify, and must do so.
+The highest feeling takes on a quality of love, and love goes to a
+personal object.  It is sometimes as toward one divine friend and God,
+sometimes toward the one beloved human being, sometimes the Christ,
+sometimes a universe of living and loving beings.  These are
+distinctions of form rather than of substance, the expression by
+different minds of the same reality.
+
+To the modern mind, the distinct personification of deity is less
+natural than formerly.  The very vastness of the Infinite, as we
+conceive it, precludes this definite personalizing of it as a habitual
+mode of thought or basis of conduct.  Yet under lofty and high-wrought
+emotion, the yearning of the soul toward the Supreme Power often breaks
+spontaneously into the language of personality.  In the exquisite sense
+of deliverance from sharp trouble,--when the trouble itself seems more
+than justified by the heightened gladness, as in Titian's Assumption
+the face of the Virgin Mother shines in the welcome of that heaven to
+which the way has led through all earthly and motherly sorrow,--in such
+emergence, the heart utters again the very words of the Psalmist: "I
+love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.
+The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon
+me; I found trouble and sorrow.  Then called I upon the name of the
+Lord, O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul!  Gracious is the Lord
+and righteous; yea, our God is merciful.  Return unto thy rest, O my
+soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with me.  For thou hast
+delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from
+falling."
+
+
+If we would weigh and measure the value of mankind, we have no scales
+or measures.  As much is to be said for the badness of men as for their
+goodness.  Still more impossible is it to trace their individual
+responsibility for what they are.  But the determination of the value
+of mankind, even the lowest, is by a different process from that of the
+speculative intellect.  Are men worthy of love?  Love them, and you
+shall know!  The attitude of love vindicates itself.  No one who has
+heartily given himself to the service of others turns back saying,
+"They are not worth it."
+
+Encompassing light creates in the developing creature an eye.  So
+encompassing love--human love--draws out response in its object, makes
+it lovable.
+
+
+One class of truths are certain for all and at all times.  These are
+such as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; the
+obligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true attitude;
+receptivity toward knowledge, beauty, and humor.
+
+There are other perceptions which vary greatly in their frequency and
+vividness.  They are impulses of reassurance, joy, hope, victory.  They
+surpass all other sources of strength and comfort.
+
+They cannot, in their clearness and fullness, be transferred or
+expressed; they cannot even, by the mind experiencing them, be resolved
+into intellectual propositions.
+
+They are not peculiar to what we usually call religion.  The experience
+of love between man and woman opens a new world.  So does music; so do
+all the finer forms of happiness.
+
+All these, when they come, are felt as gifts,--as revelations.  They
+are not within our direct and immediate command.
+
+What relation do they bear to the life which is within our command,--to
+our deliberate, purposeful, self-ordered life?  First, in that life we
+cultivate the two traits which fit us for the vision, though they do
+not command it,--sensitiveness and self-control.
+
+So no man or woman can foresee whether the love of wedlock shall come
+to them, but each can render himself worthy of love, and no high
+experience of love is possible except to one trained long beforehand in
+purity and unselfishness.
+
+Next, these higher moods, when they come, should be accepted as giving
+law to the unillumined hours.  They do not change, but they intensify,
+the aim at rightness of life, and they add to it the spirit of courage,
+of trust, of joy.
+
+
+The hope of immortality--the assurance of some good beyond, which we
+express by "immortality"--is born from a sense of the value of life.
+Life is felt to be precious as it is consecrated by the moral struggle
+in ourselves, and as it is viewed in others with sympathy.  We give our
+moral effort and our sympathy, and these are encountered by the
+tremendous play of human joys and sorrows, and the result is a sense of
+life as intensely significant.
+
+The feeling of communion with Christ, with angels and saints,--its
+natural basis is the reverence and love for great souls.  As such
+reverence and love is deep, and as death removes the objects, the sense
+of a continued communion arises spontaneously.  No form of our
+consciousness is more vivid and profound than this.  It has a
+background of mystery,--mystery scarcely deeper or other than that
+which envelops the earthly love.  _What_ do I love in the friend whom
+here I see?  Is it the individuality, or that higher power of which it
+transmits a ray?
+
+The sense of this blending of the human and divine does not weaken or
+perplex our affection for the friend we see; it intensifies and
+sublimates it.  So, in the sense of communion with the unseen friend,
+it disturbs us not that we cannot say how much is there of the
+remembered personality, how much of the one eternal deity.  The essence
+of what we loved and love is sure and undying.
+
+
+The creature succeeds as its functions and organs become fitted to its
+environment.  Man succeeds as he fits himself to a moral environment.
+To the undeveloped man the world is full of forces which are hostile or
+indifferent to his right action; a thousand things distract him from
+doing right; he is like a creature in a watery world with
+half-developed fins.  But as a man becomes morally developed he finds
+moral opportunity everywhere,--finds occasion for service, for
+admiration, gratitude, reverence, hope.  This moral development
+includes the whole man: he needs a good body; he needs much that only
+inheritance can supply.  His own effort is one factor, not the sum of
+factors.  We must be patient with ourselves,--accept our inevitable
+imperfections as part of the grand plan, and find a joy in what is
+above and beyond ourselves.
+
+
+Man first solves the problem of his own life,--finds the key in
+devotion to the highest ideal of character,--finds the answer in moral
+growth following his effort, forgiveness meeting his repentance, human
+love answering his love, beauty meeting his desire, truth opening to
+his search, a support and assurance found in emergency.
+
+Then, and only then, he can rightly study the world.  For he must first
+have the standard of values in human life; he must have, too, the utter
+devotion to truth.
+
+Studying the universe, he learns that man has come into being through
+the processes of material law,--that the aeons of astronomy and geology
+have been working toward his production.  He finds that man develops
+into moral man, with the power of choice and of love; develops into a
+being loyal and sensitive to duty and to his kind.  This type of man
+tends to become the universal type.  Human goodness tends to spread
+itself.  There is a society, living from age to age, of those devoted
+to the good of man: this sentiment grows purer, more enlightened, more
+enthusiastic; it is the heart of all reforms, all social progress; no
+equal power opposes it.  It is combated by selfishness, greed,
+ignorance, violence, but these forces have no spiritual cohesion among
+themselves, no inner unity; they are destined to fall before the
+advance of the higher spirit.
+
+Hand in hand with this advancing goodness goes advancing knowledge,
+growing sense of beauty, greater powers of happiness.
+
+We see thus a power working for good through man, making him its
+instrument, absorbing him into itself.
+
+The movement is continuous, from the star-mist to the saint.
+
+This is one element in the sum of things.  It is the element that man
+knows best.  The lives of the gnat and the tiger he scarcely more than
+guesses at.  Other possible existences than his own there may be, even
+within this mundane sphere, of which he knows nothing.  Of humanity he
+knows something, and he sees that it is moved toward the goal of
+perfection.
+
+The power which thus moves it he inevitably identifies with that which
+he has found urging himself toward goodness, touching him in his best
+estate with a sense of harmony, and sustaining him in all emergencies.
+To this Power of Good he devotes himself and trusts himself.  His
+supreme prayer is, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done."  He seeks to
+be used by this power for its own ends; better than any wish he can
+frame must be the end to which it works.
+
+The final product of the world-forces, the flower of the universe, the
+child of God, is man, in his fidelity, tenderness, yearning.  To him
+belong the saint's aspiration, the poet's vision, the mother's love.
+And this highest type, by all its finest faculties, reaches toward a
+hereafter.
+
+The ruling power turns often a harsh face upon its creatures.  There is
+unbounded suffering.  There is the perpetual destruction of the
+individual.  Even the moral growth meets obstacles often
+insurmountable; inheritance limits; circumstances betray; we see sudden
+falls and slow deterioration; whole races wane.
+
+But we see that evil is somehow a stepping-stone to all our good.
+Heroism, piety, tenderness, have been born out of pain.  The
+expectation of a hereafter gives hope that no individual moral germ is
+lost.  And we see that the crowning victory of life is the persistence
+of man's good against the evil; as in the mother whose love the
+prodigal cannot exhaust; in the Siberian exile who will not despair; in
+Jesus when before the cross he prays, "Thy will be done."  This is
+faith, this is the soul's supreme act,--the allegiance to good, the
+trust in good, in face of the very worst.  Man, in that depth feels
+lifted by a power transcending himself.  So, when the beloved is taken
+by death, the heart, in face of that loss, loves on; feels its love
+greater than that which has befallen; says, "O Death, where is thy
+sting!  O grave, where is thy victory!"
+
+
+The best living unites us closely and mysteriously with some greater
+whole of which we are a part.  The three great faculties are knowledge,
+conduct, love.  Knowledge finds always new objects, new connections, a
+more perfect and wonderful whole.  Right conduct brings a sense of
+being in true relations,--of fulfilling some high destiny.  Love blends
+the individual with the universal; its successive steps are the highest
+form of human education.
+
+
+Christianity was a feminine religion in its virtues, as purity and
+tenderness; and also in its attitude of pure dependence, submission,
+petition.  The masculine elements have not been duly recognized as
+religious, even when having a great place in the actual working of
+things,--self-reliance, physical hardihood, civic virtue, the pursuit
+of truth.
+
+
+In her subject state, woman has learned piety.  She brings that as she
+emerges into her free state, her gift to man, as his to her is strength
+and self-reliance.
+
+
+The moral power of the dogmatic systems has been very limited.  They
+pretended to all knowledge and all power, but they have only gone a
+little way to sweeten and purify human life.  The "enthusiasm of
+humanity" advances society farther in a decade than the old religion
+did in a century.
+
+
+We are taught by scientists the extreme slowness with which races have
+improved.  But do we know how fast races or families can improve if
+brought in contact with the most helpful influences of other races or
+families?  Has that experiment ever been fairly tried?  Do not results
+with hardened convicts, with Indian and negro pupils, suggest that
+there may be an immense acceleration of moral progress?
+
+
+Different classes of minds require different religions.  A multitude
+require the pictorial faith and the absolute authority of the Catholic
+church.  A great many require the divine-human figure of Christ.  A
+certain class of minds will be pantheistic.  To some the wonders of the
+physical world will be the most impressive revelation.  Natures strong
+in spiritual insight will be transcendentalists.  Those in whom
+personal affection is profound will have the gospel of "In Memoriam"
+and Lucy Smith.  Active, serviceable, unimaginative men will often be
+content with a cheerful agnosticism.  Some, after pushing their inquiry
+to the farthest, and keeping it united with right living, will rest in
+"devout and contented uncertainty."
+
+
+The advance of knowledge has been the great fact of the world's
+intellectual life for the past century.
+
+The increase by this means of material good; the upward push of the
+people, strengthened by knowledge and by prosperity won through
+knowledge; the widening and deepening of human sympathy,--these are the
+great social facts.
+
+The imminent situation is that knowledge has destroyed the old
+religious basis, and is only just beginning to construct a new
+religious cultus.  Socially, the common people seem on the point of a
+great advance, while the too eager push for material good brings
+temporarily a moral injury.
+
+Among the constructive forces are: a knowledge of man and the world
+which enables us to build on broader foundations than Jesus or St.
+Francis; a vivified sense of humanity which gives the emotional force
+which is always the strongest dynamic factor; and a new sense of
+natural beauty which feeds the religious life and imparts peace.
+
+The immediate future is uncertain,--the barbarian invasion and the
+religious wars may have a parallel in another period of disasters.  But
+the large onward movement is clear, and the personal ideal was never at
+once so reasonable and so ardent as now.  Though storms should rise
+high, faith and hope may hold fast, remembering that
+
+      "all the past of Time reveals
+    A bridal dawn of thunder-peals
+  Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact."
+
+
+Democracy is just a continuation of the upward push which out of the
+mollusk has made man.  Altruism is not the only nor the primary upward
+force.  Before it and along with it goes the individual's struggle for
+his own betterment,--the outreach, first, of hunger and sex; then
+toward finer forms of pleasure; then of moral aspiration.  Democracy,
+socialism are an effort for _common_ betterment; the egoistic merges
+with the altruistic impulse.
+
+The mind must be held open to the free winds of knowledge.  If they can
+shake the foundations, let them.  And just as one's personal courage
+must often tremble before personal risks, so there must sometimes be
+intellectual tremors.
+
+
+If in the ardent temper and sweet spirit of the New Testament we try to
+discriminate as to what phases of human conduct receive the chief
+stress, we find the strongest emphasis is on brotherly love and
+chastity.  The ethical service of the Christian church has been
+greatest in the direction of these two qualities.  What it has done for
+purity is beyond our power to measure.  And it is just at that point
+that even yet the struggle of humanity to emerge from the bestial
+condition seems most difficult and doubtful.  Some writer has remarked
+that Christianity apparently introduced no really new virtue into human
+society, with the exception of male chastity.  Shakspere in one sonnet
+gives tremendous expression to the evil of lust, with this conclusion:--
+
+  "This all the world doth know; yet none know well
+  To shun the heaven, that leadeth to this hell."
+
+
+Christianity, in a way of its own, opened a gate out of that hell.  The
+gate was the power of a pure spiritual affection.  Paul describes, in
+language that strikes home to-day, the war of flesh and spirit.  For
+him, its conclusion is: "O wretched man that I am!  Who shall deliver
+me from the body of this death?  I thank God through Jesus Christ our
+Lord!"  At the crisis there rises in his spirit the consciousness,
+vivid as a personal presence, of that great, pure, loving soul; and
+temptation falls dead.  Augustine relates more fully a like experience.
+The turning-point of his life comes when, still bound after long
+struggles by a sinful tie, there comes to him the message, "Put ye on
+the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill
+the lusts thereof."  The church has not confined itself to a single
+form of influence.  It has invested the command to purity with the
+sanction of a divine behest; has used threats and penalties; has
+employed asceticism, often with most disastrous results; has appealed
+variously to the spiritual imagination with legend and story.  The
+fresh blood of the Northern peoples has come in to reënforce the spent
+and struggling morality of the South.  A romantic conception of love
+has blended nature's two great forces--sense and spirit--instead of
+setting them in opposition, and has invested wedlock with its true
+sanctity, in place of the false exaltation of celibacy.  And, under
+various influences, the relation of the sexes has upon the whole been
+so far heightened that we see this at the end of two thousand
+years,--that marriage, which Paul himself looked upon as a kind of
+necessary evil, is recognized as the best guardian and teacher of
+purity.
+
+The connection between the two most strongly marked phases of Christian
+morality--between love and purity--is not an arbitrary or accidental
+one.  It is an ideal affection that best masters the sensuous nature.
+In the words of "Ecce Homo," "No heart is pure that is not passionate;
+no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic."
+
+
+The modern attitude has two broad differences from early Christianity.
+Man addresses all his energy to understanding and controlling the
+forces of nature, instead of regarding them as alien or hostile and his
+own salvation as a matter of supernatural relation.
+
+
+And his relation with the Infinite and the Hereafter is far more
+various, subtle, intimate.
+
+
+Epictetus gives the heaven of the conscience, Jesus of the heart,
+Emerson of the intellect.
+
+Man's problems now are to find the physical and the social heaven,--to
+rightly correlate the spirit with the body and the earth, and to more
+perfectly organize society.
+
+
+The modern man, instead of appealing to Jehovah or Christ, grasps the
+powers of nature and of life as they are put into his own hands.
+Walter Scott writes in his journal, in a sharp exigency: "God help--no,
+God _bless_--man must _help_ himself."
+
+
+"Love God and man; what higher rule can there be?" we are asked.  But
+the actual work of the modern man is widely different from what Jesus
+or Paul perceived.  To understand natural forces and ally himself with
+them; to rightly order that vastly complex organism, the state; to
+frankly enjoy the pleasures of the healthy body; to discern the beauty
+of the surrounding world; to reproduce beauty in art; to relish the
+humor of the world,--these are aims which would have sounded strange to
+Paul, to Jesus, or to Epictetus.
+
+To seek the best, not for ourselves alone but for others, even at cost
+to ourselves; to control our lower natures by our higher natures; to
+feel a relation with the Supreme,--these were the aims and inspirations
+of the earlier Christianity; and they remain, but with enlarged and new
+application.
+
+
+Science has not penetrated to the inner secret of life, which is best
+reached by other approaches.  But it has enormously affected all
+thinking by the discovery of Evolution.  The recognition of growth--a
+gradual, causal process--in mankind's whole advance, alters the entire
+face of history and prophecy.  Just as it eliminates supernaturalism
+from the past, so it guides present progress and inspires while it
+moderates anticipation of the future.
+
+
+There grows the sense of some unfathomable unity.  Creator and creature
+are not sharply separated, as by the theologians: they are even more
+closely united than the "father" and "son" of Jesus.  So, too, the
+unity of humanity--of all souls--until the idea of personal immortality
+blends with some dimly conceived but greater reality.
+
+
+It is impossible to portray under a single image the ideal of to-day,
+because many ideals coexist.  There is infinite difference of moral
+development, as many characters as there are men; the variety of the
+spiritual world is like that of the material world, and the diversity
+gives richness and charm.  And the forward movement of the ages is
+immeasurably complex.  Yet certain broad movements are traceable.
+
+"Do right and fear nothing," was the word of Stoicism.
+
+"God is holy; be ye holy," was the word of Hebraism, growing clearer,
+stamping itself by institutions and inheritance.
+
+"God is love; love ye," was the word of Christianity.  The life of
+Jesus was the symbol of that idea, and gave impulse and law to the new
+society.
+
+It was in keeping with the Stoic doctrine of Providence, but it came
+through the imagination to the heart, more powerful than the calm
+utterance of reason.
+
+The Christian sense of sin was the intense force to rouse the ancient
+world from its easy-going content.  It was necessary that purity should
+become a passion.  The dogma of depravity was the intellectual
+exaggeration of this.  A God who died to save men from sin and hell was
+its natural counterpart.
+
+When the church had worked under the control of these ideas for fifteen
+hundred years, there woke again in mankind the sense of joy, beauty,
+knowledge, as good in themselves and God-given.  Humanity was only half
+ripe for this truth, and again the austere impulse reasserted itself in
+Calvinism, in Puritanism, in the Jesuits.  But knowledge, joy,
+naturalness, went on growing; they have changed the conception of
+religion itself, turning it to the sense of a present as well as a
+future fruition.
+
+The sense of human suffering comes in our day to full realization.  The
+best impulse of the time throws itself against that, as formerly
+against sin.  Just as the evil of sin was overstated and became an
+exaggeration and terror, so the sense of human suffering is often
+overstretched and becomes pessimism.  But, essentially, a fresh and
+powerful enthusiasm assails the evils of mankind.  It aims to educate
+and elevate the whole being,--to save men.  It has in science a new
+instrument.
+
+The old hope of some speedy millennium is gone.  We see that the
+general advance must be slow.  But we also see that the imperfect
+condition is not so terrible as it was once supposed: it does not incur
+hell; it does not imply total depravity; it may even serve as
+stepping-stone to higher things.
+
+All the higher phases of man's nature point together.  The highest
+thought says, "All is well;" the deepest feeling, "God is love;" the
+human affection realizes its immortality; the seeing eye finds
+universal beauty; the profoundest yearning enfolds the promise, "I
+shall be satisfied."
+
+
+We may follow the story by another thread.
+
+A human society inspired and bound together by the highest traits,
+consciously ensphered in a divine power and inspired by it,--this is
+the ideal which has been reached toward and grown toward through all
+the ages.
+
+Its primitive germ was Israel's hope of a splendid national future.
+
+In Jesus this expanded into the Kingdom of God among men,--that is, the
+perfect reign of goodness, love, and the human-divine relation of son
+and father.  He looked for its realization by miracle, and when that
+failed said, "Thy will be done," and died, trusting all to the Father.
+
+His followers, at first under the dream of his second coming, settled
+into a society bound together by common rules and ideals.  The Catholic
+church was born and grew.  Mixed with all human elements of
+imperfection, it advanced a long way toward the goal, then divided its
+sway with new energies.
+
+In the political and social life of Europe, and especially of England,
+there slowly grew up a population fit for self-government in place of
+government by the few.
+
+Thomas More foresaw prophetically a community which should realize the
+loftiest vision, and whose bond should be human and social, not
+theologic.
+
+The Puritan tried to enforce the will of God, as he understood it, by
+authority,--to build a commonwealth on Hebrew lines.  He failed, in
+England and America, but stamped his character on both peoples.
+
+Then came the essay of the Quaker toward a reign of peace.
+
+Next, the Wesleyan movement, quickening the English heart and
+conscience, and sending the wave which did in a degree for the West of
+America what Puritanism and Quakerism did for the East.
+
+Then the uprising in France,--the passionate aspiration for "liberty,
+equality, fraternity,"--at war with Christianity, instead of at one
+with it like English freedom, and working great and mixed results.
+
+We see the American republic, founded by a blending of hard common
+sense, experience, devotion, and widening purpose, and best typified in
+Washington.
+
+In Lincoln the problem of the American commonwealth--to maintain unity,
+yet purify itself--and the problem of a human life are both solved by
+the old virtues, honesty, self-rule, self-devotion.
+
+The present movement of the world is toward a nobler social order.  It
+is to lift the common man upward, on material good as a stepping-stone,
+toward the height of the saint and seer.  This is the better soul of
+democracy, the noble element in politics, the reformation in the
+churches, the bond of sympathy with Christ.
+
+Along with this goes a new personal ideal, exemplified in
+Emerson,--accepting the present world as the symbol and instrument of a
+celestial destiny.  "Contenting himself with obedience, man becomes
+divine."
+
+
+In the Gospel history, the figures of the woman and the child take a
+high place.  In Jesus himself the feminine element blent with the
+masculine.  Medieval religion and art found their best symbol in the
+figure of the mother clasping her babe.  Our modern time is giving
+freedom to woman and recognizing her equality with man, and we are
+learning that the secret of the world's advance lies in the right
+training of children under natural law.  So the sentiment which grows
+up in the natural relations of life is elevated by religion, then
+developed and perfected by freedom and by science.
+
+
+For us the practical problem is the cultivation of the religious nature
+along with the other elements of a complete manhood.  We are not
+obliged by intellectual process to create a religious sentiment in
+ourselves.  We inherit that sentiment.  It is like the sense of purity
+or of beauty,--beyond demonstration, except the demonstration of
+experience.  We need only to supply the right conditions for its
+education and application.
+
+The belief that the spiritual life was dependent on certain
+institutions and beliefs was the key to the ecclesiastical tyranny of
+the past.  We have virtually escaped that tyranny.  Now, in the
+atmosphere of freedom, we cultivate the spiritual life, and it proves
+deeper and fairer than ever before.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+DAILY BREAD
+
+When Charles Lyell addressed himself to the problems of geology, he found
+that his predecessors in the study had accounted for all the stupendous
+phenomena whose story is written in the earth's crust, on the supposition
+of vast catastrophic disturbances in the remote past, because they held
+that these effects were too prodigious to have been wrought by the
+ordinary slow processes of nature with which we are familiar.  Lyell took
+up the question by the near and homely end.  He patiently watched the
+workings of heat and cold, sunshine and rain and frost, summer and
+winter, in the fields about his own house.  He learned there what these
+familiar forces are capable of, in what directions they operate, and in
+them he found the clew to the story of the past aeons.  Right about his
+doorstep were the magicians that had done it all.
+
+That illustrates the process of discovery in the spiritual universe.  We
+are not to soar up into infinity to find God.  The only air that will
+support our wings is that which encircles closely this familiar planet.
+Let us look for a divine significance in homely things.
+
+Here is Goodness.  It is right about us, in people whom we know and meet
+every day, plainly visible to eyes that know how to see it.  Here are all
+its forms.  Innocence,--the very image of it looks upon you from many a
+child's face.  Courage, firmness, self-control,--you may read them in the
+lines of many a manly countenance.  Purity,--who has not felt its
+hallowing regard fall upon him from the eyes of maid and matron?  Pity,
+tenderness, sympathy,--these angels move about us in human forms, and he
+that hath eyes to see them sees.
+
+Fineness of character must be recognized by sympathetic observation.
+There must be the watchful attentiveness, like that of the sculptor
+studying his subject, the hunter tracking his prey.  And there must be in
+the observer himself some quality akin to that he would detect.  Only the
+good see goodness, only the lover sees love.  A mother would convey to
+her little daughter some full sense of the motherly feeling that yearns
+within her, but how can it be done?  In just one way: let that daughter
+grow up and have children of her own, _then_ she will know how her mother
+felt.
+
+Would we know something of the Divine Mother-heart?  We must first get in
+ourselves something of the mother-feeling.  "Every one that loveth
+knoweth God and is born of God."
+
+Perhaps there has been given to us some human friend,--parent or comrade,
+husband or wife,--in whom as nowhere else we see the beauty of the soul.
+Best, divinest gift of life is such a friend as that,--a friend who fills
+toward us a place like that to which our poet so nobly aspires:--
+
+  "You shall not love me for what daily spends,
+  You shall not know me on the noisy street,
+  Where I, as others, follow petty ends;
+  Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet;
+  Nor when I 'm jaded, sick, anxious, or mean;
+  But love me then and only, when you know
+  Me for the channel of the rivers of God,
+  From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow."
+
+
+Sometimes the friend whose goodness so touches us as with the very
+presence of God is one whom we have never seen.  To millions of hearts
+that place has been filled by Christ.
+
+These lines of Emerson--heroic idealist that he was--ask to be loved only
+when he is at his highest, and so is felt as a revelation of something
+higher than himself.  But our best friends--comrade, mother, or
+wife--love the ideal soul in us, and love us no less when we are "jaded,
+sick, anxious, or mean," covering with exquisite pity our infirmities,
+and by their nobility lifting us out of our baseness.  And in that
+affection which embraces our best and our worst, those human friends are
+the symbols--yes, and are part of the reality--of the Divine love.
+
+And what is all beauty, all grandeur, but the manifestation, through the
+eye to the soul, of the one Supreme Being?  The mountains, the sea, the
+sunset, touch us with more than pleasure: they stir in us some awe, some
+mystic delight, some profound recognition of sacred reality.  How can we
+better frame the wonder in speech than by saying, "Just as my friend's
+face manifests to me my friend, so Nature is as the very face of the
+living God"?
+
+In the processes of human life,--the life we live and the life we
+see,--there is discernible a significance which grows more impressive,
+more solemn, more inspiring, just as we learn to read it intelligently.
+What a wonderful drama is this play of human lives,--this perpetual
+tragedy and comedy, of which some slight and faint transcript finds
+expression in the pages of poet and novelist!  We needs must continually
+see and feel something of it, but we are apt to miss its best
+significance.  What fastens our attention most in our experience, or in
+what we sympathetically watch in others, is the element of enjoyment or
+suffering.  Pain and pleasure are so very, very real!  We ache, and we
+are sorry for another's ache; we are joyous, and glad in another's joy.
+And there it often stops with us.  But all the while something is working
+under the pain and pleasure.  Character is being made or marred.  Yonder
+man bleeds, and you sigh for him,--ah! but a hero is being moulded there.
+And here one thrives and prospers, expands and radiates,--but a spiritual
+bankruptcy is approaching.
+
+
+When we look closely and deeply at the world about us,--whether at this
+ordered world of nature, moving steadily in its unbroken and majestic
+course, or at the external aspect of grandeur and loveliness, or at the
+drama in which all men are actors, as it is disclosed to insight and
+sympathy, or at the inner world of each one's personal experience,--do we
+not find ourselves in the perpetual presence of Goodness, Order, Beauty,
+Love?  Are not these the very presence of Deity?
+
+"But," you say, "there is also confusion to be seen,--what does that
+signify?"  Just so fast as human intelligence advances, it finds that
+what seemed disorder is really governed by strictest order.  You say, "We
+see ugliness as well as beauty,--what does that mean?"  Ugliness serves
+its purpose in aiding by repulsion to train the sense of beauty.  Beauty,
+and man's delight in it, is the end; ugliness, and our repulsion from it,
+is but an incident and means.  You say, "We see wickedness,--what of
+that?"  May we not hope that wickedness, in the broad survey of mankind's
+upward progress, is the stumbling of a child over its alphabet?
+
+The instinct that the shadow is the servant of the light, that seeming
+disorder, ugliness, sin are but veiled instruments of good,--this seems
+one of the truths which flash upon mankind in gleams, and which as the
+race rises actually into nobler life tend to become clear and steadfast
+conviction.
+
+
+It is the vastness of the Divinity that overwhelms us.  Suppose a man,
+simple-hearted and imaginative, who, in a distant country, has read of
+America, and has fashioned her in his thoughts as a heroic female
+figure,--a kind of goddess.  He has taken as literal reality such poetic
+descriptions as those in Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" and Emerson's
+"Boston Hymn,"--
+
+  "Lo! I uncover the land
+  Which I hid of old time in the West,
+  As a sculptor uncovers the statue
+  When he has wrought his best."
+
+And he comes to you and says, "Show me America!"  And you show him a
+little of this country, its mountains and lakes and rivers, its shops and
+farms and people.  He is interested and gratified.  Yet this is not what
+he expected; and he says, "But show me America,--that radiant, heroic
+form, that goddess to charm the eyes and the heart."  And you tell him:
+"But America is too great to be taken in so, at a glance.  You have just
+begun to see it.  You have seen New England's hill-farms, but you have
+not seen the prairies of the West.  You have seen the Penobscot and
+Kennebec, the Connecticut and Hudson; but you have yet to see the
+Mississippi and Niagara.  I have taken you to Katahdin and Monadnock and
+Mount Washington, but you have yet to behold the Alleghanies and the
+Rockies and Tacoma.  Our people you have just begun to see: our armies of
+free toilers, our happy households, our strong men and lovely
+women,--these you are only beginning to know." And he says, perhaps: "But
+all this is so diffuse, so various, so difficult to comprehend!  I had
+fancied _America_ as some one beautiful, some one to love.  How can one
+love such a scattered, immense, diversified thing as this you describe to
+me?"  Well, you tell him: "You may not understand it yet awhile; but this
+country which you say is not a thing to love was in peril of its life a
+few years ago, and it was so loved that men by hundreds of thousands left
+home, and risked life and all for it, and their mothers and wives and
+sisters sent them forth.  That is how America can be loved!"
+
+In some such fashion as this do we grope after a God whom we can
+comprehend at a glance; and, lo! his presence fills the universe.  "Say
+not, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring him down, or who shall descend
+into hell to bring him up? for he is nigh thee, before thy eyes and in
+thy heart."
+
+
+The chief revelation we need is the education of our own perceptive
+powers.  Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, in a very striking passage,
+that the material world may convey itself through other senses than the
+five which we possess, that there may be innumerable other senses, and
+that some of these may perhaps be already developed in other creatures
+than man.  Such a suggestion stirs our curiosity and desire; but how few
+of us have learned to rightly use the five senses we have!  And of the
+moral perceptions we have but a most rudimentary development.  We are
+unconscious of most of the world we live in, unconscious even of what
+many of our fellow-men discern.  Did you ever happen to be in the
+presence of a sunset, flooding the heavens with glory, with a companion
+who showed no sign of perceiving the splendor?  Ah! perhaps he was
+blinded to it by some secret grief or care, some trouble which you might
+have discovered in him and comforted, had your sympathy been as acute as
+your sense of beauty.  But did his blindness, whatever its cause, suggest
+to you that you perhaps were at that moment in the presence of sublime
+realities, to which your consciousness was closed as his was to the
+sunset?
+
+
+To recognize consciously the spiritual elements in the universe belongs
+partly to a right cultivation of character, and partly it is due to
+natural endowment, to an intellectual faculty.  It is not, after all, of
+so much account that we _see_ the divine in life as that we have it in
+ourselves.  In this one sentence, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for
+they shall see God," Jesus puts spiritual vision as the result of a moral
+quality.  But it is the moral quality itself on which, in one form and
+another, his blessing is constantly pronounced.  So, if you say, "I
+cannot see,--God is in no sense visible to me," yet there remain still
+most precious gifts, if you will take them.  Blessed are the gentle, the
+peacemakers, the merciful, they that do hunger and thirst after
+righteousness; blessed are the sympathetic, the stout-hearted, the
+open-eyed, the open-handed; plain and simple and sure are these
+benedictions.
+
+The presence of Divinity which it is most essential that we recognize is
+the choice perpetually presented to us between a higher and a lower
+course of action.  Whether one has the joyful, uplifting vision is of
+small consequence in comparison with whether he steadily chooses and
+follows the right.
+
+
+No one can be reasoned or persuaded into any living faith in God or
+immortality, any more than reason and persuasion can draw from the cold
+April furrow the field of waving wheat.  The faith _grows_ in the
+individual and in the race, under that culture to which the higher powers
+subject us,--a culture in which the elements are experience and fidelity,
+thought and action, love and loss, aspiration and achievement.  Love and
+Loss, the sweetest angel and the sternest one, join their hands to give
+us that gift of the immortal hope.
+
+If one asks, How shall I gain faith in God and hope of immortality? what
+better answer can we give him than this: Be faithful, live, and love!
+Work and love press their treasures on you with full hands.  Open your
+eyes to the glory of the universe.  Watch the world's new life quickening
+in bud and bird-song.  Get into sympathetic current with the hearts
+around you.  Be sincere; be a man.  Keep open-minded to all knowledge,
+and keep humble in the sense of your ignorance.  Seek the company that
+ennobles, the scenes that ennoble, the books that ennoble.  In your
+darkest hour, set yourself to brighten another's life.  Be patient.  If
+an oak-tree takes a century to get its growth, shall a man expect to win
+his crown in a day?  Find what word of prayer you can sincerely say, and
+say it with your heart.  Look at the moral meanings of things.  Learn to
+feel through your own littleness that higher power out of which comes all
+the good in you.  Join yourself to men wherever you can find them in that
+noblest attitude, true worship of a living God.  Know that to mankind are
+set two teachers of immortality, and see to it that you so faithfully
+learn of Love that Sorrow when she comes shall perfect the lesson.
+
+
+Love in its simplest and most common forms is often strangely wise.  Many
+a mother learns from the light of her baby's eyes more than all wisdom of
+books can teach.  When the little, unconscious thing is taken from her
+arms, there is given to her sometimes a feeling, "My baby is _mine_
+forever;" a feeling in whose presence we stand in reverent, tender awe.
+It is not every experience of bereavement which brings with it this
+uplift of comfort.  But to the noble love of a noble object there comes
+the sense of something in the beloved that outlasts death.  To the
+_noble_ love, for most of our affection has a selfish strain in it; the
+clinging to another for what of present enjoyment he yields to us brings
+small illumination or assurance.  But as self loses itself in another's
+life, there comes to us the deep instinct of something over which death
+has no power.  Above all, when we unselfishly love one in whom dwells
+moral nobility,--when it is a great and vital and holy nature to which we
+join ourselves,--there comes to us a profound and pregnant sense of its
+immortality.  It is when death's stroke has fallen that that sense rises
+into full, triumphant bloom.
+
+No wonder the disciples felt that their Master lived!  Theirs was the
+experience that in substance repeats itself whenever from among those who
+love it a noble soul goes home.  It was because Jesus was supremely
+noble, and they had loved him with consummate affection, that their
+experience was so intense and vivid.  Its true significance lay in this,
+that it was not supernatural but natural.  It is standing the pyramid on
+its apex to deduce all human goodness from the goodness of Jesus, and to
+argue a universal immortality solely from his rising.  Let us place the
+pyramid four-square in the universal truth of human nature.  Let us
+ground our religion upon the moral fidelity, the human love, the
+spiritual aspiration, and the sober regard for fact, in which all loyal
+souls can agree.  Then at its summit we shall get that character of which
+Jesus is the type, a character in which self-sacrifice and joy divinely
+blend, and which in its passage from earth imparts the irresistible
+assurance of a higher life beyond.
+
+This morning the sun rose upon earth and trees encased in blazing jewelry
+of ice.  Fast, fast the beauty melted and was gone,--and in its place,
+behold the brown earth touched with living green and teeming with
+promise; the trees' strong limbs tipped with swelling buds; and over all
+the tender, brooding sky of spring.  Even so, the pageant of the
+miracle-story dissolves, to give place to the natural consciousness of
+eternal beauty and eternal life.
+
+A group of Americans meet in a foreign city, and they talk fondly of
+home, and to each of them home has its special meaning.  One says: "I
+remember the green hill-pastures and the great elms and the white
+farmhouses; I know just how the autumn woods are looking, and the stocked
+corn, and the pumpkins ripening in the sun; and I am homesick for a sight
+of it all."  Another says: "It is the nation that I think of.  To me
+America seems the home of the poor man, the common man.  She is working
+out great and difficult questions in government and society, and I have
+strong faith that the outcome of it all is going to be a great good to
+the world.  I long to take part once more in that national life; and over
+here among strangers I want at least to Le no discredit to the dear old
+country, and if possible to pick up some bit of knowledge or experience
+that I can add to the common stock when I get home."  A third man says:
+"Yes, that's all true; but I don't often think of it in so big a way as
+that.  I want to see my old neighbors.  And in these foreign Sundays I
+get hungry for the old church I've been to ever since I was a boy, and
+the prayers, and the old tunes."  Another, perhaps, is silent; but to his
+heart all the while are present the faces of his wife and children.
+
+As they end their talk and go out together, up the harbor comes a gallant
+ship, and at her peak float the stars and stripes; and at the sight
+through each heart runs a common thrill of love and devotion.  One man's
+thought of home is the broader, and another's is the tenderer; but
+America is home to them all.
+
+So into each loyal soul there shines a ray from the divine Sun and Soul
+of the universe.  Each, according to his individual capacity, receives of
+the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.
+
+To some minds the beauty of nature brings a deep and inspiring sense of
+divinity.  As one who has this sensibility looks on the hills and woods
+flushing in the tender radiance of autumn, there comes to him perhaps no
+articulate and conscious thought.  He may not name the name of God, or
+think it.  But the soul is uplifted.  There flows in upon it some high
+serenity, some mysterious sense of ineffable good.  If from such a scene
+one returns to life's activities in braver, truer, and gentler mood,
+there has been to him a divine revelation.
+
+Some men are of a metaphysical turn of mind, and not only their thoughts
+but all their emotional experience, all that directs their purpose and
+animates their feeling, is cast in the mould of highly abstract ideas.
+They express themselves in phrases which to most people seem cold or
+meaningless,--an empty substitute for the warmth of religious life.  But
+to the thinker himself these phrases stand for profound realities.  It
+may be that words which have to other ears the dryness of a mathematical
+formula are to him the expression of moral purpose and sacred trust.
+Such an one may say: "I do not recognize a personal God, I do not know
+that I shall have any personal immortality; but I believe in the moral
+order of the universe and seek to conform to it.  I fearlessly trust my
+destiny here and hereafter."  Perhaps on most of his hearers the words
+fall coldly; but if they see that the speaker's life bears fruit of
+goodness and heroism and service, they may be sure that, though in a
+language strange to them, God has spoken to his soul.
+
+There are a great many people, and some of the very best of people, who
+never get any vivid or distinct apprehension of realities above the
+sphere of their personal activity.  Often they conform to the usages and
+the language of a religious faith in which they have been educated, and,
+very likely, feel some self-reproach that they know so little of the
+spiritual experiences which others speak of.  There are men, too, who
+frankly say, "I don't know much about God; I can't get hold of what folks
+call religion; but I try to do my work honestly, and I want to help other
+people just as much as I can."  Some of the most genuine religion in the
+world exists in people who are almost unconscious that they have any
+religion.  The simple desire to do right, and the constant readiness to
+"lend a hand,"--that is the revelation which such souls receive.
+
+Another very large class--a class which once included most of the
+distinctively religious world--crave and find the warmth of a personal
+relation with Christ as the only satisfying thing.  It is one of the
+great and wonderful facts of human history, this personal devotion of
+unnumbered souls throughout the ages to Jesus.  In its intensest form it
+is affection to a living personality.  Any attempt to explain it as an
+appreciation of beneficent influences of which Jesus was the historical
+originator, or as the reproduction of a temper and purpose resembling
+that which was in Jesus, fails to satisfy those in whom love to Christ is
+the ruling sentiment.  It is a person, and a living person, that they
+love.  One may decline to accept the theories which are wont to accompany
+the sentiment; one may not believe that Jesus was God, nor that personal
+love for him can be required as an essential part of religion; and, at
+the same time, one may believe that when a noble soul passes from earth,
+it rises into yet nobler existence, and may be truly apprehended and
+profoundly loved by those who are here.  Certainly we see this: that to
+many men and women the strongest and holiest sentiment of life is
+affection for a personal embodiment of goodness and love, who once walked
+in Galilee and Jerusalem, existing now in the invisible realm,
+sympathizing with all human aspiration, pitiful to all human weakness and
+sorrow, inspiring to all effort and hope and trust.  That sentiment is
+surely a blessed revelation to those in whom it exists,--the warm and
+living symbol of an eternal reality.
+
+To many, the disclosure of God is made in some way especially personal to
+themselves.  Very often some human friend is the best manifestation and
+assurance of divinity.  Our faith leans on the faith of the best and most
+loving person we have known.  Sometimes the heart's natural language is
+"My father's God," "my mother's God."  With some, the life beyond death
+first becomes real to consciousness when the heart's treasure has been
+taken there.  Sometimes, in looking upon one's own life, one becomes
+deeply conscious of the higher guidance that has led it.  There are hours
+in which past sorrows shine out as heavenly messengers of good.  There
+dawns upon us a sense of the blessedness that life has held; all its
+highest experiences become instinct with the suggestion of a celestial
+meaning that we as yet but half apprehend.  We escape for the moment from
+the thralldom of self; personal happiness merges in something higher; we
+are glad and still in the sense of a divine Will working in us and in all
+things.  In such hours the soul says, "_My_ God."
+
+There is infinite variety of personal experience; "so many kinds of
+voices in the world, and none of them without signification."  One man
+has been deep in drunkenness and debauchery, he has grown reckless and
+hopeless; but through some friendly voice there reaches him an impulse to
+a new and successful effort; there comes in upon him the sense of a
+divine love; a mighty forgiving and restoring force seems to seize him
+and draw him back to life.  In his religion thereafter there may be the
+glowing emotion of one who has been forgiven much and loves much.
+Another man walks always in steady allegiance to conscience and right,
+and never has any rapturous emotions; is not he, too, the child of God?
+We dislike the prodigal's elder brother for his jealousy; but his
+father's word to him, despite that touch of unworthiness, was: "Son, thou
+art ever with me, and all that I have is thine."
+
+One whose life flows with smooth current may find the significance of
+religion in duty rather than in trust.  To such a one God may appear as
+an ideal, inspiring conduct, but not as a power, controlling events.  But
+upon him, it may be, there breaks some great emergency of life and death;
+the heart cries out like a child waking frightened in the night, and
+there answers it, from some depth far below its fear, a voice that says
+"Peace!"  In that hour the soul finds its father.  Thereafter passing
+doubts and fears can but ruffle the surface for a moment.
+
+
+In our northern winter, how perfectly the trees blend with the scene
+about them!  They seem wholly a part of winter's grand but lifeless
+world, and with what beauty do they crown that world,--the columnar
+trunks, the mighty grip of the roots upon the firm earth, the arching
+sweep of stalwart boughs, the delicate tracery against the sky!  They
+answer to the season's mood, bending in patient grace beneath a load of
+snow, casing themselves in jewels, or springing up again in slender
+strength; silent, except when the deep voice of the wind speaks through
+them.  Their shadows soften the sunlight glittering on the snow, or weave
+a black fretwork when the cold moon shines.  Yet vital in their hearts
+the trees hold summer's secret.  A little while, and they will be clothed
+in the leafy glory of June.  The robin and catbird and oriole will sing
+hidden among their branches.  Of that summer season the trees will be the
+delight and crown, that now stand like true children of winter.  They
+stand now so strong and true because of that hidden life within them
+which summer will fully disclose.  It is because it is alive that the
+trunk bends to the storm but does not break, and the twigs hold up their
+load of snow.  So, there are lives that so fit themselves to this world
+in which they stand that they become its finest part.  Their sympathy
+finds out the secret needs and possibilities of those about them.  Their
+insight discerns the work which society most needs, and their fidelity
+accomplishes that part of the work which falls to them.  Their natures
+stand open to all the glad influences of earth; their hearts rejoice with
+them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.  They make full proof
+of those experiences in which fortitude and silent endurance are the only
+resource.  Sometimes they are happy, and sometimes they are sad; but
+always other people are happier because of them.  They are the children
+of a better country.  For them the soul's full summer waits.  Knowing
+them, we do indeed know something of God and the eternal life.
+
+
+There is freedom to be achieved from the pettiness of our lives.  They
+never, perhaps, look so pitiful as when they seem made up altogether of
+little, necessary details.  Our planting and reaping, building and
+buying, all the half-mechanical operations that absorb our thought and
+time, seem sometimes little better than the bustle of a colony of ants.
+When we look down upon it all from the height of some quiet, meditative
+hour, are we not at times oppressed with a sense of its triviality and
+worthlessness?  Trivial and worthless it is, except as amidst it all we
+are working out something higher.  But to a man whose heart is set on
+noble ends; one whose great aim is, not to get his bread and butter, but
+to be a man; one who wants, not just to make a profit out of his
+neighbors, but to serve them and help them, these details are no more
+trivial or degrading than the rough dress and homely tools of a sculptor
+are unworthy of the marble beauty that is growing under his hands.  The
+high purpose consecrates and transfigures all, the want of purpose
+degrades all.  I have stood in Switzerland upon the Gorner Grat, looking
+upon the grandest scene in Europe.  On every side a circle of towering
+heights look down; against the sky rise dazzling snowy summits,
+celestially pure, celestially tender; the Matterhorn frowns in awful
+majesty; vast ice-rivers sweep down toward the valley in solemn, silent
+march.  If there be upon earth a spot that of itself has power to hush
+the soul with noblest emotion, it should be that.  Yet there I have seen
+a company of travelers spend their half-hour in senseless gabble and
+banter and the laughter of fools.  Amid the squalid surroundings of a New
+York tenement-house, I have seen a poor Irish woman living with such
+fortitude and faith and generosity that it was a comfort and inspiration
+to meet her.  That brave soul ennobled its mean surroundings with a glory
+which not the Alps and the sky could flash in upon a heart made blind and
+dull by ignoble thoughts.
+
+
+If there dwells in us the spirit of life we shall be freed from the
+bondage of doubt.  On how many earnest and aspiring lives does doubt
+throw its chill shadow!  The world is crossing the flood that divides the
+old form of faith from the new.  The rising water strikes cold to many a
+heart.  Here and there the waves sweep men off from all moral footing.  I
+know not that for the resolute and thoughtful there is any escape from
+some suffering in the transition.  Could we be always sure that it is
+only a transition,--could we know always that a better country lies
+waiting us,--all might be easily borne.  The suffering we may not
+decline; but safety, utter safety, we may keep through all.  _Life_ is
+always possible to us.  Fidelity, purity, self-sacrifice,--these may
+always be ours.  Are we baffled in our search for a divine plan in the
+universe?  Let us look nearer home; can we not find the clew to a divine
+plan in our own lives?  Yes, there need never fail to us an immediate
+token of divinity.  There is always, at the lowest, a duty to be done.
+There is always, at the very lowest, a burden to be bravely borne.  There
+is always some one to be helped.  Do we say, But this does not comfort
+me, does not reassure me?  Then let it guide me!  It is not essential
+that I should be always in the sunshine.  It is only essential that in
+sunshine or in darkness my steering should be true.  And I am never
+without a compass while I see that there is for me a higher and a lower,
+a right and a wrong, to choose between.
+
+
+Does any sense of bondage weigh you down?  Disappointment, it may
+be,--failure, life's fair promise blighted.  It may be the bitter slavery
+of evil habit.  It may be a dull and apathetic way of life, stirred with
+a vague yearning toward higher possibilities.  It may be the darkness of
+a lost faith.  It may be a bereavement that has emptied life.  Whatever
+it be, the angel of deliverance stands beside you.  He is perhaps in very
+humble garb, unsuspected of you.  Some lowly duty awaits you.  Some
+saddened life, unnoticed by your side, asks you to cheer it.  Whatever
+opportunity of duty or of service lies in the path before you is God's
+own messenger.  Meet it like the messenger of a king!  So meet every
+duty, every opportunity.  Find them, make them, for yourself.  Live no
+longer in solitude but in brotherhood.  So shall the very spirit of God
+dwell in you; so in his service shall you find perfect freedom.
+
+
+The end of February is near, and not a hint or whisper of spring does
+Nature give us yet.  We are wont to have earlier than this a few days at
+least that seem to start the sap in the trees and the blood in the veins,
+when the first bluebird is heard, and we get one swift, delicious glimpse
+of the good time coming.  But this year the cold only takes a sharper
+clutch.  At its average, our northern winter has a fierce and almost
+merciless persistence.  Those first days of spring are hardly more than
+the taste of freedom with which the cat tantalizes the mouse.  It is this
+lingering close of winter that is hard to bear.  The supplies begin to
+give out.  The wood-pile that stood so high when the first snow came is
+getting lowered to very near the ground.  The poor man's little hoard,
+that was to bridge him over till the season of good work, is perilously
+shrunken.  Vitality, too, begins to run low.  The body pines for the
+out-door life from which it has too long been shut off.  Winter is a
+hard-fisted churl who does n't give just measure.  He drives off the
+mellow and jolly Autumn before its mid-month October is fairly gone.  He
+bullies Spring so that the poor, gentle-hearted thing has to get almost
+under the wing of Summer before she dares take possession of the remnant
+of her own.  The great robber gets almost half the year.  The very bears,
+curled up for their long nap, must in these days wake sometimes with an
+uneasy shiver and wonder whether their stock of fat will hold out.
+
+This last and worst onset of winter may stand for those experiences that
+come as the sharpest test of the stuff that is in men.  The pressure of
+adversity goes on and on, until we say it has reached the last point of
+endurance, and then another turn is given to the screw!  For three long
+days the battle has raged around the heights of Gettysburg, and each side
+seems to have done its utmost, when the word is given for Pickett's
+division in solid column to throw itself straight against Cemetery Hill,
+that becomes a volcano to meet it.  Those are the times that mark men for
+the rest of their lives as heroes.  Yet there are finer heroisms than
+this.  The very splendor of such an hour, with a nation's fate at stake
+and the world looking on, is enough to find out and kindle any spark of
+manhood in a man.  With no such inspiration as that, there are in every
+community men and women who are battling with poverty and adversity and
+all kinds of trouble with a finer courage than that of the battlefield.
+They cover an anxious heart with a cheerful face, for the sake of husband
+or wife or children who are watching the face.  No winter is long enough,
+no lifetime is long enough, to tire out their fortitude and patience and
+love.  There are resources in human nature that never are known until
+things are at their hardest.
+
+So at winter's worst--come it in one form or another--man summons up his
+courage, and though the winter be longer and sharper than he had
+thought--though poverty pinches him or trouble weighs upon him--he sets
+himself stoutly to bear it.  Alone and unhelped he seems, perhaps,--the
+march of the seasons and the vast order of the universe taking no account
+of him; yet manfully he will face whatever comes.  Whatever comes?  It is
+the summer that is coming!  As certain as to-day's snow and cold, the
+season of all beauty and warmth and delight is on its way!  The
+apple-blossoms, the wild-flowers, the budding of every twig, the
+greenness of the pastures, the rejoicing life of animals and birds and
+insects, the sweet airs of May, the sunshine of June,--these, and all
+varied loveliness beyond imagination's reach or heart's desire, lie just
+before us.  So for every soul that patiently endures an unimagined summer
+waits.  Our patient endurance seems to us now a great matter, and indeed
+if we have it not we are little worth; but when the more genial season
+comes--when there fully reveals itself to us that high meaning of our
+lives and that divine destiny of which now we catch but a glimpse--we
+shall say, not "How well we endured the winter," but "How glorious is
+God's summer!"
+
+Take the case of a man who, having engaged in the active business of
+life, feeling himself amply capable of it and longing for it, finds
+himself by force of circumstances kept out of work.  Perhaps he has his
+living to earn, perhaps he has a wife and children to support, and he can
+get nothing to do.  Well, that is about as hard a place as a man can be
+called to stand in.  Idleness in itself is hard.  It is a burden even to
+those who have wealth and all the luxuries and amusements that can be
+devised to while away their leisure.  It is the very nature of a man who
+is good for anything to _do_.  Idleness is as unnatural and trying to the
+mind as sickness is to the body.  But to see those you love in need, to
+see them threatened with suffering, to know that you could amply provide
+for them if you had a chance, and not to find a chance,--what is so hard
+as that?
+
+It is so hard, my friend, that, if you can bear it and not be conquered
+by it, you are a hero.  If under that load you can keep your patience and
+your temper and your courage, you have won a victory such as makes life
+worth living.  Just as in battle it is the post of danger that is most
+honorable, so always the hard place is the place of honor.  "But," you
+say perhaps, "I don't care about being a hero; I want to see my wife and
+children taken care of."  That is the best of all reasons for keeping up
+heart.  When a good wife sees her husband unfortunate and out of work,
+what is it that she most dreads?  Not that they will starve,--starvation
+seldom happens in this country.  Not that they will be poor, though of
+that she may be somewhat afraid.  Her greatest fear is lest her husband
+should get discouraged and down-hearted; should take to drink, perhaps;
+at any rate, should become so despondent and embittered that the light
+shall go out of their lives and their children's.  Now it is his business
+not to let that happen.  It is his part to keep up for her sake a
+resolute heart and a cheerful face.  And if she is a true woman, how
+gladly will she do the same for him!  Out of just such circumstances
+there come two opposite results, according as people meet them.  There
+comes failure of effort and resolution, then despondency, then
+recklessness, drunkenness perhaps, and at last ruin, the break-up of
+character, the destruction of the children's prospects, or sometimes
+suicide.  When a man, under pressure of such trouble, really gives up,
+even for an hour, the effort to be brave and make the best of things, he
+takes a step on a road at the end of which is suicide.  _That_ is the
+consummate act of cowardice; that is the last logical result of refusing
+to face and conquer our troubles.  Heaven have mercy on the man who seeks
+in death a refuge, and so multiplies the suffering of those he leaves
+behind!  And at the point where begins the wretched road of despondency,
+which if followed out leads to this or some other ruin, there branches
+another road--manly endurance of the worst, courage which is strong
+because it is loving,--a road which leads to heights beyond our sight.
+To bear trouble together, and for each other's sake to rise above
+it,--what knits hearts together like that?
+
+Take, again, the case of a man who is by circumstances shut off from work
+that he could do and longs to do for the large benefit of mankind,--the
+man who has a gift of teaching and is not allowed to teach, or who has
+the statesman's quality and finds no place in public affairs, or who,
+with any large executive and beneficent faculty, finds himself denied all
+opportunity of exercising it.  For a faculty to be repressed is hard just
+in proportion as its quality is noble.  A caged canary is hardly a
+painful sight, but a caged eagle stirs one with regret.  And the world
+has such need of all noble talent; such exigent and hungry need of the
+true teacher, statesman, seer,--of the word of inspiration and the act of
+leadership!  How shall one who feels in him the power and sees the need;
+who grasps in his hand the keen sickle, yet is held back, while before
+his eyes the fields are white with the harvest which threatens, unreaped,
+to perish,--how shall he reconcile himself to his lot?  How escape the
+thought that he and all mankind are but playthings in the grasp of cruel
+and ironic fate?
+
+What, then, does the world most need of us?  Is it wisdom, or
+statesmanship, or executive power?  These things it greatly needs.  But
+most of all it needs character.  Most of all it needs that quality of
+personality which is moulded by the interplay of loyal will with the
+shifting course of outward event.  For our wisest thoughts the world can
+very well wait, or do without them altogether; almost certainly some one
+else has thought them and said them.  Our executive power to be added to
+the world's work,--it is but a fly's strength contributed to a
+steam-engine.  One thing the universe asks of us, which no one else can
+give,--_ourselves_; our highest and fullest self.  It is not what we do
+externally, but what we are, that measures our worth.  The real and
+lasting value of a word or an act depends largely on the weight of
+character behind it.  And in character no higher effect is wrought out
+than that which comes through endurance and heroic passivity.  To stand
+long before closed doors of opportunity and keep serene; to see work
+waiting, see others working, and in patience and self-control to bide
+one's time,--that is more than to do any work; it is to be a man.  The
+time comes when manhood finds itself to be power.
+
+A brook goes singing on its way, marking its course through forest and
+field with a track of beauty and freshened life.  Men throw a dam across
+its path, and through many a long day its course is stopped and its
+waters silently accumulate.  And the brook says, "Alas for my lost
+freedom and service!  Alas for the rush and sparkle and joy of my
+cascades!  Alas for the parched meadows, the unwatered ferns and mosses!"
+But the day comes when with a cataract leap it crosses its barrier;
+meadow and mosses and ferns revive; and now the stored power of the
+stream is turning great mills and grinding bread for men.
+
+Washington rode as a subordinate in Braddock's army; ignorance commanded
+and knowledge looked on powerless until the mischief was done.  Twenty
+years of quiet follow; great events are impending, eloquent men are
+rousing and leading; what is there for this silent Virginian? till
+suddenly he finds himself the chief commander.  Then comes waiting to
+which all before was easy; holding away from the stronger enemy, holding
+steady under the impatience and the doubts of friends; for one bold
+stroke, a year of waiting and watching; till, at last, victory!  And not
+to Washington victorious at Yorktown do we turn for inspiration so much
+as to Washington in the dead of winter at Valley Forge.
+
+There are a great many women whose capacities and desires seem much
+beyond their opportunities.  This is especially true of our New England,
+who stimulates the brains of her children, and consigns many of her
+daughters to a secluded life with small scope for action.  There are many
+women who, being unmarried, or being married and childless, or left by
+the flight of the young birds to brood an empty nest, have not the full
+natural outlet of a woman's activities and affections, and suffer
+consciously or unconsciously from a partial emptiness and idleness of
+what is best in them.  The burden upon such lives is that of isolation.
+Isolation may be in the midst of a crowd as well as in solitude; it is
+when the heart is not filled that we are truly alone.  And this real
+solitude, this isolation of the affections from their proper objects, is
+something so bad, so against the law of our nature, that, broadly
+speaking, it is a matter not so much for endurance as for speedy getting
+rid of.  Do you feel yourself alone and empty-hearted?  Then you have
+necessity indeed for fortitude and brave endurance, but above all and
+before all you are to get out of your solitude.  You cannot command for
+yourself the love you would gladly receive; it is not in our power to do
+that; but that noble love which is not asking but giving,--that you can
+always have.
+
+Wherever your life touches another life, there you have opportunity.  The
+finest, the most delicate, the most irresistible force lies in the mutual
+touch of human lives.  To mix with men and women in the ordinary forms of
+social intercourse becomes a sacred function when one carries into it the
+true spirit.  To give a close, sympathetic attention to every human being
+we touch; to try to get some sense of how he feels, what he is, what he
+needs; to make in some degree his interest our own,--that disposition and
+habit would deliver any one of us from isolation or emptiness.  There is
+but one sight more beautiful than the mother of a family ministering
+happiness and sunshine to them all; and that is a woman who, having no
+family of her own, finds her life in giving cheer and comfort to all whom
+she reaches, and makes a home atmosphere wherever she goes.  Though she
+have not the joy of wife and mother, she has that which is most sacred in
+wifehood and motherhood.  She shares the blessedness of that highest life
+the earth has seen, of him who, having no home nor where to lay his head,
+brought into other homes a new happiness, and who spoke the transforming
+word, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."
+
+Take, again, the case of an invalid, who is for a long period shut out by
+illness or weakness from all ordinary activities.  There are many such to
+whom pain and physical endurance are less trying than the feeling of
+being excluded from use and service, and having their moral life stunted
+or disordered by this stoppage of the natural play of the faculties.
+There are kinds of illness, especially those of the nervous system, which
+seem to invade the seat of the will and soul itself, to irritate the
+temper and sap the resolve and foster a self-centring egotism, by a power
+that is literally irresistible.  Before such experiences as this one
+thought rises: it is part of mankind's business to lessen, and so far as
+possible to extirpate, these maladies.  The individual sufferer must meet
+as best he can the conditions thrust upon him, but to prevent such
+conditions from arising is the lesson for the rest of us.  We are only
+beginning to appreciate how largely the salvation of mankind must be
+worked out through physical means.  The pestilences, the transmitted
+diseases, the insanities, the nervous disorders, bred of violated
+law,--all these and the like curses, which not merely destroy human life
+but degrade it, are to be fought and extirpated.  We must secure for
+soul-life some fair room and chance as against these pests and tyrants.
+Here lies the noblest work of science; here, in prevention rather than in
+cure, lies the best field of that unsurpassed profession, the
+physician's.  And, too, in this preventive work each man must learn to be
+his own physician, and minister to himself.
+
+But what, meantime, is our disabled and secluded invalid to do?  He is
+like a man set to fight a battle with one arm tied behind him.  Others
+may pity, but for him his disablement must be a motive to greater
+exertion; he must supply by courage and skill the place of the lacking
+strength.  It is what man can do under limitations and disabilities that
+shows his high-water mark of achievement.  Any one can be cheerful in
+perfect health, but to be cheerful under weakness and pain,--_that_ is
+worth trying for!  To be considerate and unselfish, when one is at ease
+and has all he wants, does not cost much; but to take thought for others
+and to spare them, and to be sympathetic with their joys and troubles,
+when pain forces you to be self-conscious, and long endurance tempts you
+to become self-centred,--well, if you can do that, you are good for
+something.  If you can do that, have no fear that you are useless.  Such
+fruit is rare enough to be precious.  The lessons taught from many a
+sick-bed of bravery and gentleness and love,--we get no other teaching so
+good as that.  There is many a family where it is the one who can do the
+least who does the most,--where it is the invalid's room from which goes
+out the strongest influence of patience and sweet courage and that divine
+quality which transforms trouble.
+
+In one sick-room in a foreign land, for years a home-loving woman has
+been an exile; a woman of active and eager disposition, with large,
+executive capacity and ripe experience, shut up almost to idleness; a
+woman of large benevolence, who had entered on work of peculiar
+excellence and attractiveness, cut off from all such activities.  This,
+with frequent pain, with fluctuation of hope and discouragement as to the
+future; and yet there is about her an atmosphere as serene as the Alpine
+heights that look down upon her, as cheerful as the sunny Alpine pastures
+with their tinkle of sheep-bell and hum of mountain bee.  Her constant
+thought goes out to distant friends and brings them near; her close
+attention follows the march of the world's great interests, the fortunes
+of England and Russia and America, the course of freedom and reform; a
+sense of nature's beauty, trained to fineness through years of enforced
+quietude, brings exquisite ministrations; she shares the lives of the
+little circle of friends about her; heart and mind are at rest in the
+peace of God.  Patience has had her perfect work.
+
+
+Up, friend! leave your law case, your sermon, your accounts, and come out
+for an hour into this delicious March day, bracing as winter and sweet as
+spring.  The new life of the year is stirring in the trees whose tops
+begin to redden, and in the brown pastures where watchful eyes can
+already see the green.  The joy of the season is singing in a million
+bluebirds' and robins' throats; the cocks crow gayly; the caw of the big
+black crow flapping overhead with ragged wing has a cheery tone.  All
+living creatures feel the tingle and throb of the great tide of life that
+sweeps in with the returning sun.  See yonder two dogs, how they frolic,
+how they crouch and wheel and charge and roll each other over and pretend
+to bite.  "Pure mongrels," both of them, and as happy as if they were the
+most aristocratic of Irish setters!  See near by the tree full of flowers
+that has lasted the winter through.  That is a tulip-tree, holding up its
+thousand delicate ghostly cups.  Its grand trunk rises straight and
+unbroken full thirty feet, then branches in symmetry, and holds up as if
+to catch the sunshine and the rain its fairy goblets.  And here is an oak
+that has not yet let go its grip on last year's dead leaves.  How sharply
+the snow rattled on them, as if clashing on the iron which naturalists
+say the sturdy tree holds in its blood!  Who ever sees these last oak
+leaves fall?  And who knows where this dry, dead grass vanishes when the
+green blades fill all its room?  Look at the horse-chestnut; already its
+buds are shiny.  It must wait a good while before their
+
+        "little hands unfold,
+  Softer 'n a baby's be at three days old."
+
+
+Sharp whistles the wind to-day, but it is the breath of life that it
+breathes into us.  It comes down from yonder hills where the snow is
+shining yet.  Grandly on the horizon lies Mount Tom, like a crouching
+lion, guardian over the fair valley.  Where the mountain line breaks,
+between him and his twin sentinel, Holyoke, we know that the broad
+Connecticut sweeps past Hockanum.  The glorious river,--what an unfailing
+joy it is to the eye as it curves and winds on its leisurely, steadfast
+course to the sea!  Here at our feet is another river, a little brook
+flowing in clear stream over the roadside sand, born of the last
+snow-drift and living till the sun drinks it up.  And beside it are half
+a dozen happy boys, paddling with their bare feet, making mud dams,
+scraping new channels and short cuts for the stream.
+
+How black is the still water of this pond, smooth as a steel mirror! what
+perfect pictures it gives back of its woody and snow-touched banks!  The
+woods above are solemn as that grandest work of man, an Old World
+cathedral, and free as only the Lord's own works are free, with the music
+of the wind in the great pine-tops; the gracious, infinite sky revealing
+itself through their tracery; the columnar trunks swaying now like a
+ship's masts.  How at evening the setting sun glows through their black
+shafts; how ethereal the light that then fills the spaces of the wood;
+how the stars look down through the branches in the living stillness of
+the night!  A few steps, and below us in the hollow we see the city, all
+its commonplaceness charmed away, the vulgar noises of the streets
+blended in a soft murmur.  Not one human life moves in those streets,
+commonplace and vulgar though it may seem, but has its own charm and
+beauty, if we could find the right view-point, or if our sight went deep
+enough.
+
+Across a plowed field darts in swift zigzag a gleam of blue; then,
+perched on a fence-rail, sends a thrilling song.  The bluebird is the
+true voice of early spring, as is the bobolink of later spring.
+Bobolinks and apple-blossoms come together in the prodigal time of May.
+Our Northern spring is the most arrant of coquettes,--the most delicious
+in allurement, the swiftest in retreat.  One day she seems to pour her
+whole heart out to us, and we think she is ours once and for all; next
+day she pelts us with sleet; buffets, freezes us; she--nay, she is gone,
+and we never shall see her again; it is the sourest shrew in the whole
+sisterhood of the year that has come in her stead!  But the true lover
+thinks not so.  He knows her woman's heart,--coying it a little, holding
+back her treasure till she sees if her worshiper be faithful, to pour it
+out all unstinted at the last, when May's perfect bridal day shall usher
+in the full and fruitful marriage blessing of the year.
+
+On this June morning, place yourself here, under the shade of this noble,
+wide-spreading apple-tree on a garden lawn.  Last night the earth was
+washed by showers, and a thunder-storm cleared the air.  This morning a
+fresh northwest wind breaks the clouds, and opens pure, sweet depths of
+sky.  Around us the flowers of early summer are blooming.  Over the grass
+trip the young birds, mottle-breasted robins and bluebirds; the trees
+ring with frequent song; from the barnyard comes cheery cackle and cluck,
+and the chickens stray forth to investigate the secrets and riches of the
+world.  A catbird pours out an opera in which he takes all the parts in
+succession, and the voice of the wind rises and falls in mysterious,
+delicious cadence.
+
+"Oil and wine:" the oil poured on the wounds to soothe and heal, the wine
+drunk to revive and hearten with cordial life.  The Hebrew symbolism has
+its roots in strong material soil: its imagery is vigorous and
+ruddy,--"wine of gladness," "oil of joy," "wine that maketh glad the
+heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which
+strengtheneth man's heart."  A modern psalmist might add, "and coffee
+which uplifts his spirit, and tobacco which soothes his cares."
+
+Jesus chose, as the two symbols by which he would be remembered, bread
+and wine.  Bread stands for nourishment and substantial support, wine for
+exhilaration and joy.  When his disciples were full of the sorrow of
+approaching parting, he showed them that the loss was only in semblance:
+the reality was to be a higher energy, a purer joy,--bread to eat, wine
+to drink,--not death, but life.  The sorrow attendant on death and loss
+is to be esteemed but the pangs that usher in life.  "A woman when she is
+in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is
+delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that
+a man is born into the world."
+
+"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach
+the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to
+preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind,
+to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of
+the Lord."  What a key-note is that,--how jubilant, tender, strong!
+
+As the earth revolving passes alternately into light and shadow, so human
+life in its divine appointment moves by turns through sorrow and through
+joy.  Each has its service for the soul, as for the earth has day and
+night each its ministry and message.  Of pain come hardihood and strength
+and sympathy.  What a sapless, fibreless thing is a man untrained by
+endurance and untaught by suffering!  How flaccid in muscle, how narrow
+in intelligence, how shallow in affection!
+
+Yet, as to an all-beholding eye the sun pours light through all the
+planetary spaces, and the night, which to us on the world's darkened side
+seems all-enfolding, is in truth but a shadowy fleck in the vast
+sun-steeped sphere: so, of the soul's universe, the native, all-pervasive
+element is conscious good.  Gladness is man's proper atmosphere.  It is
+by the impulse of his deepest nature that he seeks joy, it is by the
+force of spiritual gravitation that he is drawn to it.  But two hard
+lessons await him.  One is, that to reach that goal he must trust himself
+to a higher Power, his own effort and purpose being to obey that Power.
+The other is, that the goal is not for one alone, but for all; and he can
+reach it only as he shares the common lot, making himself partner in the
+vicissitudes of his comrades, rejoicing with them that rejoice and
+weeping with them that weep.  On our long voyage the stars by which we
+steer must be Duty and Love.  The stars guide us, the winds and currents
+bear us, to the port of perfect good.  The instinct of our journey's end
+we call Hope; the instinct by which we cleave to our true course, even
+when wholly doubtful of its end, and though false lights beckon us
+alluringly,--that instinct we call Faith.
+
+Open your eyes upon the world on such a morning as this.  Forget your own
+cares long enough to really see, but for a moment, yonder spray of roses
+waving in the breeze.  Watch the play of light and shade in the
+flickering leaves overhead.  Listen to the chorus of voices from bird,
+insect, and wind.  The wine of gladness!  Nature pours it in a sparkling
+flood, unceasing by day and night, for every one who will drink.
+
+Nature pours the wine of gladness, but only from the mingling of human
+hearts comes the oil of tenderness.  From sorrow it gets its sacred
+fragrance, from mutual service it draws its healing power, from the
+bitterness of parting it wins the sweetness of an inexpressible hope.
+
+It was under the stroke of a great bereavement, the death of his child,
+that Emerson, in the "Threnody," gave utterance to highest consolation
+soaring out of sorrow's darkness.  It was under the shadow of that loss
+that he heard the voice,--
+
+  "Saying, What is excellent,
+  As God lives, is permanent;
+  Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain,
+  Heart's love will meet thee again."
+
+
+It is the same voice that speaks through all the ages.  It speaks through
+Isaiah, "to give beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the
+garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness."  It speaks in Paul, when
+in one sentence he gives the relation with God and his fellows into which
+man may come when out of darkness is born light.  "Blessed be God, even
+the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God
+of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be
+able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we
+ourselves are comforted of God."
+
+Where, asks the stricken heart, shall I find the God of comfort?  O
+heart, only God himself shall answer you!  But know this, that the very
+end and purpose of grief is that it shall be comforted.  Comfort?  The
+word has no meaning except to those who have mourned; was never stamped
+with its sacred significance except by those who had been through the
+deep waters of grief.  "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I
+comfort you."  A man child, a woman child, He trains you to fullness of
+stature, to greatness of experience, to capacity for noble joy, for
+heart-sufficing love.  To greatness and to joy he calls us, and draws us
+slowly by the changing years.  The cross is the symbol of a passing
+experience.  The end, the attainment, is figured to us by that face of
+Nature which is the face of God, with the strength of the mountains, the
+gladness of the sunlight, the freedom of the sky, the infinitude of the
+ocean.
+
+
+The ripe days of early autumn open their best joys only to the sturdy
+walker, who turns his back on the streets to seek the country roads, and
+leaves the roads behind him to explore the forest nooks, the ravines, and
+the sheltered meadows, hidden deftly away from the incurious traveler,
+and keeping a wild sweetness for him who finds them out for himself.  If
+one is in good tune, he may get the finest flavor of such a walk by
+taking it alone, or with only rarely perfect companionship.  The ideal
+companion is one who can fully enjoy, who will help you to glimpses
+through another pair of eyes, and who will never obtrude inopportunely
+between yourself and nature.  If a satisfactory human comrade be not at
+hand, one may find these qualities in no ordinary degree in--a good dog.
+But then to appreciate them one must be a true dog-lover, a gift which
+is, alas! denied to some otherwise exemplary and worthy people.
+
+What does the dog think of it all?  He has his own keen pleasures.  His
+nose is an organ of intelligence and enjoyment which his master does not
+possess.  He explores woodchuck holes; he tracks real or imaginary
+squirrels; one barks and scolds at him from a high limb, and throws him
+into a delicious fever of excitement.  As Fox said the greatest pleasure
+in life was to win at cards, and the next greatest to lose at cards, so
+apparently the dog finds even an unsuccessful chase to be the second best
+joy he knows.  Look at him, tense and motionless with excitement, as he
+watches the noisy chatterer overhead!  No doubt the squirrel will brag to
+all his acquaintances of how he openly defied and triumphed over his huge
+enemy.
+
+A chestnut bough swings low, and with hospitable hand proffers a
+half-open burr, out of which shine the glossy brown nuts.  Sweet is the
+taste of the nuts.  Sweet is the crisp red apple into which we bite, and
+with just a hint of the flavor of stolen fruit.
+
+What audacious pen will try to reproduce or even dryly catalogue the
+glories poured out for eye and ear, for heart and brain, upon a bright
+and cool September day?  The deep-glowing sumacs, the asters purple and
+white mixed with flaming goldenrod, in a splendid audacity of color such
+as only One artist dare venture on; the occasional dash of scarlet upon a
+maple, a first wave of the great tide that is sweeping up to cover the
+whole north country; the masses of yet unbroken green left neither dimmed
+nor dusty by the generous, moist summer; the oaks that will long hold
+their green flag in unchanging tint, as if "no surrender" were written on
+it, and then, last of all the trees, change to a hue of matchless depth
+and richness, like the life-blood of a noble heart that shows its full
+intensity only just before death's translation falls upon it; the
+separate tint of each leaf and vine, "good after its kind;" the soft
+whiteness of the everlastings in the hill-pastures; the reaped buckwheat
+fields heaped with their sheaves, stubble and sheaves alike drenched in a
+fine wine of color; the solemn interior of the woods, with the late
+sunlight touching the shafts of the pines; the partridge-berry and the
+white mushroom growing beneath, as in a cathedral one sees bright-faced
+children kneeling to say their prayers at the foot of the solemn pillars;
+the masses of light and of shadow--one cannot say which is the
+tenderer--lying on the cool meadows as evening draws on; the voice of
+unseen waters, the voice of the wind in the pines.
+
+And so, with song, with autumn colors, with sunset lights, the Mother
+calls her children home.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Chief End of Man, by George S. Merriam
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Chief End of Man, by George S. Merriam
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Chief End of Man
+
+Author: George S. Merriam
+
+Release Date: August 22, 2007 [EBook #22371]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHIEF END OF MAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CHIEF END OF MAN
+
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE S. MERRIAM
+
+
+
+
+BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
+
+The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+
+1897
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1897,
+
+BY GEORGE S. MERRIAM.
+
+_All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+_The chief end of man,--to define it anew, and cite the witness of the
+ages, may seem an audacious attempt, likely to issue in failure or in
+commonplace.  By the scholar this work must often be judged as crude,
+to the churchman it will sometimes seem mischievous, and to the man of
+science it may appear to lack solidity of demonstration.  But its
+essential purpose is to utter afresh, though it be with stammering
+tongue, the message with which the universe has answered the soul of
+man whenever he listened most closely and obeyed most faithfully._
+
+_It is the assurance that Fidelity, Truth-seeking, Courage, and Love
+are the rightful lords of human life, and its sufficient guides and
+interpreters.  It is the knowledge that as man is true to his best self
+he finds the universe his friend._
+
+_That message the seeing eye reads in the face of earth, and the
+listening ear hears it in the song of the morning stars.  The will
+finds it as answer to its loyal endeavor.  The heart wins it through
+rapture and through anguish.  It is our dearest inheritance, it is our
+most arduous achievement.  It is the sword with which each man must
+conquer his destiny.  It is the smile with which Beatrice welcomes her
+lover to Paradise._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+      PROLOGUE
+
+   I. OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY
+
+  II. THE IDEAL OF TO-DAY
+
+ III. A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK
+
+  IV. GLIMPSES
+
+   V. DAILY BREAD
+
+
+
+
+THE CHIEF END OF MAN
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+It sometimes happens that a man is confronted by a perplexing crisis,
+before which he is quite at a loss how to direct his course.  His
+familiar rules and habits seem to fail him, and his perplexity
+approaches dismay.  At such a time, if his previous life has been
+guided by purpose and consideration, he may perhaps help himself by
+looking attentively back at the steps by which he has hitherto
+advanced.  He recalls other crises, he sees how they were met, and
+light, it may be, breaks on the path before him, or at least he takes
+fresh heart and hope.
+
+Some such crisis confronts the thoughtful mind of the world to-day, in
+the disappearance of the old sanctions of religion.  When the idea of
+an authoritative revelation of divine truth has been finally dislodged,
+there are moments when moral chaos seems to impend.  We are still
+upheld by old habits and associations, we are borne along by forces
+mightier than our creeds or negations, and the loyal spirit catches at
+moments the "deeper voice across the storm," even though the voice be
+inarticulate.  But it is felt that we need to somehow define anew the
+rule of life.  By what road shall man attain his supreme desire,--how
+can he be good, and how can he be happy?
+
+As the individual seeks help in looking back over his course, so it may
+help us if we look back a little over some of the significant passages
+in the movement of mankind.  History is to the race what memory is to
+the individual.  One's best treasure is the memory of his happy and
+heroic hours.  The best treasure of humanity is the story of its happy
+and heroic souls.  Let us call before us some of these, and see how
+they answered the questions we ask.
+
+Following this clew, we run back along the line of what may be called
+"our spiritual ancestry."  Turning naturally to our own next of kin, a
+child of New England, going back from the teaching of his youth to his
+fathers and to their fathers, soon finds before him the Puritan.  When
+we study the Puritan it appears that he was a most composite product,
+and that just behind him, and essential to the understanding of him, is
+the great mediaeval church.  Studying the church, there is nothing for
+it but to go back to its foundation, and ponder well the one from whose
+person and teaching it grew.  And to know at all the mind of Jesus we
+must know something of the mind of Judaism, of which he was the child.
+Indeed, the popular religion of to-day bases itself directly on the Old
+and New Testaments; so that our lineage must clearly be traced from
+this as one of its origins.  Another ancient line attracts us, by a
+history which blends with Judaism at the birth of Christianity, and by
+a literature which is rich in moral treasures.  We must glance at some
+of the landmarks of the Greek and Roman story.
+
+And here our present study may define its bounds.  We will not go back
+to the progress from the animal up to man, nor survey the prehistoric
+man; nor will we turn aside to the religions of Egypt, Arabia, and the
+East; and we can but lightly glance at the early Teutonic people from
+whom we are descended after the flesh.  It will sufficiently serve our
+purpose if we touch a few salient points among our more direct
+progenitors in the life of the spirit.  And, after all, our richest
+search will be in the years nearest ourselves.
+
+But no version of history simply as history gives an adequate basis for
+the higher life.  That life must be worked out by each for himself,
+equipped as he finds himself by inheritance and circumstance, and
+guided largely by the sure and simple laws of conduct which he drew in
+with his mother's milk.  Study and thought may help a little, and so
+such essays as the present are offered for whatever they may afford.
+Of all human studies, history, at its best,--the knowledge of whatever
+of worthiest the past of mankind affords,--such history is of all
+studies most delightful and inspiring, for it is the contact through
+books with noble souls--and the touch of a great soul is a natural
+sacrament.  Such history has significance mainly as its events and
+characters find parallels in the mind that reads.  The soul of to-day,
+catching from the past the voices of prophets and leaders, thrills with
+a sense of kinship.  The story of American independence means most when
+the reader has fought his own Bunker Hill, and wintered at Valley
+Forge, and triumphed at Yorktown.  The death of Socrates has small
+significance unless something in the reader's heart answers to his
+affirmation that "nothing evil can happen to a good man, in living or
+dying."  The life of Jesus and the story of Christianity are most fully
+understood when life's experience has brought the Mount of Vision and
+the Garden of Gethsemane, the cross and passion, the resurrection, and
+the coming of the Holy Spirit.
+
+The interest of the present study is in the illustration of certain
+great spiritual laws.  These are laws of which every man may make proof
+for himself.  He may find instances of their working in any close
+observation of his nearest neighbor, or in reading his newspaper.  He
+may find the clearest exemplification of them in studying the noblest
+men and women he has known, or, if his life has been worth living, in
+recalling the most critical and significant passages of his own
+experience.  The reading of these laws is the latest and finest result
+of the experience of the race.  In their substance, they are
+acknowledged by all good men.  No wholly new path to goodness and
+happiness is likely to be suddenly discovered; certainly no essentially
+new ideal of what kind of goodness and happiness we are to seek.  The
+saints and heroes are all of one fellowship, though they do not all
+speak the same language.  In a word, there are certain traits of
+character which all men whose opinion we value now recognize as
+supremely worthy of cultivation.  To seek to know things as they really
+are; to fit our actions to our best knowledge; to conform in word and
+act to the truth as we see it; to seek the good of others as well as
+our own; to be sympathetic and responsive; to be open-eyed to beauty,
+open-hearted to our fellow creatures; to be reverent and aspiring; to
+resolutely subject the lower elements of our nature to the higher; to
+taste frankly and freely the innocent joys of life; to renounce those
+joys and accept privation, suffering, death, when duty calls,--such
+purposes and dispositions as these are unquestionably a true rule of
+life.  The main theme to be illustrated in these pages is that this
+ideal and rule is in itself an all-sufficient principle.  Fidelity to
+the best we know, and search always for the best, is the natural road
+to peace and joy, the sure road to victory.  It is the key which opens
+to man the treasury of the universe.
+
+To enforce and vivify this conception,--this interpretation of the key
+of life as consisting in fidelity to certain ideals of character,--we
+go back to the memorable examples of the past.  We use those examples,
+partly to show how the spiritual laws always worked, the same
+yesterday, to-day, and forever; and partly to show how as time advanced
+the laws have been understood with growing clearness, and applied with
+growing effectiveness.  The same stars shone above the sages of Chaldea
+as shine above us, but our astronomy is better than theirs.  The sages
+of Greece, the prophets of Palestine, the heroes of Rome, the saints of
+the Middle Ages, the philanthropists and the scientists of to-day, each
+made their special contribution to the spiritual astronomy.  From age
+to age men have read the heavens and the earth more clearly, and so
+made of them a more friendly home.  Just as, too, there come times of
+momentous progress in the physical world; the establishment of the
+Copernican theory, the discovery of a new continent, the mastering of
+electricity,--so there are periods of swift advance and discovery in
+the spiritual life, and such a birth-hour, of travail and of joy, comes
+in our own day.
+
+In this hasty panorama of the past, then, the effort has been to give
+real history.  But every student knows how transcendent and impossible
+a thing it is to recall in its entirety and fullness any phase of the
+past.  Even the specialist can but partially open a limited province.
+So with what confidence can one with no pretensions to original
+scholarship, however he may use the work of deeper students, express
+his opinion on any special point in a survey of thirty centuries?  If,
+accordingly, any competent critic shall trouble himself to convict the
+present writer of error: "This view of Epictetus confuses the earlier
+and the later Stoics;" or "This account of the Hebrew prophets lacks
+the latest fruit of research,"--or, other like defect,--acknowledgment
+of such error as quite possible may be freely made in advance.  But, in
+our bird's-eye view of many centuries, any fault of detail will not be
+so serious as it would be if there were here attempted a chain of
+proofs, a formal induction, to establish from sure premises a safe
+conclusion.  Only of a subordinate importance is the detail of this
+history.  We say only: in this way, or some way like this, has been the
+ascent.  The contribution of the Stoic was about so and so; the Hebrew
+prophet helped somewhat thus and thus.  But the ultimate, the essential
+fact we reach in the Ideal of To-day.  Here we are on firm ground.  The
+law we acknowledge, the light we follow,--these may be expressed with
+entire clearness and confidence.  The test they invite is present
+experiment.  Nothing vital shall be staked on far-away history or
+debatable metaphysics.
+
+In the fivefold division of the book, "Our Spiritual Ancestry" is a
+bird's-eye view of the main line of advance, which culminates in "The
+Ideal of To-Day."  A more leisurely retrospect of certain historical
+passages is given in "A Traveler's Note-Book;" thoughts on the present
+aspect are grouped under "Glimpses;" and "Daily Bread" introduces a
+homely and familiar treatment.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+OUR SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY
+
+The ideas and sentiments which underlie the higher life of our time may
+be largely traced back to two roots, the one Greek-Roman, the other
+Hebrew.
+
+Each of these two races had originally a mythology made up partly of the
+personification and worship of the powers of nature, and partly of the
+deification of human traits or individual heroes.
+
+
+The higher mind of the Greeks and Romans, in which the distinctive notes
+were clear intelligence, love of beauty, and practical force, gradually
+broke away altogether from the popular mythology, and sought to find in
+reason an explanation of the universe and a sufficient rule of life.
+
+The Greek-Roman mythology made only an indirect and slight contribution
+to modern religion.  But the ethical philosophy and the higher poetry of
+the two peoples belong not only to our immediate lineage but to our
+present possessions.
+
+A humanity common with our own brings us into closest sympathy with
+certain great personalities of this antique world.  Differences of time,
+race, civilization, are powerless to prevent our intimate friendship and
+reverence for Homer, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius,
+Epictetus.
+
+Homer shows the opening of eyes and heart to this whole wonderful world
+of nature and of man.
+
+Sophocles sees human life in its depth of suffering and height of
+achievement.  He views mingled spectacle with profound reverence, sure
+that through it all is working some divine power.  Goodness is dear to
+the gods, wickedness is abhorrent to them.  But the good man is often
+unhappy,--from strange inheritance of curse, or from complication of
+events which no wisdom can baffle.  Yet from the discipline of suffering
+emerges the noblest character, and over the grave itself play gleams of
+hope, faint but celestial.
+
+In Socrates, we see the man who having in himself attained a solid and
+noble goodness, addresses all his powers to finding a clear road by which
+all men may be led into goodness.  He first propounds in clearness the
+most important question of humanity,--how shall man by reason and by will
+become master of life?
+
+Plato takes up the question after him, and follows it with an intellect
+unequaled in its imaginative flight.  Plato lighted the fire which has
+burned high in the enthusiasts of the spirit,--the mystics, the dreamers,
+the idealists.
+
+Aristotle confined himself to the homelier province where demonstration
+is possible, and laid the foundation of logic and of natural science.
+
+Lucretius resolutely puts away from him the whole pageant of fictitious
+religion.  He scouts its terrors, and scorns to depend on unreal
+consolation.  He addresses himself to the intellectual problem of the
+universe, and decides that all is ruled by material laws.
+
+In Epictetus man reverts from the problem of the universe to the problem
+of the soul.  The beauty of the Greek world has faded, the stern Roman
+world has trained its best spirits to live with resolute self-mastery.
+The mythologic gods are no longer worth talking about for serious men.
+But here is the great actual business of living,--it can be met in manly
+temper, and be made a scene of lofty satisfaction and serene tranquillity.
+
+Epictetus was the consummate expression of that Stoic philosophy in which
+were blended the clearness of Greek thought and the austerity of the best
+Roman life.  Stoicism reverted from all universe-schemes, spiritual or
+materialist, to the conduct of human life which Socrates had propounded
+as the essential theme.  The Stoic affirmed that all good and evil reside
+for man in his own will, and that simply in always choosing the right
+rather than the wrong he may find supreme satisfaction.  Epictetus
+expresses this in the constant tone of heroism and victory.  In the more
+feminine nature of Marcus Aurelius the same ideas yield a beautiful
+fidelity along with a habitual sadness.
+
+Stoicism was the noblest attainment of the Greek-Roman world.  It was a
+clear and fearless application of reason to human life, with little
+attempt to solve the mystery of the universe.  It gave an ideal and rule
+to thoughtful, robust, and masculine natures.  It made small provision
+for the ignorant, the weak, or the feminine.  Its watchwords were Reason,
+Nature, Will.
+
+
+The distinction of the Hebrew development was that the higher minds took
+up the popular mythology, elevated and purified it.  The Hebrew genius
+was not intellectual but ethical and emotional.  The typical Hebrew guide
+was not a philosopher but a prophet.  Through a development of many
+centuries the popular religion from polytheistic became monotheistic, and
+from worshiping the sun and fire came to worship an embodiment of
+righteousness and of supreme power.  An ideal of character grew up--in
+close association with religious worship and ceremonial--in which the
+central virtues were justice, benevolence, and chastity.  The sentiments
+of the family, the nation, and the church were fused in one.  Its outward
+expression was an elaborate ceremonial.  Its heart was a passion which in
+one direction dashed the little province against the whole power of Rome;
+in another channel, preserved a people intact and separate through twenty
+centuries of dispersal and subjection; while, in another aspect, it gave
+birth to Jesus and to Christianity.
+
+
+Jesus was one of the great spiritual geniuses of the race,--so far as we
+know, the greatest.  The highest ideas of Judaism he sublimated,
+intensified, and expressed in universal forms.  Indifferent to the
+ceremonial of his people, he taught that the essence of religion lay in
+spirit and in conduct.
+
+The holy and awful Deity was to him a tender Father.  The whole duty of
+man to man was love.  Chastity of the body was exalted to purity of the
+heart.  He lived close to the common people; taught, helped, healed them;
+caressed their children, pitied their outcasts, laid hands on the lepers,
+and calmed the insane.  He brooded on the expectation of some great
+future which earlier seers had impressed on the popular thought, and saw
+as in prophetic vision the near approach of the perfect triumph of
+holiness and love.  Overshadowed by danger, his hope and faith menaced as
+by denying Fate, he rallied from the shock, trusted the unseen Power, and
+went serenely to a martyr's death.
+
+
+Jesus had roused a passion of personal devotion among the poor, the
+ignorant, the true-hearted whom he had taught and called.  When he was
+dead, that devotion flamed out in the assertion, He lives again!  We have
+seen him!  He will speedily return!  The Jewish belief in a bodily
+resurrection and a Messianic kingdom gave form to this faith, and
+unbounded love and imagination gave intensity and vividness.  That Jesus
+was risen from the dead became the cardinal article of the new society
+which grew up around his grave.  His moral precepts, his parables, his
+acts, his personality,--the personality of one who was alike the child of
+God and the friend of sinners,--these were enshrined in a new mythology.
+A society, enthusiastic, aggressive; at first divided into factions; then
+blending in a common creed and rule of life; a loyalty to an invisible
+leader; a sanguine hope of speedy triumph, cooling into more remote
+expectation, and in the finer spirits transforming into a present
+spiritual communion; a growing elaboration of organization, priesthood,
+ritual, mythology; a diffusion through vast masses of people of the new
+religion, and a corresponding depreciation of its quality,--this was the
+early stage of Christianity.  It vanquished and destroyed the Greek-Roman
+mythology, already half dead.  Philosophy strove with it in vain,--there
+was no real meeting-ground between the two systems.  The final appeal of
+the Stoic was to reason.  The Christian theologians thought they
+reasoned, but their argumentation was feeble save at one point.  But that
+was the vital point,--experience.  Christianity, in its mixture of ardor,
+credulity, and morality had somehow a power to give to common men and
+women a nobility and gladness of living which Stoicism could not inspire
+in them.  So it was the worthier of the two antagonists that triumphed in
+the strife.
+
+Ideally, there ought to have been no strife.  Christianity and ethical
+philosophy ought to have worked side by side, until the religion of
+Reason and the religion of Love understood each other and blended in one.
+Destined they were to blend, but not for thousands of years.  The new
+religion brooked no rivalry and no rebellion.  It swayed the world
+despotically, but the beginning and secret of its power was that it had
+captured the world's heart.  Its best watchwords were Faith, Hope, Love.
+
+In a word, civilized mankind, having outgrown the earlier nature-worship,
+and having found the philosophic reason inadequate to provide a
+satisfying way of life, accepted a new mythology, because it was inspired
+by ideas which were powerful to guide, to inspire, and to console.  For
+many centuries we shall look in vain for any serious study of human life
+except in conformity to the Christian mythology.
+
+
+The Roman world was submerged by the invasion of the northern tribes.
+There was a violent collision of peoples, manners, sentiments, usages; a
+subversion of the luxurious, intelligent, refined, and effete
+civilization; a rough infusion of barbaric vigor and barbaric ignorance.
+The marvelous conflict, commingling, and emergence of a thousand years,
+through which the classic society was replaced by the mediaeval society,
+cannot even be summarized in these brief paragraphs.  The point on which
+our theme requires attention is that the religion of this period had its
+form and substance in the Catholic church; and of this church the twin
+aspects were an authoritative government administered by popes, councils,
+bishops, and priests, and a conception of the supernatural world equally
+definite and authoritative, which dominated the intellects and
+imaginations of man with its Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.  The visible
+church and the invisible world of which the church held the
+interpretation and the key,--this concrete fact, and this faith the
+counterpart of the fact, were the bases and pillars of the religion of
+Europe for many centuries.
+
+We are not required to balance the merits and faults of this mediaeval
+religion.  It was a mighty power, so long as it commanded the
+unquestioning intellectual assent of the world, and so long as upon the
+whole it exemplified and enforced, beyond any other human agency, the
+highest moral and spiritual ideals men knew.
+
+Its supremacy was favored by the complete subordination of all
+intellectual life which was an incident of the barbaric conquest and the
+feudal society which followed.  Even before those events the human
+intellect seemed to flag.  The old classicism and the new Christianity
+never so wedded as to produce either an adequate civic virtue or a great
+intellectual movement.  In the Dark Ages which followed, learning shrank
+into the narrow channels of the cloister, and literature almost ceased as
+a creative force.  For almost a thousand years--from Augustine to
+Dante--Europe scarcely produced a book which has high intrinsic value for
+our time.  When intellectual energy woke again in Italy and then in the
+North, the ecclesiastical conception had inwrought itself in human
+thought.
+
+Along with authority and dogmas there developed an elaborate ceremonial,
+appealing through the senses to the imagination and the spiritual sense.
+For the multitude it involved a habitual confusion of the symbol with the
+substance of religion.  In an age when the highest minds lived in an
+atmosphere of profound ignorance, and philosophy was childish, there was
+wrought out the full doctrine of the Mass and its accompaniments,--a
+literal transformation of the bread and wine of the sacrament into the
+body and blood of Christ, powerful to impart a saving grace.  The power
+to work this miracle was the supreme weapon of the priesthood.
+
+We may glance at the mediaeval religion in its culmination in the three
+figures of Dante, Francis of Assisi, and Thomas a Kempis.  A Kempis shows
+religion fled from the active world with its strifes and temptations,
+sedulously cultivating a pure, devout, unworldly virtue; feeding on the
+contemplation of heavenly splendors and infernal horrors; self-centred
+and inglorious.  The opposite type is Frances, a joyful prophet of glad
+tidings to the poor; ardent, sympathetic, heroic; touched with the beauty
+of nature and the appeal of the animal creation; exalting simplicity and
+poverty like an ancient philosopher; seeking the needy and sorrowful like
+Jesus of Nazareth; but with no spiritual originality like Jesus, no power
+to create a new religion; strong only to revive the best elements of the
+traditional faith, and to organize a society which erelong sank back to
+the general level of the church.
+
+Dante is an embodiment of mediaeval belief in its most sublime and
+intense phase.  He has much of the temper of the Hebrew psalmist, in his
+tremendous love and hate, his patriotism, his sorrow, his quest for the
+highest.  This vast spiritual passion finds its expression and
+satisfaction in an invisible world, which promises in a future existence
+the supreme triumph and reign of a divine justice, wrath, and pity, and
+for which the visible world is but antechamber and probation.  Dante
+shows the culmination of supernatural Christianity, but he has something
+further.  The guide of his pilgrimage, the star of his hope, the
+inspiration of his life, is a woman,--loved with sublimation and
+tenderness, loved better after her death, and felt as the living link
+between the seen and unseen worlds.  Thus at the heart of the old
+supernaturalism is the germ of a new conception, in which human love
+sanctified by death becomes the revealer.
+
+In Dante we feel that the projection of human interest to an unseen and
+future world has reached its furthest limit.  The mind of man must needs
+revert to some nearer home and sphere.  And closely following Dante we
+see in England a group of figures who betoken the return.  There is
+Chaucer, displaying the various energy and joy and humor of earthly life.
+There is Piers Plowman, showing the grim obverse of the medal, the
+hardship and woe of the poor.  Wyclif insists on a personal religion,
+whose austere edge turns against ecclesiastical pretense and social
+wrong; and he applies reason so daringly that it cuts at the very centre
+of the church's dogma, in denying Transubstantiation.  A little earlier
+we see Roger Bacon making a fresh beginning in the experimental
+philosophy which had been slighted for centuries.  These four are the
+precursors respectively of the purely human view, as in Shakspere, of the
+elevation of the poor, of Protestantism, and of natural science.
+
+
+As pagan mythology, Stoicism, and Judaism all were superseded by early
+Christianity, as that in turn was succeeded by mediaeval Catholicism, so
+another stage has brought us to the religion of to-day.  The leading
+features of this last transition may be summarily sketched, we may then
+glance at certain groups of figures illustrating the advance in its
+successive periods, and so we shall come to the ideal of the present.
+
+The religious transition of the last four centuries is in one aspect
+marked by the waning of authority and the growth of individual freedom;
+and in another aspect it is the substitution for a supernatural of a
+natural conception, or, we may say, in place of a divided and warring
+universe, a harmonious universe.
+
+In this double progress toward individual liberty and toward a new way of
+thought, a conspicuous agency has been the advance of knowledge.
+Connected with the advance of knowledge has been an improvement of the
+actual conditions of human life.  Meantime the ethical sense and the
+spiritual aspiration of mankind have asserted themselves, sometimes as
+slow-working, permanent forces, sometimes in revolutionary upheaval.
+With change both of material condition and of ways of thought, new forms
+of sentiment and aspiration have appeared,--a wider and tenderer
+humanity; a reverence for the order of nature and dependence upon the
+study of that order for human progress; a consciousness of the sublimity
+and beauty of nature as a divine revelation; a reliance upon the powers
+and intuitions of the human spirit as its only and sufficient guides; a
+rediscovery under natural and universal forms of the faith and hope which
+were once supposed inseparably bound up with ritual, dogma, and miracle,
+but which now when given freer wing find firmer support and loftier scope.
+
+Along with these forces has gone the steady push of human nature for
+enjoyment, for ease, for power; the grasp of man for all he can get of
+whatever seems to him the highest good.  There have been mutual injuries,
+degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of human
+history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, and
+which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making."
+
+Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action of
+strong personalities.
+
+No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers,--their interplay
+is constant.  The main argument of the drama, from the mediaeval to the
+present phase, may be briefly shown.
+
+
+Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three great
+lines,--opening the material universe, rediscovering a lost
+interpretation of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the
+many.  The astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven
+and a new earth.  The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated
+class a "renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual
+beauty, of delight in human activities for their own sake.  It was a new
+birth in some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell;
+worse than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity
+which Christianity had bred.  In others it was a new birth to the pursuit
+of moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism and
+early Christianity.  Then came the invention of printing, and the
+aristocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy.
+
+The foremost men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church,
+either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be
+maintained and purified.  The successful rebel against the church was a
+peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which long had
+sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice.  It was
+originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in his own
+experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of the spirit
+was possible without dependence on the church of Rome.  But neither
+Luther nor any of the reformers were men of spiritual originality.
+Driven to construct a new creed, they simply worked over the old dogmas,
+divesting them of the keys of priestly power--the Mass, the confessional,
+absolution, Purgatory, and the like; and giving infallible authority to
+the Bible only.  A war of creeds followed, mingled with a strife of
+ambitions and a struggle between the powers of the secular state and of
+the hierarchy.  To men of piety and peace like Erasmus and Melanchthon it
+seemed as if religion were only a loser by the long period of bloodshed
+and bitterness that followed.  The gain, as we see it, was that half of
+Europe was wrested from the dominion of the Catholic church; that that
+church was driven to purify its morals; and that in the Protestant states
+the liberty which at first was only a change of masters spread gradually,
+as one sect after another established its foothold, and as the secular
+temper in the state rose above the ecclesiastical, until the religious
+freedom of the individual is at last becoming generally and securely
+established.
+
+Only by this overthrow of ecclesiastical authority was rendered possible
+that unchecked freedom of intellectual inquiry which has been the great
+positive factor in modern advance.  Step by step men have learned to know
+the condition, the history, the natural laws of the material world in
+which they live and the social world of which they are a part.  The
+bearing of this growing knowledge on the conception of the spiritual life
+has been various,--seeming for a while to lie wholly apart from it; then
+at times menacing its existence or contracting its scope; again arming it
+with powerful weapons and enlarging its ideals.  Of the latest chapters
+in the story of science, one has retold the origin of Christianity,
+divested it of miracle and revelation, and translated it into purely
+natural and human terms.  Another chapter has fixed the general trend of
+the universe known to man as an ever advancing and broadening movement,
+under the name of Evolution.
+
+Amid all these changes the Christian church has continued to present its
+ideals, precepts, incitements; partly affirming them in contradiction of
+all denial, partly adapting them to the changes of time and thought.  The
+moral and spiritual interpretation of life has not been confined to the
+church, but has been voiced in each generation by poets, moralists,
+reformers, statesmen, each after his thought.  Out of the conflict and
+confusion a substantial agreement and harmonious ideal is at last
+appearing.  More clearly and confidently in our day than ever before the
+universe may be seen and felt by man as a Cosmos,--a beautiful order.
+
+
+This bird's-eye view will grow more distinct and vivid if we study
+certain typical figures which group themselves as the representatives of
+succeeding generations.  Our conventional division of centuries will
+serve as a convenient framework for four groups.
+
+In the sixteenth century we have Sir Thomas More, uniting the highest
+virtue of the church with the clearest intelligence of the new thought,
+and setting forth in Utopia the ideal to be sought,--not mere individual
+salvation, not an ecclesiastical fold, but a human commonwealth of free,
+happy, and virtuous citizens.
+
+Instead of the peaceful growth of such a society,--made impossible by
+selfishness, ignorance, and passion,--comes social upheaval and religious
+revolution, its central figure the burly, heroic, great-hearted Luther;
+by turns a rebel and a conservative; leading the successful revolt of
+Teutonic Europe against Rome, but leaving reconstruction to other hands.
+
+Then we have Calvin, the builder of the creed of Protestantism; in its
+substance little but a symmetrical statement of mediaeval ideas, but
+resting its appeal not on authority, but logic; or, more exactly, on the
+authority of a book, which, having no longer an infallible interpreter,
+must be judged by human reason as to its contents and at last as to its
+nature and origin.  Thus, unconsciously, Calvin initiated a religious
+democracy and ultimately a religion of reason; while for the time he
+established a creed more austere and grim than the Catholic.  Opposite
+him stands Loyola, the reviver of Catholicism, infusing it with a new
+heroism and self-sacrifice; reaffirming and intensifying its authority;
+scornful of speculation, powerful in organization; zealot, missionary,
+educator; giving to ecclesiastical obedience an added emphasis, to
+organization a new force.
+
+
+For a typical group in the next century, let us take Francis Bacon,
+leading the human intellect away from abstractions and from other worlds
+to the close, intelligent study of the material world in which men live.
+Beside him stands Shakspere, reading the world of humanity with eyes
+neither biased by creed nor sublimed by faith; portraying with marvelous
+range the joys, sorrows, humors of mankind; showing on his impartial
+canvas a true humanity, far different from the fictitious saint and
+fictitious sinner of the theologian; showing, as with the truth of
+nature, "virtue in her shape how lovely;" but with no consolation beside
+the grave, no satisfying ideal for man's pursuit nor rule for man's
+guidance.  Near him we see "the Shakspere of divines," Jeremy Taylor; he,
+too, is close to the realities of life, but he is planted firm on the
+belief in a supernatural revelation of God, Christ, and a hereafter, and
+for those who so believe offers a simple, noble way of "Holy Living and
+Dying."
+
+In Cromwell is embodied the attempt of extreme Protestantism to mould
+society and the state by the authority of a supernatural religion.  The
+Puritan creed for which he stands is a mixture of Hebraic and Calvinistic
+elements; the Puritan temper is at its best heroic and austere, made
+despotic by its confidence of divine authority, and by its
+supernaturalism made indifferent to the new science and to the various
+elements of human nature on which statesmanship must build.  Its
+political sway is brief, its effects on English and American character
+are lasting.
+
+In the next century the master minds stand outside of Christianity.
+Voltaire assails the whole ecclesiastical and supernatural fabric with
+terrible weapons of hard sense and derision.  For the target of his
+arrows he has a church at once corrupt, tyrannical, and weak, and a creed
+which the best intelligence has outgrown.  He heartily scouts the church,
+dogma, miracle; admits a vague Deity and a possible hereafter, but cares
+little for them; is fearless, jovial, generous,--a rollicking,
+comfortable, formidable apostle of negations.
+
+Into the vacuum he creates comes Rousseau, and at his touch there well up
+again deep fountains of feeling, belief, desire.  Rousseau, too, has left
+behind him the church and its dogmas; but he craves love, joy, action,
+and finds scope for them.  He delights in nature's beauty, and it is the
+symbol to him of a God in whom there remains of the Christian Deity only
+the element of beneficence.  He exhorts men to return to nature, but it
+is a somewhat unreal nature, a dream of primeval innocence and
+simplicity.  He idealizes the family relation, and brings wisdom and
+gentleness to the training of the child.  He lacks the Hebraic and
+Puritan stress on conscience; the mild benevolence of his Deity is
+somewhat remote from the ethical need of man and from the actual
+procedure or the universe; Rousseau himself is tainted with
+sensuality,--a diseased, suffering, pathetic nature, with "sweet strings
+jangled," worthy of pity and of gratitude.
+
+In France, the highest intelligence was at war with established
+institutions,--the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, against the
+Catholic church and the reigning authorities: on the one side
+persecution, but growing feeble; on the other side derision or evasion or
+attack.  In England, a large measure of civil and religious freedom gave
+the intellectual combatants a fairer field and a milder temper.  The
+English genius showed itself as practical, matter-of-fact, and moderate.
+Supernatural Christianity was attacked and defended; against the assault
+on the miracles the defense was really a shifting of the ground, and an
+insistence as by Butler on an ethical order in the observed workings of
+the world, which gives a sort of analogue and support to the Christian
+scheme of future retribution.  In speculative thought the prevailing
+school, as in Locke, approached reality from the side of sense-knowledge,
+till Hume showed how this road led to a denial of miracle and in
+philosophy to a fundamental skepticism.  Berkeley reverted to the ideal
+philosophy, and there seemed but a continuance of the eternal seesaw of
+metaphysics.
+
+In Germany, Kant sank his plummet deeper.  He found indeed in the working
+of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction.  But he
+recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world
+affords, the commanding sense of duty,--the "moral imperative;" and
+through this he found the presence and the authoritative voice of a moral
+deity.
+
+Goethe lived through a rich and various experience, of book-culture,
+emotion, conversance with men and affairs, in the attitude of an explorer
+and observer, unbound by creeds, but open to all teaching from past
+records or present impressions.  The projection of this experience was an
+ideal of life which gave large scope to all human faculties,--to
+knowledge, pleasure, passion, service,--under a wise self-control, and
+with theoretical allegiance to a moral law and a future hope not unlike
+the law and the hope of Christianity.  It was an ideal which appealed
+only to the man of intellectual habit, and which lacked the note of
+heroism and self-sacrifice.
+
+It was the opposite quality, the passion of self-forgetful service, which
+won for Christianity its most notable triumph in this century, in the
+movement led by John Wesley.  In Wesley, Protestantism came back to the
+rescue of the poor, as Catholicism came back in Francis of Assisi.  Among
+the peasants and colliers of England, among the backwoodsmen of America,
+swept an uplifting wave of love, joy, and hope.
+
+Jonathan Edwards did Christianity the service of carrying Calvinism to
+its logical extreme, and showing what it really meant. He started in
+the New England ministry a strenuous speculation, which was not to
+rest till it destroyed the foundation from which he worked. The hell
+as to which comfortable churchmen were getting silent, he painted in
+such lurid colors that reaction and ultimate revolt were necessities
+of human nature. The life of holiness and love--in himself a most
+genuine reality--he defined in such terms of introspection and
+self-consciousness, that there opened a wide gulf between the forms of
+religion and the most sturdy and natural virtue of the time.
+
+That sturdy and natural virtue was embodied in Benjamin Franklin,--in all
+this eighteenth century the best type and herald of the coming
+development of man.  Franklin inherited the characteristic virtue of the
+Englishman and the Puritan; he started in ground which Puritan and Quaker
+had fertilized, and when the fire of the early zeal had cooled; he worked
+out the problem of life for himself with great independence and entire
+good sense.  After a few vagaries and some wholesome buffeting, he
+determined that "moral perfection" was the only satisfying aim.  But
+instead of proclaiming his discovery as a gospel, he quietly utilized it
+for his personal guidance.  He had a keen eye for all utility; he carved
+out his own fortune; he early identified his own happiness with that of
+the people around him, and served the community with disinterested
+faithfulness through a long life.  That unselfish beneficence, of which
+Goethe thought a single instance was enough to save his hero from the
+fiend to whom he had fairly forfeited his selfish soul, was the habit of
+Franklin's lifetime.  He found the ample sanctions and rewards of virtue
+in the present world, though he held a cheerful hope of something beyond.
+In the study of this world's laws, he saw, lay the best road to human
+success.  He recognized the homely virtues of industry and thrift, on
+which the young American society had worked out its real strength, and
+assigned to them the fundamental place, instead of that mystic and
+introspective piety which the Calvinist made his corner-stone.  He took
+the lead in penetrating the secrets of nature, and not less in moulding
+and guiding the infant nation.  If his virtue was prudential rather than
+heroic, his prudence was close to that large wisdom which is a right
+apprehension of all the facts of life.  Only the realm of the poet, the
+mystic, the ardent lover, lay beyond his ken.  He stands side by side
+with the grand and magnanimous figure of Washington,--the twin founders
+of the American republic.
+
+
+The complexity and onrush of the nineteenth century may be in some degree
+made clear if we fix our eyes on certain typical groups of men whom we
+may classify under the aspects of Knowledge, Philosophy, Literature,
+Protestantism, Catholicism, Social Ideals, Personal Ideals.
+
+Regarding under Knowledge what may fairly be considered as solid and
+irreversible acquisition,--the general movement of humanity has received
+conspicuous interpretation by Darwin, who by most patient investigation
+discovered at least approximately the path by which man has been
+developed out of the lower animal forms.  Spencer has shown, by a vast
+generalization of facts, the working throughout all realms of existence
+known to man of certain common tendencies--of variation and new and
+specialized formation.  Apart from all debatable theories of psychology
+and metaphysics, he and a host of other students in the same direction
+have discovered clews by which the growth of human societies and their
+individual members can be in some degree traced under general laws.
+
+In another department of knowledge the sacred histories of Christianity
+have been given a new reading by scholars, among whom Strauss, Baur, and
+Renan are conspicuous.  The general result has been to show that these
+scriptures are purely human documents, and the personages they describe
+are purely human.  Through the gospel histories Strauss ran his critical
+theory like a plowshare through a field of daisies.  He showed especially
+the genesis of many of these stories by imagination working creations out
+of Old Testament texts.  Baur led the way in discovering by marvelous
+analysis the composite influences which helped to shape the apostolic
+histories in the interest of party or of piety.  Renan reillumined the
+scene which his predecessors seemed to convert into a dreary waste, by
+reconceiving, with erudition illumined by genius and sympathy, the
+personality of Jesus of Nazareth as a human character, nowise infallible,
+but a sublime leader of the race.  While Christianity has thus been
+brought to the level of a natural religion, its old-time adversaries, the
+other world-religions such as Buddhism, Brahmanism, Islamism, have been
+shown by sympathetic students to be vast upward essays of mankind toward
+truth and goodness.  That no religion is handed down complete from
+heaven, and that all religions are expressions of human aspiration and
+effort, is coming to be accepted as axiomatic.
+
+Turning from well-established knowledge to theoretical schemes of the
+universe, the three typical names in this century are Hegel, Comte, and
+Spencer.  Hegel stood for the interpretation of all existence in terms of
+man's inner world--thought and being are regarded as identical, and the
+movement of thought, expressed by a new kind of logic, becomes
+interpreter of the development of the universe.  In absolute revulsion
+from this tendency, Comte in his world-scheme rejected metaphysics and
+theology alike as belonging to the infantile stage of man, and recognized
+as legitimate only the "positive" knowledge which science affords.  For
+the emotional and ethical needs of man, he offered "the religion of
+humanity," with the service of mankind as its worship and woman as its
+priestess.  Spencer, equally discarding the supernatural as matter of
+knowledge, relegates the distinctively religious emotion to awe before a
+supreme power wholly inscrutable to man.  He sets himself to formulate so
+far as possible the observed workings of the universe in which man is a
+part; he makes Evolution the central principle; he finds in Heredity and
+Environment the great formative influences upon the individual; and he
+reaffirms as of supreme importance the familiar ethical principles which
+mankind has discovered in its experiences.
+
+In all these forms, the constructive philosophy of our century has
+visibly fallen short of the immense volume of old and new truths which it
+has striven to mould and formulate.  The characteristic genius of the
+time is shown more powerfully on the one hand in the accumulation of
+specific knowledge, as science; and on the other hand in the imaginative
+portrayal of human life.  The favorite vehicle of imagination has been
+the novel.  If our successors hereafter desire to know how man in the
+nineteenth century appeared to himself, their best guides will be such as
+Scott, Hawthorne, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Hugo, Balzac.  It is
+the children of Bacon and those of Shakspere who are most conspicuous in
+the work of yesterday.  To-day we seem to stand on the threshold of a
+more inclusive, more profound, more inspiring philosophy.
+
+The Christian church has, like all other institutions, been deeply
+affected by the time-spirit.  In Protestantism, the great developments
+have been a modification of the creed, and a transfer of energy from the
+winning of a future salvation to the working out of a present salvation
+for the individual and for society.  The creed has been changed, in
+spirit more widely than in form, partly under the influence of reason and
+partly through a reawakening of spiritual and humane feeling.
+Schleiermacher interpreted Christianity as an emotional and ethical
+experience, rather than a dogmatic system.  In the English church, while
+one refluent wave swept toward a dogmatic authority and ritualistic
+splendor like that of Rome, on another side the effort to reconcile the
+church with modern thought and fit it to modern society was carried
+farther and farther by Coleridge, Arnold, Robertson, Maurice, Kingsley,
+and Stanley; till the advance has met a sharp check at the point where
+rejection of miracle involves a collision with the formularies of
+worship.  In America, a like advance has had the advantage of that more
+elastic polity which allows to churches of the Congregational order an
+easier change of creed and worship.  The leaders have been, in the
+Unitarian line, such as Channing, who purified Christianity of its
+Calvinistic harshness and then of its Athanasian metaphysics; and Parker,
+who took the great step to simple theism,--Christian in ethics and piety,
+but purely naturalistic in theology.  In the other great branch of the
+New England church,--for in New England alone has America shown religious
+originality,--Bushnell in a scholastic way, and Beecher with poetic and
+popular power, resolved the dogmatic system into a supremacy in the
+universe of love and holiness, embodied in a deity who became actually
+incarnated as Christ.  Phillips Brooks, exercising a spiritual power of
+extraordinary purity and intensity, and so unspeculative that he felt no
+difficulty in the formulae of the Episcopal church, taught a religion in
+which Christ represents a sublimed and perfect humanity, a realized
+ideal, the inspiration and helper of men who are his brothers.
+
+In the Catholic church, two Popes stand as representative, Plus IX. and
+Leo XIII.  Under the first, the monarchic system of the church was made
+complete, and the highest function of the Council, the definition of
+religious truth, was assigned to the Pope.  By Leo XIII. this autocracy
+is administered in sympathy largely with modern ideas.  The church allies
+itself less with the temporal monarch than with the common people.  It
+throws much of its force into ethical channels.  Its characteristic
+interest is in education, temperance, social reform; and along with these
+it still ministers publicly and privately to that communion with God in
+which it places the foundation and secret of human life.  Its limitations
+are that it still claims not only to persuade but to rule--a useful
+function toward some classes, but impossible toward other classes; that
+its pretension to infallibility obliges it to misread history; and that
+its foundation of dogma admits no frank and full reconciliation with
+modern knowledge.
+
+But to know the full mind and heart of our age, we must again take a
+survey beyond the church walls.  The emotional forces which have moved
+the world have been largely in the direction of certain social
+aspirations.  The first was for Liberty--freedom from the tyranny of
+king's and priests.  It won its first great victory in America, where the
+War of Independence and the making of the Constitution marked by a brave
+struggle and a masterpiece of good sense the consummation of many years'
+growth of an English shoot in virgin soil.  England herself has followed
+with more unequal steps to a similar result.  In France, there was
+volcanic explosion which convulsed Europe.  The other Continental states
+have variously followed, save Russia, which as yet lies impotent under
+despotism.  Following the substantial success of the effort for Liberty,
+or blending with it, came the aspiration for a better Social Order.  In
+one phase, this worked toward the consolidation of nations on natural
+lines of race and history, as in Germany and Italy.  In America, the two
+ideas of universal Freedom and national Union, conflicting for a while
+with each other, blent at last and triumphed after a mighty struggle.
+The supreme figure in that struggle was Abraham Lincoln; who in his
+public capacity illustrated how the most complicated problems of
+statesmanship find their best solution through good-will, resolution,
+patience, and homely shrewdness; while in his own life he showed that a
+man may rise above misfortune and melancholy, unaided by creed or church,
+working only by absolute fidelity to the right as he sees the right, till
+he renders to his fellows a supreme service and wins their unbounded love.
+
+The aspiration for Social Order pauses not when it has won national unity
+and harmony.  The principle and the result of the existing industrial
+system no longer content those who live under it.  That system has been
+stimulated by the enormous material acquisitions which have flowed from
+invention.  It has improved in some degree the condition of most members
+of society, but with a marked inequality in the improvement, and at the
+cost of the mutual hostility which unchecked competition involves, and
+which is fruitful in moral mischief and material waste.  The laborer has
+gained in intelligence by the school and the newspaper; holding the vote,
+he feels himself one of the masters of the state; sympathy draws him to
+his own class.  The scholar sees that the system of unchecked competition
+is an outgrowth of conditions which are changing, and which ought to
+change.  The idealist longs for a society which shall effectually seek
+the highest good of every member, and supplement the hunger for personal
+advantage with satisfaction in the good of all.  The toiler and the
+idealist unite to seek a more generous and serviceable order in the
+community, and the tendency is vaguely called Socialism.  One conspicuous
+exponent is Karl Marx, who, with his followers, would make the highly
+centralized German state the starting-point for a still more
+authoritative and minute regulation of the community, directed to the
+equal material benefit of all its members.  By a different road a degree
+of fraternal organization is being attained, through voluntary
+associations of workingmen, for mutual support as toward their employers,
+or for independent production or distribution.  All definite and dogmatic
+schemes of social reform prove upon challenge to need adjustment and
+modification, to fit the actual workings of a society already infinitely
+complex.  It is as the sentiment which for want of a better word we call
+socialistic works along with that broad and candid study of fact which we
+call scientific, and toward an ideal in which the material is but an
+instrument of the spiritual,--that there is solid promise of advance.
+
+With these sentiments of Liberty and Social Order may be named what is
+sometimes called Philanthropy, or in a broader way of speaking may be
+named Humanity,--the unselfish passion for the good of others, the ardor
+of service, to which early Christianity gave outlet in missions, and
+which now throws itself into reform, education, amelioration in every
+direction of human need.
+
+More central to man than any social ideal is the personal ideal.  For
+society is but an aggregation of units; state, church, community, family,
+have their aim and outcome in the individual man; they are serviceable
+only as through them he becomes good and happy.  What new interpretations
+has this century seen of the personal ideal?  They may partly be read in
+a group of poets of the English-speaking people.  Wordsworth, loyal to
+the forms of the old Christianity, shows life as really sustained and
+gladdened by simple duty and by the sacramental beauty of nature--one
+giving the rule of conduct, the other disclosing the divinity of the
+world.  Tennyson gives in "In Memoriam" that interpretation of human life
+which comes when love is sublimed by death.  Browning shows the soul face
+to face with the doubt, the denial, the dismay, which are added to the
+foes of human peace in an age which has lost the old faith, and shows the
+soul victorious over all by its own energy, constancy, and joy.  In
+Whittier, the dogmatic system of Christianity is transformed into a
+spirit of fidelity, brotherhood, and tender trust.  Emerson gives that
+direct vision of divine reality, seen in nature, in humanity, in the
+heart's innermost recesses, which is possible to a soul purified by moral
+fidelity, reverent of natural law, and winged by holy desire.
+
+These have been the prophets of hope and of victory.  The dark message of
+defeat and despair has also had its full expression.  Satiety with
+material good, disappointment of inward joy, the loss of the old objects
+of adoration and trust, have inspired utterances in every key of gloom,
+impotence, despondency verging toward suicide.  Schopenhauer has
+formulated a philosophy of pessimism, and through a host of the minor
+story-tellers and versifiers runs the note of discouragement and
+abandonment.  The most dangerous alliance which besets man is that
+between Sensuality and Unbelief, whispering together in his ear, "Let us
+eat and drink, for to-morrow we die!"  Sometimes unbelief is at the
+widest remove from sensuality; it may go with pure devotion to truth and
+thirst for goodness.  There are pathetic and noble voices of seekers
+after God, which when they do not gladden yet strengthen and purify, and
+which catch at moments an exquisite tone of peace and joy.  Such are
+Clough and Matthew Arnold.  We have one moralist of the Spencerian
+school, George Eliot, who unites a strong ethical sense with a wonderful
+reading of human nature.  Her essential message, told again and again in
+every book, is, "Life may be ruined by self-indulgence--beware!"  If we
+ask, "But may life be saved by fidelity?" her answer is uncertain.  And
+in her own life we read, with humbled eyes, the defect which marred the
+note of triumph and deepened the note of warning.
+
+If, again, as to the Personal Ideal, we revert to the basal elements of
+character,--to the homely, every-day aspect,--to the life not only of the
+cultivated few but of the mass of humanity,--the new perception has been
+reached, that Work is the basis of all personal and social virtue.  Toil,
+said the old Scripture, is God's punishment for man's sin.  Toil, says
+the religious enthusiast, is a necessary incident of an existence whose
+higher exercise lies in spiritual emotion reaching toward a future
+Paradise.  But toil, to modern eyes, is the root which binds man to his
+native earth, and transmits all the sap which creates flowers and fruit.
+Intelligent, arduous, thrifty toil is the mother of greatness.  "Do the
+next thing,--do the nearest duty,--labor rather than question,"--is the
+most articulate note in Carlyle's stormy message.  The old charity was to
+give bread to the hungry; the new charity is to help the hungry to work
+for their bread.  A generation ago it seemed to American reformers that
+the nation's problem would be solved if once the slaves were freed.  They
+were set free, and then it was seen that the whole question of their
+future destiny was still to be met.  Practical necessity, religious zeal,
+political schemes, all played their part; but the best answer came
+through the apostle Armstrong, "Character, wrought out through education
+and labor."  The inherited devotion of Christian missionaries caught the
+light of personal experience and observation, and a man in whom heroic
+temper blent with shrewdest wisdom laid the foundation of an education
+transcending in its aims and results the whole traditional system of
+school and university.  It is an object-lesson of supreme significance.
+That way lies the future education of our children,--character its aim,
+nature its chief book, exercise of all the bodily and spiritual powers
+its method.
+
+Here, then, are the results of our century as they bear on man's higher
+life.  A religion through special revelation has been displaced by a
+religion which faces all the facts of existence and bases itself on them.
+Man has found new clews to read the story of his past, and new ways to
+mould his present and future.  The old ethical ideals have been
+reaffirmed, broadened, purified.  The task of building personal life and
+of ordering society has been set before man in fresh clearness, under
+heavy penalties for failure and heart-filling rewards for success.  It is
+seen that the humble path of moral obedience issues in celestial heights
+of spiritual vision.  Out of the noblest use of the Here and Now springs
+the assurance of a Hereafter and the sense of a present eternity.  The
+way to the Highest is open, inviting, commanding.  The simplest may
+enter, and the strongest must give his full strength to the quest.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE IDEAL OF TO-DAY
+
+The way of the highest life is clear and certain.  Its first and last
+precept is fidelity to the best we know.  Its constant process is that
+fidelity wins moral growth and spiritual vision.
+
+All attempts to demonstrate the nature and attributes of God, all
+effort to prove by argument that the universe is administered by
+righteousness and benevolence, are aside from the main road.  The real
+task for man is to order his own life, as an individual and in society.
+To do that, he needs to understand his own life as a practical matter;
+he needs to study the procedure of the world in which he stands; he
+needs to rally every force of knowledge, resolution, sympathy,
+reverence, aspiration, upon this high business of personal and social
+living.  As he achieves such life, there develop in him the faculties
+which read sublime meanings in the universe of which he is a part.  As
+he becomes divine, he finds divinity everywhere.
+
+The heart of religion is joy, peace, energy, support under suffering,
+inward harmony, true relation with fellow creatures, grateful sense of
+the past, full fruition of the present, glad out-reach to a beckoning
+future.  The way to that life is wholly independent of doubtful
+argumentation.  It lies simply in a whole-hearted conformity to what
+are known beyond all question as the worthy aims, the just
+requirements, the righteous laws.
+
+Let us consider somewhat at large the unfolding of this philosophy of
+life.  Let us seek to sympathetically interpret the deepest, most
+significant working of the human spirit in our time.
+
+Is it not the distinctive note of the thoughtful and honest mind of
+to-day, as compared with a like mind some centuries ago, that it
+contemplates more directly the actual procedure of the universe, is
+less concerned with supernatural personages and transactions, and more
+attentive to what has happened and is happening in this mundane sphere?
+The piety of our ancestors contemplated the justice and mercy of God as
+manifested in the counsels of eternity,--his righteous condemnation of
+the wicked, and the love-inspired sacrifice of Christ.  The philosophy
+of our ancestors was largely an attempt to map out a world-scheme from
+man's inner consciousness.  The modern thinker, whether he calls
+himself Christian or not, is inclined to make his essay toward the
+Supreme Power by way of the observed workings of the universe.  And
+certain general impressions which he thus receives we may distinguish.
+
+That aspect of things which now engages us with the fascination of a
+new and vast discovery is what we term "Evolution."  Its spectacle, on
+the one hand, prompts a sure and soaring hope.  In the sum of things we
+see a movement upward and still upward,--from unorganized to organized
+matter, from unconscious to sentient existence, from beast to man, from
+savage to saint,--and who can say to what height in the coming ages?
+But on the other hand we see that thus far at least the progress of the
+favored is at deadly cost to the losers.  And we see that parallel with
+the ascending white line of humanity runs an ascending black line,--the
+bad man of civilization is in some ways worse than the bad man of
+savagery.  And this complexity of good and evil is recognized at a time
+when a higher sensibility has made the old familiar pain and sin of
+humanity seem more than ever intolerable.
+
+Yet the spectacle of creation and of the world, as we see and know it,
+makes upon us an impression far beyond that of mere perplexity or
+dismay.  It produces a sentiment which we may best call _awe_.  All the
+great aspects of nature wake in us this reverential emotion.  A
+familiar instance is the effect upon us of the starry heavens.  The
+Psalmist thrilled at that sight,--how much more deeply are we moved,
+knowing what we know of the vastness and the order!  Some like effect
+on us has the unfolding revelation of the whole process of nature.  "I
+think the thoughts of God after him," said Kepler.  Let any man study
+in some clear exposition the development of the human race from the
+animal; and the wonder of the process, the unity of design, the
+unforeseen goals reached one by one, the irresistible impression that
+the harmony which man's little faculties can discern is but a fraction
+of some sublimer harmony,--these emotions have in them a surpassing
+power to humble, purify, and exalt the spirit.
+
+The modern mind addresses itself to the highest reality through the
+actualities of existence, and of those actualities one most significant
+phase is the procedure and laws of nature.  But there is another and
+more impressive aspect: it is the inner life of humanity; it is man's
+own conscious existence, with its struggles, victories, defeats, its
+agonies and raptures, its mirth, its play, its sweetness and
+bitterness.  This to us is the realm of real existence.  In this we are
+at home.  The march of the planets, the evolution of a world, the whole
+process of nature, is like the view from a window; and, gazing upon it,
+sits feeling, thinking, aspiring man.  His consciousness is environed
+and conditioned by the surrounding world, but is utterly unexplained by
+it, wholly untranslatable in its terms.  Definite and precise is the
+language of mathematics, of chemistry, of physical procedure.  Mystery
+of mysteries is the human spirit,--mystery of mysteries and holy of
+holies.  A new sense of the sacredness of human life has been born in
+this later age.  It is our most precious acquisition.  Better could we
+have waited for modern science than for modern humanity.  Better could
+we spare the telegraph and the steam-engine and anaesthesia than that
+quickened sense of the value of man as man which inspires the deepest
+political and social movements of to-day.  In all sober minds, in all
+lofty effort,--whatever there may be of despair of God or hopelessness
+of a personal future,--we see a profound recognition of the solemnity
+and sacredness of human existence.  Through the sad pages of George
+Eliot, through Emerson's exultant psalm, through the reformer's battle,
+the socialist's scheme, runs this golden link,--the value of simple
+humanity.
+
+This, then, we may say is the characteristic attitude of the man of
+to-day,--before the processes of nature, awe and reverence; before the
+life of humanity, sympathy and tenderness.
+
+But now rises a heart-moving question.  The dearest article of
+religious faith has been a Divine Power, governing the universe and
+holding to man an intimate relation involving issues of supreme
+significance to humanity.  At this point modern thought falters.  The
+long-familiar expression of that belief is the assertion of a personal,
+providential, all-just, and all-loving God.  What reason have men
+assigned to themselves for belief in such a God, while confronted all
+the time by the fearful spectacle of a world in which sin and misery
+perpetually mingle with goodness and happiness?  What has been the
+resource of the Christian intellect against that mystery of evil which
+baffled the questioner in the book of Job, and drove Lucretius to
+virtual atheism, and left Marcus Aurelius in doubt whether there be
+gods or not?  The resource of the Christian thinker has been his belief
+that Jesus Christ was God incarnate.  Here was a soul which was sinless
+and holy, which loved sinners so as to die for them; and this was God
+himself.  That belief has been the foundation of Christian theology.
+It left the mysteries of earth's sorrow and sin unexplained; but it
+offered the assurance, under a most living figure, that the author and
+final disposer of the whole was one whose nature was love itself.
+
+When it ceases to be believed that Jesus was God, the corner-stone of
+this whole structure of belief, as an intellectual conception, is gone.
+The void is concealed for a while by intermediate theories,--that Jesus
+was a kind of inferior deity, that he was at least a supernatural
+messenger.  Frankly say that he was a man only, and we have really
+given up that intellectual ground of confidence in a God on which for
+many centuries men have stood.  And, in that involuntary and most
+regretful surrender, and in the first impression following it, that the
+only discernible order is a mechanical order, with no room for worship,
+no hope of immortality, lies the tragedy of the thinking world to-day.
+For a multitude of minds, God is eclipsed, and the earth lies in
+shadow.  In shadow, but not in despair.  For still there is
+
+          "The prophetic soul
+  Of the wide world, dreaming of things to come."
+
+
+Slowly emerges a new conception.  In the lowest depth of his spirit man
+has found that, in Robertson's words, "it is better to be true than to
+be false, better to be pure than to be sensual, better to be brave than
+to be a coward."  By that sure and simple creed man lives through his
+darkest day.  When the tree seems dead, that root lives.  And presently
+there grows from it a nobler tree.
+
+The turning-point from the old thought to the new is this: We see that
+the imperative task set to every man is not to understand the universe
+plan, but to live his own life successfully.  It will quite suffice for
+most of us if we can each one do justice to the possibilities of his
+own existence.  Those possibilities are something more than breathing
+and eating, sleeping and waking, toil and rest.  Among his
+possibilities each man hopes are included contentment, joy, peace.  At
+least there must be possible for him some right conformity to the
+conditions in which he is placed, some noble and spiritual
+satisfaction, some imparting of good to his fellow creatures.  There is
+for him some best way of life, which it is his business to find and to
+follow.
+
+And as he finds and follows it,--as he fills out the best possibilities
+of his own being,--so he must come into the truest relation possible
+for him with this whole mysterious frame of things we call the
+universe.  As he is himself at his best, so he will get the best, the
+widest, the truest impression of the whole in which he is a part.
+
+This, then, is the rational and hopeful way of addressing the supreme
+problem,--the problem, for the individual and for mankind, of a
+happiness and a success which shall be rooted in the true nature of
+things and the real order of the universe.  We are not to start with
+any supposed comprehension of the general plan, whether as revealed by
+miracle or thought out by wise men.  We are simply to live our own
+lives according to the best knowledge we have, the highest examples we
+know, the most satisfying results of our own experience.  And, with
+whatever discipline and enrichment this process of right living may
+bring us, we are to hold our whole natures open, attentive, percipient
+to the world about us, and accept whatever shall disclose itself.
+
+The two processes--right living and clear vision--blend constantly and
+intimately.  We may distinguish them in our thoughts, but there is
+constant interplay between life and sight.
+
+The business of living,--how infinitely complex it is, how endlessly
+laborious, yet how simple and how sure!  Its central principle, we may
+say, is the right fitting of one's self to his surroundings.  Modern
+science has learned that for every creature the condition of success is
+adaptation to its environment.  We may use that way of speaking to
+express the prime necessity of man.  His environment is a vast
+complexity of material, social, and spiritual realities.
+
+There is for him a true way of adapting himself to these surrounding
+facts.  He has somehow found it out in the long existence of the race;
+he has seen it more and more clearly.  This true way is expressed by
+what we call right principles of conduct.  It is such traits as we name
+courage, truth, justice, purity, love, aspiration, reverence.  It
+includes the study of natural laws and conformity to them.  It includes
+the search for knowledge, both for its use and for its own joy.  It
+includes the delighted gaze upon beauty of every kind.
+
+Whoever follows this ideal--and just as far as he follows it
+intelligently and earnestly--finds certain results.  Whenever he acts,
+he finds set before him a right way to follow rather than a wrong.  So
+from every situation he may draw strength.  So he may continually find
+peace,--often peace won through struggle, but the deeper for the
+struggle.  The love of beauty finds beauty everywhere.  The love of
+living creatures finds objects everywhere, and love given brings love
+in response.  This higher life gives joy,--not constant, alternating
+with sorrow; but the joy is incomparably sweeter and purer and higher
+than any other course of life yields, and the sorrow has such nobility
+that we dare not wish it absent from the mingled cup we drain.  And
+always through joy or sorrow may come moral growth--development of
+character.
+
+There is no exemption to be won from suffering, none from fear.  Pain,
+weakness, bereavement, death,--these things must come, and we must
+sometimes tremble before them,--no divine hand will pluck them away.
+But in our fear we learn a deeper strength.
+
+These are the gifts with which Life answers our faithful service.  The
+brave, the gentle, the peace-makers, the pure in heart, the forgiving,
+the patient, the heroic, are blessed,--incomparably enriched.
+
+This is what we know of the relation of the One Power to
+ourselves,--that it asks the very highest and best we can give, and
+returns our service with the best and highest we can receive.  This is
+what that power we name God is to us.
+
+This is the same reality which has been apprehended under the figure of
+a personal God, a Heavenly Father, or a Christ.  To many, those figures
+still express it.  But those to whom the Deity is not thus personified
+may no less fully and vividly apprehend the divine Reality.
+
+And further, this whole conception stands no less in stead the persons
+and the hours when the conscious sense of Deity fails altogether.  This
+conception makes the essence of religion to be conformity to the homely
+facts about us, in the relations of fidelity, sympathy, and service.
+When one has no conscious thought of God, or cannot reach such thought
+if he tries, he can always exercise love, sympathy, admiration,
+self-control,--and that is enough.
+
+The limitations of our knowledge imply everywhere a background of
+mystery.  But that mystery is at once a stimulus to our inquiry and a
+prize set before our longing.  In some respects it is only a challenge
+to search, and the horizons of knowledge forever widen before the
+explorer.  At other points the veil never lifts, but all longing,
+aspiration, unsatisfied hunger, inarticulate yearning, "groanings which
+cannot be uttered," reach out to and lay hold on this realm of mystery.
+It is not an adamantine wall that encircles us, it is the tender
+mystery of the sunset or the starry heavens.
+
+So of the mystery of death.  The veil is not lifted, but it stirs
+before the breath of our prayers and hopes.  The deepest fear in man is
+the fear of death, and that fear is conquered in him by something
+greater than itself.  Even on the natural plane man is seldom afraid of
+death when it comes; it is rather the distant image that appalls him.
+Before the reality some instinct seems to bid him not to fear.  Every
+noble sentiment lifts men above the dread of death.  For their country
+on the battlefield, for other men in sudden accidents and perils, men
+give their lives instinctively or deliberately.
+
+It is personal love to which death seems to menace irretrievable and
+final disaster.  But it is personal love to which comes the divinest
+presage.  Some voice says to our yearning heart, "Fear nothing, doubt
+nothing, only _live_!"
+
+From our birth to our death we are encompassed by mystery, but it is a
+mystery which may, if we will have it so, grow warm, luminous, divine.
+
+
+So, by simple fidelity, man may find within himself harmony, victory,
+and peace.  When now, from this standpoint, he looks out on the
+universe,--and from no other standpoint can he hope for any clear
+vision,--what does he most clearly discern?  These three
+aspects,--Order, Beauty, Life.
+
+As he opens himself to these three aspects and actively conforms
+himself to them,--as he studies, obeys, and reveres the Order, as he
+perceives and rejoices in the Beauty, as in sympathy and service he
+merges his personal life in the multiform Life,--so he grows in the
+impression of a divine harmony and unity pervading all things.  So he
+becomes aware of a Cosmos,--a universal order of beauty and of love.
+He becomes aware of it only as he becomes voluntarily and consciously a
+part of it.  Only through the fidelity of his moral life does he feel
+beneath his feet a sure foundation.  Only as his soul glows a spark of
+love does it recognize the celestial ether in which it is an atom.
+
+
+At every moment and on every side we are in touch with the realities of
+being.
+
+We live and move in a world of orderly procedure, to which we may adapt
+ourselves with growing intelligence and purpose.
+
+Both the animate and inanimate creation is clothed in forms which
+minister to the sense of beauty; and the more that sense is cultivated
+in us, the more universally do we recognize beauty, and the more
+profound is its appeal to our consciousness.
+
+In our social existence we come in touch with other souls, each with
+its actual or potential wealth of being, and each inviting our
+sympathetic response.
+
+These--order, beauty, conscious existence--are the impact on us of the
+universe.  The right apprehension of these and the active response to
+them constitute the true exercise of our own nature; and it is through
+that exercise that we know Life,--the one Life,--and know it to be
+divine.
+
+These three aspects,--order, beauty, our fellow-lives,--let us dwell
+for a moment on each in turn.
+
+An amazing stimulus to man's powers has come in the discovery that he
+may penetrate and follow to an indefinite extent the actual procedure
+of the Universe.  We are only on the threshold of our discoveries.  We
+are just beginning to see where they have their highest application.
+We have been harnessing the steeds of power to the service of our
+physical wants.  We are just beginning to understand that they are to
+be made the ministers of building up a complete manhood.  The
+theologian has sought to demonstrate that all natural processes work in
+the service of a divine righteousness.  In place of any such
+demonstration, we are finding the true exercise of knowledge in
+applying for ourselves the processes of nature to the fulfillment of
+our noblest purposes.
+
+We are just now at the transition point between the old and the new
+conception of divine Power.  The old conception was: "The Almighty is a
+merciful father.  If his children ask anything, he will give it: the
+weapon of desire is prayer."  The new perception is: "The Almighty
+moves in lines which we can partly discern.  By putting ourselves in
+line with that Power, we make it helpful: the weapon of desire is
+intelligent effort.  Through our wills works the divine Will."
+
+  "With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth!"
+
+
+It is moral fidelity which apprehends the true application and
+significance for man of that regular procedure of nature which environs
+and conditions him.  And this Natural Order, in turn, requires the
+moral sense to humbly and obediently go to school to it.  "You want to
+be good?" says Nature.  "You dare to believe that even I in my
+mightiness am set to help you to be good?  Then study my processes, and
+conform to them!"  A new set of commandments is being written in the
+sight of men,--commandments learned but slowly and often transgressed,
+even by those whose wills are pure and whose hearts are loving.  _Thou
+shalt sufficiently rest_!  How perpetually in these days is that
+commandment broken, and with what woeful penalty!  The practical basis
+of all religion is the religion of the body.  The body politic, too,
+the social organism, has its code of natural laws, intelligible,
+imperative.  And every new discovery yields guidance and utters
+command.  "Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened!"
+
+
+Only through moral fidelity is the higher meaning of Beauty won.  It is
+the pure in heart who see God.  The beauty of the human form is, on the
+one side, uplifting to the soul, sacramental, as if it were the shrine
+of a divinity.  On the other side, it blends with the instincts which
+when unchecked in their play degrade humanity.  Plato pictures the two
+mingled elements as two steeds yoked together, the one black, unruly,
+down-plunging, the other white, celestial, up-mounting, while Reason,
+the charioteer, strives to rule  them.  The nobler interpretation is
+slowly acquired by mankind.  There are great, sometimes catastrophic,
+lapses; there are periods when art and literature become the servants
+of the earthly instead of the heavenly Venus.  We still look far
+forward to
+
+  "The world's great bridals, chaste and calm."
+
+Yet, little by little, the ennobling aspect of human beauty becomes a
+familiar perception, is wrought into a habit, is transmitted as an
+inheritance.  Whoever achieves in himself the victory of personal
+purity is helping to open the eyes of mankind.
+
+The material world becomes instinct with majesty and with sweetness to
+the eyes that can see.  It is a revelation of which Wordsworth and
+Emerson are the prophets in literature, but which is written no less in
+many a heart quite untaught of books.  The face of Mother Earth is the
+book in which many a man and woman and child read lessons of delight,
+spelled in letters of rock and fern, of brook and cowslip, of maple
+leaf and goldenrod.  Such lessons mean little save to the pure and
+humble.
+
+The distinctive voice of nature's gospel is a voice of joy.  Mixing
+freely with humanity, we encounter the almost perpetual presence of
+trouble.  But turning to forest and mountain and sea and sky, we are
+confronted with gladness ineffable.  Still "the morning stars sing
+together and the sons of God shout for joy."  Can our religion find no
+other emblem than the cross,--the instrument of torture?  Mankind has
+pondered long the lesson of sorrow: dare it enter the whole inheritance
+of sonship, and taste the fullness of joy?  Reality which thought and
+word cannot convey is bodied forth to us in music and in natural
+beauty.  Music is the deepest voice of humanity, and beauty is the
+answering smile of God.  When the poet-philosopher has crowded into
+verse all that he can express of life's meaning,--of the subservience
+of evil to good, the "deep love lying under these pictures of
+time,"--he invokes at the last the very look of earth and sea and sky
+as the best answer:--
+
+  "Uprose the merry Sphinx,
+    And crouched no more in stone;
+  She melted, into purple cloud,
+    She silvered in the moon;
+  She spired into a yellow flame;
+    She flowered in blossoms red;
+  She flowed into a foaming wave;
+    She stood Monadnoc's head.
+
+  "Thorough a thousand voices
+    Spoke the universal dame,
+  'Who telleth one of my meanings
+    Is master of all I am.'"
+
+
+Yet is the chief exercise of our life through relation with our
+fellow-lives.  If the sublime joy of nature's companionship could be
+made constant, at the price of isolation from our kind, the price were
+a thousand-fold too great.  And it is through true and sympathetic
+relation with other lives that we chiefly come into conscious harmony
+with the universe.  It is in a right interplay with mankind that we get
+closest to the heart of things.
+
+"God is love."  So I am told: how shall I interpret it in my
+experience?  Is it a proposition to be believed about some being
+throned above my sight?  If I exercise my mind in that direction, if I
+weigh and balance and sift the intellectual evidence, I may toil to a
+doubtful conclusion.  But let me, issuing forth from my ponderings, put
+myself into kindly relations with my fellow beings,--let me so much as
+pat affectionately the head of the honest dog who meets me on the
+street,--and a thrill like the warmth of spring touches my chilled
+intellect.  Let me, for a day only, make each human contact, though but
+of a passing moment, a true recognition of some other soul, and I feel
+myself somehow in right relation with the world.  "He that loveth
+knoweth God, and is born of God."
+
+At the heart of all love is an instinct of reciprocity.  It may or may
+not get a return from its immediate object, but somehow it opens the
+fountains of the universe.  The heart that loves finds itself, it
+scarce knows how, beloved.
+
+
+Such, then, is the process, and such the revelation.  The first step,
+the constant requirement, the unsparing hourly need, is obedience to
+the known right.  The sequence is an ever-widening sense of a sweet and
+celestial encompassment.
+
+The man rightly practiced in all noble exercises of life--in moral
+fidelity, in reverence and sympathy, in observation and conformity to
+the actual conditions of the world about him--will find pouring in upon
+him a beauty, a love, a divinity, which fill the soul with a heavenly
+vision.  And that soul, in whatever of extremity may come to it, has
+under its feet the eternal rock.
+
+
+Through the serious literature of to-day runs a bitter wail,--the cry
+that life is sad and dark and cruel.  Sad and dark and cruel it is,
+until one meets it sword in hand.  The great Mother will have her
+children to be heroes.  She tests them, frightens them, masks herself
+sometimes in terror.  Face the terror, drive straight at the danger,
+and the mask dissolves to show the celestial smile, the "all-repaying
+eyes."
+
+
+The road is an arduous one.  The aged philosopher, you remember, was
+asked by a youthful monarch, "Tell me if you please in a few words what
+is the final fruit and outcome of philosophy?"  The philosopher
+answered him, "Cultivate yourself diligently in all virtue and wisdom
+for thirty years, and then you may be able to partly understand the
+answer to your question."
+
+It is an arduous road, but it leads to reality.  All short and easy
+answers to the supreme question dissatisfy after the first flush.  The
+confidence of the dogmatic answer, we soon discover, has no sufficient
+authority to back it.  The glib theoretical answer leads us, after all,
+to a Balance of Probabilities.  That is the best God that theoretic
+philosophy can give us.  It may be better than nothing.  But who can
+love a Balance of Probabilities?  Who can feel the hand of such a deity
+as that when his hand gropes for support in face of temptation,
+disaster, heartbreak?
+
+
+We are told, "It may suffice for the strong and saintly to bid them
+'Prove for yourself that the universe is good;' but what kind of gospel
+is this for the weak, for the child, for the average man and woman?"
+The answer is: The vast majority of mankind always have lived and
+always will live largely by reliance on some person or some body of
+persons or some social atmosphere of opinion.  That authority of the
+church which has availed so much is just the confidence of a crowd in
+the leadership of certain men to whom they are accustomed to look up.
+In the order of nature, always the leaders will lead.  What the strong
+and saintly receive with vivid impression and profound assurance, the
+mass who feel their influence will accept a good deal on their
+authority.  The child will catch the faith of its father and mother.
+But, further, in its very nature, that method of approach to the
+highest reality which requires only goodness and open-heartedness and
+love is available to the little child and to the simplest mind.  When
+Jesus said, "Blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peace-makers, the
+pure in heart, they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness,"
+every one understood him.
+
+
+But it may be asked, Does this attitude bring man face to face with a
+personal God?  Personal he will be to some: to many the only solid and
+adequate expression of a real being is a personal being.  Nay, to many
+only a human personality means anything.  A great preacher and poet of
+our day once said that he never thought of God except under the figure
+of Christ,--a human figure in some human occupation and attitude.  Let
+Divinity body itself as Christ to minds so constituted.  Let others
+invoke "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."  But impose no
+constraint and lay no ban on those to whom, as Carlyle says, "the
+Highest cannot be spoken of in words.  Personal!  Impersonal!  One!
+Three!  What meaning can any mortal, after all, attach to them in
+reference to such an object?"  It is not these forms of thought that
+are essential.  What is essential is a way of living access to the
+Highest.
+
+
+The adequate conception--the keynote--must be one that is sufficient
+alike for the every-day mood, for the exalted hours, and for the
+emergencies.  That keynote is given in this truth: that there is no
+moment so dull or so hard but one can ask himself, What is the best the
+situation allows? and conform to that; can open his eyes to some beauty
+close at hand; can enter sympathetically into some neighboring life.
+
+
+We prescribe to ourselves certain attitudes, and strive toward certain
+ideals.  But the supreme hours are those in which there flow in upon
+our consciousness the inshinings and the upholdings of some unfathomed
+Power.  We are led, we are carried.  We feel, we know not whence nor
+how, a peace that passeth understanding and a love that casteth out
+fear.
+
+This is the substance of that religious experience in which throughout
+the ages the heart of man has found its deepest support and
+encouragement.  The experience has clothed itself to the imagination in
+the garb of this or that creed or climate.  It is liable to debasements
+and counterfeits, but no more liable than all other noble emotions and
+experiences.  Sometimes there is the culmination of a moral struggle,
+and the whole course of life receives a new direction.  Sometimes there
+is an illumination and joy and peace.  It is an exaltation of the soul
+in which gladness blends with moral energy.  No chapter of human life
+is written in deeper letters than those which tell of victory over
+temptation, strength out of weakness, radiance beside the grave,
+through this divine uplift.
+
+
+There is another experience, more common, less dependent on individual
+constitution, which bears an inward message of soberer tone but of like
+import.  It is the peace which attends the consciousness of
+right-doing.  Wordsworth personifies it as the approval of Duty, "stern
+daughter of the voice of God:"--
+
+  "Stern Lawgiver!  Yet thou dost wear
+    The Godhead's most benignant grace;
+  Nor know we anything more fair
+    Than is the smile upon thy face."
+
+
+The faithful child of duty, whatever his creed, whatever his
+temperament, is naturally the possessor of a steady, calm assurance.
+Somehow, he feels, it is well.
+
+
+Reasonings about immortality lead to little result.  Convinced or
+unconvinced, we profit little by a mere opinion.  We speculate, doubt,
+reject, or hope; and in either case the moral conduct of life is,
+perhaps, not much affected.  But there come hours when to love and
+aspiration the heavenly vision opens, and the sense of its own eternity
+thrills the soul.
+
+The crying need of the heart is always a present need.  No promise of a
+far-away satisfaction is sufficient for it.  And answering to just that
+need is the experience, sometimes given, that the human love once ours
+is ours still in its fullness,--some richer fullness even than that of
+days gone by.  There are hours in which the heart's voice is,
+
+  "Though mixed with God and Nature thou,
+    I seem to love thee more and more."
+
+
+The highest state of consciousness to which we attain is expressed by
+the old phrase that man feels himself a child of God.  His energy feels
+back of it an infinite energy.  His desires rest peacefully in some
+all-sufficing good.  All that is highest and purest in him mingles with
+its divine source.  He sees new and higher interpretations of his own
+life and other lives.  All the human love he has ever experienced he
+holds as an abiding possession.  There comes to him not so much the
+premonition of a future state as the consciousness of some state in
+which past, present, and future blend.  He is free from illusions, and
+serene.  It does not disturb him even to know that the vision will
+pass, and he will return to earth's level.  He sees the truth, he feels
+the divine reality; and the certainty and the gladness are such that
+not even the prevision of his own relapse into dimmer perception can
+depress him.  The hour speaks with command to the hours that are to
+follow; it bids them to fidelity, to love, to highest courage.
+
+When turning from contemplation we throw ourselves into the work and
+the battle, a pulse of divine energy blends with our noblest effort,
+touches our joy with an ineffable sweetness, and hushes our sorrow like
+a child folded in its mother's arms.
+
+The key of the world is given into our hands when we throw ourselves
+unreservedly into the service of the highest truth we know, "with
+fidelity to the right as God gives us to see the right."  So it is that
+we may find ourselves
+
+  "Wedded to this goodly universe
+  In love and holy passion."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A TRAVELER'S NOTE-BOOK
+
+A tourist who roams for a brief while through some great country like
+England or Russia may jot down a few of the impressions which come home
+to him, making no pretense at completeness or symmetry of description.
+So, one who has journeyed like a hasty traveler over some passages in
+that vast tract of years which we describe as the classic and Christian
+civilizations, notes down in the following pages a few of the salient
+features that have impressed him.  He has already prefaced this with a
+sort of outline map, drawn largely from familiar authorities, under the
+title "Our Spiritual Ancestry;" and has further ventured to interpret
+some phases of our own time, as "The Ideal of To-Day."  Now he goes on to
+group a few observations on some special phases of the historical survey,
+disclaiming any attempt at exact proportion and perspective, but
+lingering where the prospect has pleased his fancy, or at points which
+seemed to yield some necessary clew or fruitful suggestion.
+
+
+When, in the poems bearing the name of Homer, the curtain rises on the
+drama of man as it was acted in Greece, after the immeasurable
+prehistoric space, we are amazed at the sudden brilliance.  The men and
+deeds brought before us are various in character and worth,--savage,
+heroic, repulsive, beautiful, by turns.  But the ever-present charm is
+man seeing the world about him.  It is the vividness with which every
+object is seen in its distinctive form and spirit, and conveyed by the
+fit word and phrase.  So seen and spoken, the commonest object becomes a
+thing of delight.  The high-roofed house, the brazen threshold, the
+polished chest, the silver-studded sword, the purple robes,--the tawny
+oxen, the hollow ships, the tapering oars,--the wine-dark sea, the
+rosy-fingered dawn, the gold-throned morning,--Hector of the nodding
+plume, the white-armed Nausicaa,--so in long procession moves the
+spectacle.  A like distinctness invests all the actions and emotions of
+the story with charm.  To us, as to the poet, the world becomes enchanted
+simply in being seen.
+
+And presently we discover a strange transfiguration that is being
+wrought.  Experiences which were painful or grievous to the actors and
+sufferers become in the representation the source of keen pleasure to the
+hearers or readers.  The Iliad is mainly a story of men destroying one
+another.  The Odyssey depicts a long strife with hardship and danger.
+The men who heard those songs were themselves familiar with the fight,
+with the wounds and terrors mixed with its energies and elations; they
+had tasted the perils of shipwreck and of pirates.  But as they listened,
+the rehearsal of trials the counterpart of their own filled them with
+exhilaration.  We who read in modern days, if less experienced in
+bloodshed and bodily peril, yet in some fashion have had our share of
+battle and storm; and we, too, like the first listeners, drink in the
+tale with delight.  The poet, in other words, has the secret not only of
+seeing but of idealizing the actual world.  We catch from him some subtle
+art by which, standing a little aloof from the pressure and turmoil
+around us, often felt as painful or degrading, we see it through an
+atmosphere in which it becomes a splendid and heart-stirring scene.  At a
+later stage we may perhaps in a degree analyze the change of view; we may
+partly understand how through the struggle with evil man is strengthened
+and ennobled; how in such strife courage and sympathy and tenderness are
+engendered.  But long before we can thus philosophize, and to a degree
+which our philosophy can hardly explain, we are affected by this beauty
+and elevation imparted to the spectacle of human life by the true poets.
+
+We moderns read Homer with delight in the roll of the music, the
+vividness of the pictures, the humanity so near us in its essence and so
+unlike in its dress.  When we inquire what are the moral ideals, we are
+often uncertain how far the impressions made on us may differ from those
+of the original audience, or the intention of the singer.  But often his
+work is like the painting of great Nature herself.  We pass upon it as we
+pass upon the facts of life.
+
+The supernal features in the story are not here discussed.  The deities,
+judged by our standards, have little of divinity.  Beyond the grave lies
+a dim and dreamy realm.  All this, with its great significance, we here
+omit, to linger a little on the essential and permanent humanity.
+
+Achilles, the embodiment of power and passion, just touched with human
+ruth; Hector, the selfless, brave and gentle champion; Odysseus, victor
+in the long pilgrimage by fortitude and by wisdom,--these are the three
+ideal types of the early world, portrayed by its noblest genius.
+
+The Iliad culminates in the triumph of pity.  The heart of Zeus is
+melted, the harder heart of Achilles is melted, before the sorrows of
+bereaved old age.  An exquisite gentleness breathes through the closing
+scenes.  All the wrath and terror and savagery of the story have led up
+to this height of pure compassion.  A new light falls on all that has
+gone before.  Achilles, the fierce hero of the earlier story, is outshone
+by his victim, Hector of the great and gentle heart.  The crowning word
+of praise, after father, mother, wife have uttered their lament, is
+spoken by the frail woman whose sin had brought ruin on Hector and his
+people: "If any other haply upbraided me in the palace halls, then
+wouldst thou soothe such with words, and refrain them by the gentleness
+of thy spirit and by thy gentle words.  Therefore bewail I thee with pain
+at heart, and my hapless self with thee, for no more is any left in wide
+Troy-land to be my friend and kind to me, but all men shudder at me."
+
+We see the sin of man and woman wrecking nations and leaving the sinner
+in dreary isolation.  We see unrelenting wrath, even when provoked by
+wrong, spreading woe upon the innocent, and at last smiting the wrathful
+man through his dearest affections.  We see the heroism which meets death
+in defense of the beloved, yet has only tender pity for her who has
+wrought the ruin.
+
+The Iliad is mostly war,--men acting hell on earth, as Goethe said.  But
+in the Odyssey the goal of the hero is his home.  The magnet is not
+Helen's beauty, but Penelope's faithfulness.  Odysseus, mighty warrior,
+crafty leader,--who with his sword has smitten the Trojans, by his wiles
+destroyed their city,--Odysseus is driven for ten years through hostile
+seas and men and gods by the compelling passion of home-sickness!
+
+In the Odyssey, it is the battle with the sea which does most to toughen
+and supple and make indomitable.  The soldier and sailor are the pioneers
+of the race.  These and the tiller of the earth are the strong roots out
+of which are to grow the flower and fruit.
+
+In the Iliad, woman appears in Helen as the tempting prize and the gage
+of battle, and in Andromeda as the tender wife foredoomed to bereavement
+and captivity.  In the Odyssey, woman plays a higher part--as Penelope,
+faithful and prudent and patient wife, fit spouse for Odysseus; as
+Eurydice, the devoted old nurse; and as Nausicaa, loveliest of pristine
+maidens.
+
+"The story of her worth shall never die; but for all humankind immortal
+ones shall make a gladsome song in praise of steadfast Penelope."  It is
+a noble story: the fidelity of a wife, the undaunted courage of a man; a
+long battle with adversity, crowned with the joy of love's reunion; the
+meeting with servant, nurse, dog, son, wife, father.
+
+Odysseus fights his battle as every hero must,--against hostile nature
+and man,--by courage and patience and craft, and a confidence that the
+heavenly power will somehow bring him through.
+
+So at the heart of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an austere and sweet
+message.  The singers who embodied it in tales which stir every pulse
+with delight were among the supreme teachers of mankind.  The inner
+meaning of humanity's story which their songs display is still the lesson
+set us,--out of adversity man may win fortitude; through battle,
+shipwreck, and overthrow he scales the heights of manhood; and the
+faithful pilgrimage ends in a home which is dearer for all troubles past.
+
+The Homeric poems show man in his first full awaking to beauty and to
+music.  They show more.  The fashioning of the supernal world in man's
+mind varies with people and with time.  Here it is Zeus and Hades, again
+it will be Jehovah and Satan, and then Heaven and Hell.  But in the Iliad
+and Odyssey the human heart recognizes its rightful lords as long as it
+shall endure,--Courage and Pity, Fortitude and Fidelity.
+
+
+Socrates is the man who has actually achieved goodness, and tries to make
+a science and art of goodness, to find a way in which it can be clearly
+known and rationally and effectively taught.  "Can virtue be taught?" is
+his characteristic question.  The chief result of his keen scrutiny is to
+bring to light how little men really know of the higher life,--how little
+he knows of it himself.  The effect of this revelation of ignorance is
+not a despair of truth, but a humility which is the beginning of wisdom.
+The deepest thing in Socrates is his knowledge of the good life as a
+reality, and of the joy and peace which it brings.  Secure in this, he
+can go on in the most fearless temper, and even with light-hearted
+jesting, to sift the questions.  Intellectually, his main achievement is
+to bring out clearly the problems to be faced, and to give an immense
+stimulus to the higher class of minds.
+
+In the picture of Socrates by Xenophon in the Memorabilia, which bears
+all the marks of true portraiture, goodness goes with happiness and
+knowledge.  It is a most winning combination--beautiful as a Greek
+statue.  Xenophon lays stress on his happiness, but the basis is
+self-command.  Among a people where even religion and philosophy were
+tolerant of sensuality, he was pure.  He was hardy, trained to bear heat
+and cold, temperate, simple, faithful to civic duty, a reverent worshiper
+of the gods, watchful for the divine leading.
+
+Xenophon shows him absorbed in teaching, imparting the best he has found,
+never so happy as when he can win a young man to virtue.  His ideal
+society is the union of those who together are seeking goodness and
+knowledge.
+
+His patience is shown under the worst of domestic annoyances, a scolding
+wife,--he says he thus learns to bear all other crosses.  His admonition
+to his son to bear with her shows genuine tenderness.
+
+He has the heroic quality.  He resists the raging people, and refuses the
+part assigned him in voting the death sentence on the generals whose
+defeat had been a misfortune and not a fault.  He calmly disobeys the
+Thirty Tyrants, at the risk of his life.  He dies at last, a tranquil
+martyr to fearless truth-speaking.
+
+He teaches nobly of Providence, the Supreme, the guidance from above.  He
+conforms to the religion of his people, while planting a higher truth.
+When Athens, faithfully warned by him in vain, was sinking toward ruin
+and decay, he was sowing the seeds of spiritual harvests for future
+generations, like Jesus when Judea was tottering to its fall.  In the
+intellectual development of man's higher life he holds a place not unlike
+that of Jesus in the emotional development.
+
+Socrates, as Xenophon describes him, goes no farther as a teacher than to
+impress the principles of conduct as they were generally accepted by good
+men of the time, with peculiar persuasiveness.  But Plato shows him as an
+original investigator of the human mind and the universe.  In this there
+is an undoubted trait of true portraiture, but its limit is very
+difficult to trace, because in Plato's dialogues the master is made the
+mouthpiece of all the pupil's philosophy.  The most distinctive feature
+which can be identified as that of Socrates himself is the
+cross-examination.  Under this process, high-sounding generalities,--put
+in the mouths of speakers in the dialogues, the whole word-play set forth
+with exquisite grace and charm,--are shown by a rigid sifting to resolve
+themselves into nebulous and baseless figments,--the mere simulacra of
+true knowledge.
+
+The conversations glide from this destructive analysis into a
+constructive philosophy, and then we soon feel that it is Plato rather
+than Socrates whom we are getting.  The great contribution of Socrates
+himself to philosophy is the attitude he impressed--of inquiry which is
+serious because seeking the foundations of virtue and happiness, and is
+inexorable in its insistence on nothing less than solid reality.  Against
+all allurements of indolence, comfort, and social convention he presses
+the question, What is _true_?  His characteristic word is:
+
+"Some things, Meno, I have said of which I am not altogether confident.
+But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that
+we ought to inquire than we should have been if we indulged in the idle
+fancy that there was no knowing and no use in searching after what we
+know not; that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and
+deed, to the utmost of my power."
+
+
+Plato took from Socrates not method but inspiration, and soared into
+speculation.  He wrote over the door of the Academy, "Let no one enter
+here who does not know geometry."  That is, you are first to acquire
+absolute confidence, by familiarity with the demonstrations of
+mathematics, that real and certain knowledge is accessible to the human
+mind.  Thus planting his foot on firmest certainty, Plato leaps off into
+a glorious sea of clouds.  Flashes of insight and sublime allegory mix
+with fantastic theory and word-play.
+
+The vast range of his thought we will touch only at two points.  In the
+Symposium and the Phaedrus he discusses in his most brilliant vein the
+problem of love.  To the reader who has inherited the ethical ideal of
+Christianity, Plato's love will seem like the image in Nebuchadnezzar's
+vision,--the head of gold, the feet of miry clay.  He has a toleration
+for some aspects of sensuality of which Paul said, "it is a shame even to
+speak;" and this tolerance, in the greatest of the classic philosophers,
+is the most pregnant suggestion of the cleansing work which it was left
+for Christianity to undertake.  Yet Plato teaches most impressively the
+subordination of sense to spirit in love, and the struggle of the two in
+man has seldom been set forth more powerfully than in his figure of the
+two yoked horses: the white, celestial steed struggling upward; the
+black, unruly one plunging down, while Reason, the charioteer, strives to
+guide.  In the description of Love which Socrates professes to quote from
+the wise woman of Mantineia, there is the very height of the Platonic
+philosophy,--the gradual sublimation of human passion to the recognition
+of all noble forms and ideas, and at last to the vision of the Divine
+Beauty which is one with Wisdom and with Love.
+
+"The true order of going or being led by another to the things of love is
+to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upwards for
+the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all
+fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to
+fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of
+absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.
+
+"What if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the divine beauty, I mean,
+pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollution of
+mortality, and all the colors and vanities of human life--thither looking
+and holding converse with the true beauty divine and simple, and bringing
+into being and educating true creations of virtue, and not idols only?
+Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye
+of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but
+realities; for he has hold not of an image but of a reality,--and will be
+enabled, bringing forth and educating true virtue, to become the friend
+of God and be immortal, if mortal man may." [1]
+
+It is largely to Plato that we owe the idea of immortality as it exists
+in the mind of the civilized world to-day.  The belief in a continued
+existence beyond death is much older; it is seen in the Iliad, where the
+appearance of the dead Patroclus to Achilles in a dream is accepted as
+the assurance of a shadowy and forlorn hereafter; and in the Odyssey the
+visit of the hero to the land of shades is portrayed with a free and
+gloomy imagination.  It was a belief which among the earlier Greeks had
+little power either to console or to guide.  In the age of Socrates, it
+seems to have signified little in the minds of the orthodox and pious.
+The great tragedians, who sublimate the popular mythology, for the most
+part regard the after-life as only a sad inevitable sequel; and to be
+snatched back from it for even a brief reprieve, like Alkestis, is
+miraculous good fortune.  The greatest of the tragedians in his highest
+reach, Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, invests the departure of the
+hero, who has been purified by suffering, with a mystic radiance, a
+"light that never was on sea or land," the promise as it were of some
+future too sublime for mortal words.  But the philosophy of Socrates was
+directed rather to the clear penetration of the method and secret of
+earthly life, than to any vision of the hereafter.  It is noticeable that
+Xenophon, the loyal disciple and biographer of Socrates, himself of the
+best type of orthodox piety, and zealous to vindicate his master from the
+charge of irreligion,--Xenophon, in all the story of the master's life
+and death, gives not a hint of any future hope.  But Plato developed the
+idea that in man there resides an essential, indestructible principle,
+superior to the physical frame which is its home and may be either its
+servant or master--a principle which manifests itself in thought,
+aspiration, virtue; which has existed before the body and will exist
+after it; which chooses for itself an upward or downward path; and which
+rightly tends to a celestial and immortal destiny.  The thought never won
+universal acceptance even among philosophers; it had only an indirect and
+slight effect on the Stoicism which was the best religious product of
+ancient philosophy.  But it wrought by degrees all effect on the thinking
+of mankind.  While the lofty faith of the Egyptian passed away leaving no
+visible fruit, the idea of Plato slowly suffused with its light and
+warmth the current of human aspirations.  Meantime, the later Jewish
+belief in a hereafter--in its form a much cruder conception of a physical
+revival from the grave--flamed up in a passionate ardor, as the sequence
+of the life and teaching of Jesus.  The Platonic and the Christian belief
+sprang from a like source.  Each was born from the death of a man so
+great and so beloved as to give the impression of some imperishable
+quality.
+
+Socrates, with his noble character and aim, was put to death as a
+criminal.  Was that the end of it all?  Impossible--monstrous--never, if
+this world be indeed a cosmos.  The one firm certainty which Socrates
+seems to have held, "No evil can happen to a good man in life or
+death,"--flashes in Plato's mind into a glorious hope of immortality,
+embodied in his loftiest passage, the picture of the dying Socrates.
+
+The soul when withdrawn from all outward objects and rapt in
+contemplation is nearest to the divine,--this is the central thought of
+the Phaedo.  It is pursued with much subtle argumentation, of which the
+essential residuum is this: the soul's action is purest and most intense
+when farthest withdrawn from the visible and tangible world,--and hence
+we guess that her true and eternal home is in that invisible realm of
+which all this material universe is but the veil and symbol.
+
+But more impressive than the argument, more moving to the human heart, is
+the picture which is given of Socrates himself as the hour of death comes
+on,--the exaltation of all his familiar traits, the playfulness so
+exquisitely blent with seriousness, the searching thought, the frank
+human desire to be convinced by his own argument,--the charm of his
+friendly ways, the hand playing with Phaedo's hair, the taking of the cup
+"in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the least fear or change of
+color, looking at the man with all his eyes as his manner was,"--the last
+word, of calm reminder of a trivial obligation,--the whole scene of
+majestic and tender peace, like a sunset.  It is a scene which reconciles
+us to life, and makes us no longer impatient even of our uncertainties.
+It speaks with a voice like that of Landor's verse:--
+
+  "Death stands above me, whispering low,
+    I know not what into my ear,
+  Of his strange language all I know
+    Is,--there is not a word of fear."
+
+
+To the modern reader there is a singular contradiction between the
+doctrine of Lucretius and his temper.  The denial of any divine
+supervision of human life, or any hereafter for man; the dominion over
+all existence of purely material law,--this seems to us to destroy man's
+dearest faith and hope.  This is the teaching of Lucretius, yet on this
+road he marches with a step so firm and buoyant, an eye so awake to all
+beauty and grandeur, a spirit so elate, that as we read we catch the
+energy and elation.  The reading of the riddle is this: the religion
+against which Lucretius made his attack was not the soaring idealism of
+Plato, nor the inspiring and consolatory faith of Christianity, but an
+outworn mythology in which this world was ruled by capricious and
+unworthy despots, and the next world was gloomy with terrors and almost
+unlighted by hopes.  Such had become the popular mythology in its later
+day, and as contrasted with this the view and temper of Lucretius are
+rational and manly.  His message went far beyond a negation; he announced
+one of the greatest discoveries of the human spirit--the uniformity of
+nature.  Well might the genius of poetry and the vigor of manhood unite
+to make the message impressive and splendid.  Not caprice, but
+order,--not conflict, but harmony,--not deified partialities and spites
+and lusts, but exalted and unchanging law, rules the universe!
+
+When Lucretius essayed to define in what this law consists, he fell
+hopelessly short of the mark.  In his revulsion from the chaos and
+pettiness of man-like divinities, he fixed on material forces,--clearly
+to be seen and permanent in their operation,--as the only and sufficient
+cause and order.  Those forces, by a brilliant guess, he resolved into an
+interplay of atoms.  From this basis he projected a physical theory,
+which we know now was quite inadequate even for material phenomena, while
+the application of it to human thought and will was hopelessly
+insufficient.  Viewed from this standpoint, the spectacle of human life
+takes on a sadness which the poet's genius cannot dispel, and sometimes
+intensifies.  To man's inner world Lucretius has no serviceable key.  But
+he is to be judged not by what he missed but by what he gained.  He above
+all others stands as the discoverer of one of the few cardinal truths by
+which to-day we interpret the universe,--the constancy of nature.
+
+The genius of Lucretius did for the realm of thought what Roman
+statesmanship did for the nations,--it brought peace and order among
+warring elements, by the imposition of a rule which was often narrow and
+harsh, but which was firm, stable, and the foundation for fairer and
+freer growths.
+
+
+Already in Lucretius, and now again in Epictetus, we have passed from the
+Greek into the Roman world.  It is a change partly of race, partly of
+time, and it is in close analogy with the successive phases of the human
+spirit.  The mythology which satisfied the youth of the world had grown
+unlovely and unreal.  Plato's splendid imaginings had yielded neither a
+secure basis to the thinker nor a moral guidance to the common man.
+Lucretius's interpretation of all events as the product of material law
+had small power to sustain or cheer when the intellectual glow of the
+bold innovator had subsided.  Thoughtful men sought as their one supreme
+necessity an adequate and worthy rule of life.  So there was wrought out,
+or grew, the Stoic philosophy.  Based on an intellectual theory, its
+working strength lay in its consonance with the best habits and aptitudes
+engendered in the world's actual experience.  The Greek type was beauty,
+pleasure, thought, freedom; the Roman type was law, obedience,
+self-mastery.  The legion was the school of discipline and fidelity.  The
+forum was the theatre where classes and parties, through rude jostling,
+worked out an efficient political order.  A Greek thinker gave the mould,
+and Roman virtue gave the metal, of the Stoic type.
+
+We may best study that type in Epictetus,--once a slave, afterward a
+teacher; so careless of fame that he left no written work, and we have
+only the priceless notes taken down by a faithful scholar, making a book
+whose stamp of heroic manhood twenty centuries have not dimmed.
+
+"Man is master of his fate."  The true aim of life is goodness, and
+goodness is within the command of the will.  The lawgiver is Nature, and
+Nature bids us to be just, strong, pure, and to seek the good of our
+fellows.  Such was the essence of Stoicism.  As to deity, providence, or
+a hereafter,--belief and hope varied, according to the individual; but to
+the true Stoic the all-important matter was, Act well your part, here and
+now.
+
+In Epictetus is always the note of reality and of victory.  While
+actually a slave, he has learned the secret of inward freedom.  His
+essential doctrine is that good and evil reside wholly in the will, and
+the will is free.  As we choose, so we are.  And by the right choice we
+find ourselves in harmony with the universe.
+
+Though Epictetus continually appeals to reason, his basal word is to the
+will.  Be constant to duty--accept the order of things as good, and be
+true to the highest law--revere "nature," the established order; obey
+"nature," the ideal law.  Take all for the best, and you make all for the
+best.
+
+Most practical and inspiring are his counsels.  The war must be waged in
+the inmost thoughts.  The images that rise to seduce, the images that
+rise to dismay, are to be fought down and driven away.  "Be not hurried
+away by the rapidity of the appearance, but say, Appearances, wait for me
+a little; let me see who you are and what you are about; let me put you
+to the test.  And then do not allow the appearance to lead you on and
+draw lively pictures of the things which will follow, for if you do, it
+will carry you off wherever it pleases.  But rather bring to oppose it
+some other beautiful and noble appearance, and cast out this base
+appearance.  And if you are accustomed to be exercised in this way, you
+will see what shoulders, what sinews, what strength you have." [2]
+
+"Be willing at length to be approved by yourself, be willing to appear
+beautiful to God, desire to be in purity with your own pure self and with
+God.  Then, when any such appearance visits you, Plato says, Have
+recourse to expiations, go a suppliant to the temples of the averting
+Deities.  It is even sufficient if you resort to the society of noble and
+just men, and compare yourself with them, whether you find one who is
+living or dead."
+
+"This is the true athlete, the man who exercises himself against such
+appearances.  Stay, wretch, do not be carried away.  Great is the combat,
+divine is the work; it is for kingship, for freedom, for happiness, for
+freedom from perturbation.  Remember God, call on him as a helper and
+protector, as men at sea call on the Dioscuri in a storm.  For what is a
+greater storm than that which comes from appearances which are violent
+and drive away the reason?"
+
+Epictetus, compared with Plato, is the warrior philosopher beside the
+seeing philosopher.  He is in closest grip with the foe, and his calm is
+the calm of the victor holding down his enemy.
+
+His apparent unconcern as to the hereafter is in keeping with his whole
+attitude, which is that of cheerful acquiescence in the divine order,
+whatever it be.  "To be free, not hindered, not compelled, conforming
+yourself to the administration of Zeus, obeying it, well satisfied with
+this, blaming no one, charging no one with fault, able from your whole
+soul to utter these verses:--
+
+  "Lead me, O Zeus, and thou, too, Destiny."
+
+
+He vindicates Providence against injustice.  "The unjust man has the
+advantage,--in what?  In money.  But the just man has the advantage in
+that he is faithful and modest."
+
+"We ought to have these two principles in readiness, that except the will
+nothing is good nor bad; and that we ought not to lead events, but to
+follow them.  My brother ought not to have behaved thus to me.  No, but
+he will see to that; and, however he may behave, I will conduct myself
+toward him as I ought."
+
+"As a mark is not set up for the purpose of missing the aim, so neither
+does the nature of evil exist in the world."
+
+That is, it is inconceivable that the universe is a blunder.  This is one
+of the fundamental ideas of Epictetus.  The inference is, that man has
+only to define his true end and pursue it, which is the right action of
+the will, or as we should say, right character.  Pursuing this, he never
+finds himself thwarted or unfriended, never rebels or mistrusts the gods.
+
+The substance of his message is: "On the occasion of every accident
+(event) that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what
+power you have for turning it to use."
+
+"God has delivered yourself to your own care, and says, 'I had no fitter
+one to intrust him to than yourself; keep him for me such as he is by
+nature, modest, faithful, erect, unterrified, free from passion and
+perturbation.'"
+
+God, says Epictetus, has made me his witness to men.  "For this purpose
+he leads me at one time hither, at another time sends me thither; shows
+me to men as poor, without authority and sick; sends me to Gyara, leads
+me into prison, not because he hates me,--far from him be such a meaning,
+for who hates the best of his servants? nor yet because he cares not for
+me, for he does not neglect any, even of the smallest things; but he does
+this for the purpose of exercising me and making use of me as a witness
+to others.  Being appointed to such a service, do I still care about the
+place in which I am, or with whom I am, or what men say about me? and do
+I not entirely direct my thoughts to God, and to his instructions and
+commands?"
+
+Thus he falls back on the life of the spirit,--simple, sure, victorious.
+To place all good in character is the secret.  From virtue grows piety.
+It is desire set on externals, and so disappointed, that brings
+discontent, repining, impiety.
+
+Yet Epictetus has distinct and serious limitations.  He assumes that to
+avoid all perturbation is the aim of the wise man.  This can be
+accomplished only by the sacrifice of all objects of desire which lie
+outside of the control of the will, and he advises this sacrifice.  "If
+you love an earthen vessel, say it is an earthen vessel which you love;
+for when it has been broken you will not be disturbed.  If you are
+kissing your child or wife, say that it is a human being whom you are
+kissing, for when the wife or child dies you will not be disturbed."
+
+All joys but the purely moral are to be despised.  In going to the
+theatre one should be indifferent to who gains the prize.  This attempted
+indifference to all the great and little pleasures of life which have no
+distinct moral character, if successful, makes an ascetic, and of most
+men is liable to make prigs.  It is the vice of Puritanism.
+
+The modern world is riper and richer than the Roman world.  We say now,
+the ideal man is not "unperturbed."  Perturbations are inevitable to the
+man normally and highly developed, with sensibilities and sympathies
+keenly alive.  The true aim is to include composure, but not as sole and
+supreme.  This is a more complex development than the Stoic, less capable
+perhaps of symmetrical completeness, but grander, as a Gothic church is
+grander than a Greek temple.
+
+Again, the assumption of Epictetus and of all the Stoics that the will is
+wholly free, that man has only to choose and seek goodness and he can
+perfectly achieve it, misses the familiar and bitter experience of
+humanity, that too often man carries his prison and fetters within
+himself.  A Roman poet voiced it: _Meliora video proboque, deteriora
+sequor_.  Paul spoke it: "The good that I would, I do not; and the evil I
+would not, that I do."
+
+But Epictetus himself is one of the great souls who are not to be
+described by the label of any creed.  He has in himself the secret of
+spiritual victory, and he has a peculiar power to impart it.  The
+limitations of Stoicism as a creed are more plainly seen in Marcus
+Aurelius.  His character, revealed in the "fierce light that beats upon a
+throne," is of rare nobility and beauty.  To a man's strength he unites a
+woman's tenderness.  Just because of that tenderness, and the deep heart
+of which it is the flower, the philosophy he so bravely practices gives
+him but a bleak and chill abiding-place.  Through his Meditations--manly,
+wise, and gracious--there runs a deep note of sadness.  For this man's
+nature cried out for love, and not even faithfulest duty can take the
+place of love.
+
+Stoicism was the most distinct embodiment of the virtues of the classic
+world.  Those virtues shone in many who did not profess themselves to be
+of the Stoic school.  Plutarch's gallery of portraits is a part of the
+world's best possession.  His heroes belong not to their own time alone.
+They may be distinguished in some broad respects from the saints and
+sages of other lands and times; some advance of type may be traced in the
+highest products of the successive ages; but while one turns the pages of
+Plutarch, he scarcely asks for better company.
+
+Why, then, did Stoic philosophy fail of more wide or lasting success
+among mankind?  Because--we may perhaps answer--its chief weapon was the
+reasoning intellect, in which only a few could be proficient.  Because,
+fixing its ideal in imperturbability, it denied sensibilities of
+affection, joy, and hope, which are a large part of normal humanity.
+Because, in its lack of natural science, and its revulsion from the
+mythologic deities, it isolated man in the universe, claiming for the
+individual will a sovereignty which ignored the ensphering play of
+natural forces, and denying to the heart any outreach beyond the earthly
+and finite.  If we may venture to summarize the defects of ancient
+philosophy in two words--it lacked womanliness and it lacked knowledge.
+
+We are now to study the building up of another side of the ideal man.
+Philosophy had essayed a religion of the intellect and the will; now from
+Judaism sprang Christianity, a religion of the imagination and the heart.
+
+
+The highest outcome of the classic civilization was the clear conception
+and strenuous practice of right for its own sake.  The outcome of Judaism
+in Christianity was essentially the belief and feeling of an intimate
+union between man and a higher power, with love and obedience on the one
+side, love and providence on the other.
+
+In the vast tract of Greek-Roman history, we have looked at only a few of
+the highest mountain peaks--the noblest contributions.  But since the
+Christian church still treats the Old Testament as one of its charter
+documents, we need to enlarge a little upon the general outline and color
+of Jewish history, and we must recognize the shadows as well as the
+lights.
+
+The traditional interpretation of the Old Testament which is still
+current is based on successive misconceptions, overlaying and blending
+with each other like close-piled geologic strata.  Pious intent of the
+original writers, shaping their facts to suit their theories--later
+assumptions of inspiration and infallibility in the records--theologic
+systems quarried and built out of these materials--the supposed
+dependence of the most precious faiths of mankind upon these misreadings
+of history,--all these influences, with the lapse of time, have buried so
+deeply the original facts, that the exhuming and revivifying of the true
+story, or at least a tolerable similitude of its main lines, has imposed
+a gigantic task upon modern scholarship.  Of the results of this
+scholarship, we may give here only a kind of shorthand memorandum.
+
+The Old Testament as a whole, with precious exceptions, can only by a
+great stretch of imagination be claimed as an integral part of "_the_
+book of religion"--the title which Matthew Arnold asserts for the entire
+Bible.  The phrase can scarcely be applied to the Old Testament, unless
+it be read through a medium surcharged with association and
+prepossession.  Much of its morality has been outgrown; many of its early
+stories are revolting to us: much, of which the inner meaning is at one
+with our deepest life, is disguised under phraseology wholly alien to our
+modern thought and speech.  As a manual of devotion, or as a textbook for
+the young, the Old Testament can never again fill such a place as it
+filled to our fathers.  But we can still trace in it many of the upward
+steps of the race, and there are portions which still hold a deep place
+in the affections of the truly religious.
+
+The mind at certain stages personifies the Deity with the greatest ease
+and naturalness.  The primitive man interprets the whole world about him
+by the analogy of his own activity.  He sees in all the phenomena of
+nature the presence of personal beings,--beings who act and suffer and
+enjoy and love and hate as he does himself.  The sky, the sun, the wind,
+the ocean, represent each a separate deity.  Next, each clan, or city, or
+nation, comes to regard itself as under the patronage of one of these
+deities.  The national god of the Israelites, at the earliest time we
+know them, bore the name of Yahveh,--a name more familiar to us under the
+form Jehovah.  Originally he was probably the god of the sun and fire.
+His acts were seen everywhere, his motives guessed.  The heat and light
+of the sun--now illumining, now fructifying, now blasting--were his
+immediate manifestations.
+
+Later, he was conceived to favor certain kinds of human action.  He was
+at first appeased under the influences of analogies from the lower side
+of human nature,--Give him a present, something to eat, or to smell, or
+to see.  Then came the idea that he was the friend and favorer of the
+righteous,--of the merciful and just.  The turning-point in the history
+of Judaism--the birth-hour of religion as it has come down to us--is
+marked by that great dimly-seen personality, Moses, who taught that the
+worship of Yahveh forbade murder, adultery, theft, false witness,
+covetousness.
+
+The Jews had neither science nor logic; they had no intelligent induction
+as to nature,--hence they never got beyond the idea of supernatural
+intervention.[3]  Apparently they never challenged and sifted their
+fundamental ideas,--never raised the question as to the actual existence
+of Yahveh.  They saw and felt the incongruities of the world as a moral
+administration, and sometimes pressed the inquiry, as in Job, _Why_ does
+Yahveh thus?  But the denial of any ruling personal Will, as by
+Lucretius, was impossible to them.  They were imaginative, intense, and
+their imagination got the saving ethical impress especially from the
+prophets.
+
+Judaism as a religion grew from "the Law and the Prophets."  From almost
+the earliest historic time there existed some brief code of
+precepts,--probably an abbreviated form of what we know as the Ten
+Commandments.  Later came the impassioned preaching of the prophets.
+Still later, there was formulated that elaborate statute-book for which
+by a pious fiction was claimed the authority of Moses.
+
+The prophets spoke out of an exaltation of which no other account was
+given than it was the inspiration of Yahveh,--"Thus saith the Lord!"
+They did not argue, they asserted--with a passion that bred conviction,
+or at least fear and respect.
+
+It is here that the distinction between the Greek and the Hebrew method
+is most marked.  Socrates, for example, called himself the midwife of
+men's thoughts.  His maxim was, "Know thyself."  His cross-examination
+was designed to make men see for themselves.  That is, he taught by
+reason.  But the prophet's claim was, "Thus saith the Lord!"  He spoke
+out of his personal and passionate conviction, for which he believed he
+had the highest supernatural sanction.
+
+The heart of the typical prophetic message was that the Ruler of the
+world is a righteous ruler, and that the service he desires is
+righteousness.  The early prophets--such as Micah, Hosea, Amos--speak
+with scorn of the worship by sacrifices,--whether the fruits of the
+earth, or slaughtered beasts, or the ghastly offering of human life.
+Hosea cries: "I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of
+God more than burnt offerings."  So Micah speaks: "Shall I come before
+him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves?  Will the Lord be pleased
+with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?  Shall I
+give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin
+of my soul?  He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the
+Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
+humbly with thy God?"
+
+Further, the prophets assumed to know and declare Yahveh's will on public
+affairs, especially on the government of the nation.  They tried to
+dictate the attitude of Judea toward other kingdoms--an attitude
+generally of proud defiance.  Often their counsel ignored the
+actualities, and helped to precipitate Judah and Israel into hopeless
+conflicts with their mighty neighbors.  When in these conflicts they were
+worsted, the prophets laid the disaster to the idolatry or other
+wickedness of the people.  Finally came utter defeat and dispersal, and
+an exile for generations in a foreign land.  Then the prophets rose to an
+intenser faith,--purer, tenderer, more spiritual.  Some time and somehow
+the Lord would surely be gracious to his people!
+
+But when the captives, or a part of them, were restored to their own
+land,--with lowered fortunes and humbled pride, half dependent still on a
+foreign master,--the prophetic enthusiasm no longer availed to give a
+fresh message from the Lord.  Instead, the leaders and founders of the
+restoration--Ezra, Nehemiah, and their associates and followers--built up
+a well-organized, well-enforced system of discipline.  They reshaped the
+old traditions, enlarged and codified them; they shaped the Pentateuch
+and book of Joshua, as we know them now; they purified and beautified the
+Temple service; they instituted synagogues in every town, where religious
+teaching should be regular and constant; they developed a class of
+"Scribes," or expositors of the Law; they multiplied ceremonial
+observances; they rewrote the national history, and invested their laws
+with the sacredness of divine oracles, under the august name of Moses;
+they imposed deadly penalties and bitter hatred on all who deviated from
+the established religion.  All this was the work of centuries, and its
+important result was that by a manifold and perpetual drill certain
+religious ideas were stamped upon the minds of the people, until beliefs
+and usages and sentiments ran in their very blood and were transmitted
+from father to son.
+
+
+As types of the Hebrew religion in its advancing stages we may note:
+first, Jacob, winning his way by craft and subtlety, gaining the favor of
+his god by a fidelity which expresses itself by vows and sacrifices and
+scarcely at all by morality; and hardly attractive except in the
+tenderness of his family relations.  A mythical figure, he is a marvelous
+embodiment of the persistent race-traits of the Jew--tenacity, craft,
+devoutness--in the early phase.  It is a very earthly phase, but with the
+germs of a marvelous development.  Later, we have David, the warrior
+king.  Still later comes Elijah, the prophet of a Deity who now stands
+for chastity and justice against gods of sensuality and cruelty, and
+defying wicked kings in the name of that God.  Then in the line of
+prophets we may pass to their greatest, Isaiah,--both first and second of
+the name,--each of whom in the deepest adversity of the people is
+inspired by a hope, vague in its expectation, but so deep, so fervid, so
+sweet, that to this day it lends its language to hearts which in darkness
+look for the morning.  Next we may take Ezra, rebuilding the shattered
+nationality, not on a political basis, but by a law of personal conduct
+in which a genuine morality is mixed with a ceremonial code.  And here
+really belongs the legislation ascribed to Moses and given in the
+Pentateuch; the law-giver having an original in some great, dim, historic
+figure, long treasured in the popular imagination, but rehabilitated by
+priestly art as the author of a great volume of minute legislation, to
+which dignity is lent by the legends of a personality sublime yet meek.
+We have then the flowering of the inner life, in the book of Psalms,--the
+single name of the Psalmist covering the products of many minds and
+successive generations.  In the course of affairs, the hero's place
+belongs next to Judas Maccabaeus, the patriot leader against the heathen
+Greek; and we may take the books of the Maccabees and the book of Daniel
+as giving the ideal thought of the period,--the matrix of belief and hope
+from which was to spring the crowning flower of Judaism.
+
+It will suffice for our purpose if from this series we touch upon David,
+the Psalms, the book of Job, Isaiah, and the literature of the Maccabean
+time.
+
+
+The real place of David is that of the warrior-king who gave
+independence, unity, and victory to the people of Israel.  It was he who
+broke the yoke of the Philistines which Saul had weakened, and slew in
+fight their gigantic champion.  He conquered and subjected the
+neighboring tribes; he put down the rebellions headed by his own sons; he
+made and kept Israel for a brief term a proud and victorious military
+monarchy.  Within a single generation after his death it was divided into
+two hostile fragments, and both of these gradually fell under foreign
+conquerors.  Very short was the period of Israel's warlike glory, and for
+a thousand years afterward the national heart turned in love and
+reverence to the hero of that time.  As the Saxons remembered Alfred, as
+Americans remember Washington, so the Israelites remembered David.  It
+was in his image and under his name that they pictured a future which
+should outshine their past.  Israel throughout the period when she is
+most distinctly before us was a subject people.  It was largely the
+presence of a foreign oppressor which gave to the national voice that
+tone of intense entreaty toward a divine friend and deliverer which runs
+its pathos through psalm and history and prophecy.  There had been a
+better day for Israel, before Assyrian and Egyptian trampled her.  There
+had been a day when Philistia and Edom quailed and fell before her, and
+the Lord wrought victory by the hand of David.  So it is David's history
+that stands out fullest and clearest in the whole record, from Abraham
+onward.  How much is true history and how much is imaginative addition
+must be largely guesswork.  But we see in David the ideal hero and type
+of that period of Jewish history as we see in Achilles and Odysseus the
+ideal types of primitive Greece.
+
+And the story of David is as deeply colored with the primal passions of
+humanity as are the songs of Homer.  There is the picture of the
+shepherd-boy, to which must be added the exquisite psalm which later
+traditions put in his mouth; the victory over the giant; the most
+pathetic story of the moody and wayward Saul--the power of music over his
+melancholy, the alternations of jealous rage and compunction; the
+friendship with Jonathan, more tender and pure than the friendships Plato
+pictures; the dramatic fortunes of the outlaw; the family tragedies full
+of crime and horror; the dark story of Amnon, Tamar, and Absalom; the
+passion of fatherhood in fullest intensity, with the agonized prayers for
+the sick child and the heartbroken lament over Absalom; the group of
+valiant captains and their chivalrous exploits; the risk of life to bring
+to their homesick chief a drink from the well of Bethlehem; the story of
+Bathsheba and Uriah--lust, treachery, and murder; the prophet's rebuke;
+the years declining under heavy shadows.  How full of lifeblood it all
+is!  Every chapter is an idyl, an epic, or a tragedy.
+
+It is largely this picturesque dramatic quality which made the English
+Bible in its early days the favorite book of the English people, and has
+kept for it always so high a place.  But the attempt to reduce a story
+like David's to terms of spiritual edification has been difficult above
+measure, ever since mankind advanced beyond the half-barbaric age in
+which the story was told.  Judged by our standards, the ethics of the
+story are often low, and its religion is largely a superstition.  What
+brings the Almighty on the scene is most frequently some great calamity,
+which priest or soothsayer interprets as a divine judgment.  Often there
+is attributed to him the quality of a jealous Oriental despot.  The
+justice he enforces is often injustice and savagery.  Take the story of
+the Gibeonites.  A three years' famine in Israel was explained by
+Yahveh's oracle as a retribution for the breach of faith by Saul, many
+years before, with the Gibeonites, whom he had persecuted in defiance of
+ancient compact.  David thereupon invited the Gibeonites to name the
+requital which would appease them, and they asked for the death of seven
+sons of Saul.  So David delivered the seven innocent men into their
+hands, "and they hanged them before the Lord."
+
+The Zeus of Homer is offensive to religious feeling because he fully
+shares the sensuality which we account one of the great defects of
+humanity.  From that blemish the Hebrew idea of God is always free.  The
+hostility between Yahveh and the heathen gods has its deep ethical
+significance in the struggle of chastity against licentiousness, to which
+the religious sanction brings reinforcement.  But the Hebrew God has a
+savage and vindictive quality, which only slowly and partially
+disappears.  Originally, it is probable, the God of the sun and fire,
+beneficent to illumine, malevolent to burn, he remains always in some
+degree a God of wrath.
+
+It was by one of the strange growths of the advancing popular thought
+that David, the valiant, passionate soldier-king, came to be conceived of
+as the writer of the book of Psalms.  Historically a misconception, it
+yet lent a continuity and ideal unity to the nation's self-interpretation.
+
+The book of Psalms, says Dean Stanley, is the selected hymns of the
+Jewish people, for a period as long as from Chaucer to Tennyson.  The
+service-book of the Second Temple is Kuenen's description.  Beyond any
+other single book, it shows us the heart of Judaism in its ripest, most
+characteristic development.  Its language has become saturated with the
+associations of many centuries.  In these intense, direct, and fervid
+utterances we can see the form and lineaments of a faith which was the
+ancestor of our own, yet is not the same.
+
+The religion of the Psalms has different phases.  We have here the
+experiences of many souls, with a certain kinship, yet with wide
+differences.  In many of these hymns one recognizes the religion in which
+Jesus was cradled.  Imagination and feeling have full scope.  The
+constant idea is of Yahveh, ruler of the world and its inhabitants, the
+judge of the wicked and friend of the good.  "Mark the perfect man and
+behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace."  "How excellent is
+thy loving-kindness, O God! therefore the children of men put their trust
+under the shadow of thy wings."  "Thy righteousness is like the great
+mountains; thy judgments as a great deep."  "The Lord redeemeth the soul
+of his servants, and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate."
+"Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the man that
+trusteth in him."
+
+The depth and passion of the struggle against sin is shown in the
+fifty-first Psalm.  "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy
+loving-kindness; according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies, blot
+out my transgressions."  "Against thee, thee only, have I sinned."  "Wash
+me, and I shall be whiter than snow."  "Make me to hear joy and
+gladness."  "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit
+within me."  "Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it.  The
+sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O
+God, thou wilt not despise."
+
+This passion against sin--this cry for inward purity--is the root of the
+religion of Jesus, the blessedness of the pure in heart; the warfare of
+Paul, the spirit against the flesh.
+
+In other psalms, again, is a poignant cry for help and deliverance.  It
+is the expostulation of the soul with Fate, the cry to a Power who should
+be a friend, but hides his face.  There, is a pathetic sense of man's
+frailty and mortality.  "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my
+cry; hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee and a
+sojourner, as all my fathers were.  O spare me, that I may recover
+strength, before I go hence, and be no more."
+
+Praise for God's greatness and awe for his eternity are joined with the
+sad sense of man's mortality.  "Wilt thou show wonders to the dead?
+Shall the dead arise and praise thee?  Shall thy lovingkindness be
+declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction?  Shall thy
+wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of
+forgetfulness?"
+
+Very often again the burden is the cry of the weak against the oppressor.
+Man, wronged by his fellow, cries to God, and can imagine no deliverance
+save by the ruin of his enemies.  The cursing is tremendous.  "O daughter
+of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheth
+them against the stones!"  At this point is the widest ethical difference
+between "them of old time" and our own religion.  In them, abhorrence of
+sin was not yet distinguished from hatred of the sinner, and the foes of
+the Psalmist or his nation were always identified with the foes of God.
+To hate thine enemy seemed as righteous as to love thy friend.
+
+In a sense we may say the Psalms are a cry to which Jesus is the answer:
+"Lord, save me, and destroy my enemies!"  "Love your enemies, and in
+loving you are saved."
+
+In the book of Psalms there blends and alternates with the old theory of
+reward and punishment a later idea,--that goodness carries its own
+blessing with it,--that better than oil and wine, flocks and herds,
+health and friends, is the peace of well-doing, the joy of gratitude,
+yes, even the passionate contrition in which the soul revolts from its
+own sin and finds again the sweetness of the upward effort and a response
+to that effort like heaven's own smile.  Not, goodness brings blessings,
+but goodness _is_ blessed; not, the wicked shall perish, but wickedness
+_is_ perdition; this is the deep undertone of the best of the Psalms.
+
+Among these hymns are some which are filled with a noble delight in the
+works of nature,--a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle of
+creation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among the
+hills, and the conies of the rock.  There is frank satisfaction in the
+bread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad.
+And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of nature
+never so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality.  It is
+everywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy and
+beneficent God.
+
+What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the most
+vivid and various play of human emotions,--sorrow, wrath, repentance,
+joy, dread, hope,--always exercised as in the presence of an Almighty
+being, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men.  In this is
+their abiding power,--this close reflection of the fluctuations in every
+sensitive heart under the play of life's experiences,--encompassed with
+an atmosphere of noble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power.
+
+
+In the story of the Jewish mind, the book of Job stands by itself.  It is
+not so much a stage in the progressive development of a faith, as a
+powerful and unanswered challenge to the current assertions of that
+faith.  The characteristic idea of Judaism was that God rules the world
+in the interest of the good man.  Not so, says Job, the facts are against
+it.  Hear the complaint of a good man to whom life has brought trouble
+and sorrow, without remedy and without hope!  So stood first the bold
+arraignment, the earliest voice of truly religious skepticism.  Job is
+skeptical, not from any want of goodness,--he has been strenuously good;
+even now in all his darkness, "my righteousness I hold fast and will not
+let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live."  His
+goodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, help
+to the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sense
+he has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies has
+his hate gone out; he has not "rejoiced at the destruction of them that
+hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have I
+suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul."  Yet, after a
+life of this sort, he finds himself bereft, impoverished, tormented.
+Where is the righteousness of God?  He turns to his friends for sympathy.
+"Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of
+God hath touched me."  His friends for reply justify God by blaming Job.
+Doubtless you deserve it all: you must have done all manner of wrong, and
+been a hypocrite to boot!  That is all the comfort they give him.  Dreary
+and desolate he stands, no good in the present, no hope in the future.
+"I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou
+regardest me not.  Thou art become cruel to me; with thy strong hand thou
+opposest thyself against me.  I know that thou wilt bring me to death,
+and to the house appointed for all living."
+
+Upon that gloom the curtain falls.  "The words of Job are ended."
+
+The later chapters of the book seem added by successive hands.  They
+introduce a fresh speaker, to help out the argument for God.  They make
+the Almighty speak in his own behalf.  His answer is simply an appeal to
+the wonders of physical nature.  Look, vain man, at my works; consider
+the war-horse, the behemoth, the leviathan; how can your petty mind judge
+the creator of these?  This strikes a note which is still heard in the
+music of to-day, the awe and reverence before the grandeur of nature
+which can sometimes soothe the restlessness of man and hush his
+anxieties, as the harp of David brought peace to the moody Saul.  Yet
+such thoughts do not suffice for the man whose personal suffering is
+keen.  They silence rather than answer the question which presses upon
+Job.
+
+The story must be otherwise helped out, so some kindly champion of
+orthodoxy put in a fairy-story climax,--Job got well of his boils, had
+more sheep and oxen than ever, had other children born to him.  And so
+the difficulty is happily solved!
+
+But the earlier and deeper words remain, with their unanswerable
+challenge to the comfortable creed that God will always make the good man
+happy.  The book stands, the expression of a typical, a mournful but
+sublime attitude of the human mind.  It is a facing of truth when truth
+looks darkest, rather than to take refuge in comfortable make-believe.
+And it shows man falling back on his innermost stronghold of all.  If God
+himself fail me,--if the power of the universe be cruel or
+indifferent,--yet "my righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go;
+my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live."
+
+
+The habitual weapon of the Prophets is denunciation.  They pour out on
+their opponents a wrath which is the hotter because it involves a moral
+condemnation, and the heavier because it claims the sanction of Deity.
+Among their exemplars are Samuel deposing Saul, and scaring him from the
+tomb, and Elijah slaying the priests of Baal.  Of the written prophecies
+the characteristic word is "Woe unto you!"  They are the prototypes of
+Jesus assailing the Pharisees and driving out the money-changers; of the
+book of Revelation; of Tertullian proclaiming the torments of the damned;
+of the mediaeval ban on the heretic; of Puritan and Catholic hurling
+anathemas at each other; of Carlyle, of Garrison.  But in the greatest of
+the prophets the threat is almost hidden by the promise, and instead of
+cursing there is benediction.
+
+Whoever would get at the heart of the Old Testament, and understand the
+spell which the religion first of Judaism and then of Christianity has
+cast upon the world for thousands of years, should ponder the book of
+Isaiah.  It blends the work of two authors, but their spirit is closely
+akin.  In each case the prophet is full of a conviction so intense that
+he propounds it with perfect confidence as the word of God.  By the
+boldest personification, he speaks continually in the name of God.  This
+was the characteristic method of Hebrew prophecy.  The prophetic books
+all stand as for the most part the direct word of God.  This way of
+thought and speech was possible only to men in an early stage of
+intellectual development and under the highest pressure of conviction and
+emotion.
+
+The traditional repute of these Jewish prophets and the record of their
+words were accepted by both Jews and Christians.  Their writings were
+taken as the authoritative voice of God.  The same credit came to be
+extended to all the ancient books of the Jewish religion,--psalms,
+histories, genealogies, ritual, and all.  But it is mainly the prophecies
+to which this character originally belonged.  The Psalms are, with few
+exceptions, purely human in their standpoint.  In them, it is avowedly a
+_man_ who mourns, rejoices, repents, prays, curses, or gives thanks.  But
+in the prophecies God himself is presented as the speaker.
+
+In both the earlier and later Isaiah, God appears as speaking to men in
+extreme need, in words of incomparable comfort, inspiration, and hope.
+To whatever special exigency of Israel they were first addressed, the
+language, stripped of all local references, comes home to the universal
+human heart in its deepest experiences.  To the divine favor this
+teaching sets only one condition: "Cease to do evil, learn to do well."
+"Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for
+the widow."  "If ye be willing and obedient."  "Say ye to the righteous
+that it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their
+doings.  Woe unto the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of
+his hands shall be given him."  On the one simple condition of turning
+from moral evil to good, the blessings of the inner life are promised in
+every tone of assurance, consolation, promise.  "Though your sins be as
+scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson,
+they shall be as wool."  "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your
+God.  Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her
+warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned."  "He shall feed
+his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm and
+carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with
+young."  "Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth, and break forth into
+singing, O mountains, for the Lord hath comforted his people, and will
+have mercy upon his afflicted."
+
+The most triumphant word in the New Testament, and its tenderest word,
+both are drawn from one verse in the elder Isaiah: "He will swallow up
+death in victory, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all
+faces."
+
+The distinctive word and thought of Jesus toward God is first found in
+the later Isaiah,--"our Father."  "Doubtless thou art our father, though
+Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not; thou, O Lord,
+art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting."  The word
+recurs, together with an image which by a later than Jesus was made the
+symbol of an arbitrary divine despotism, but which Isaiah first employed
+to blend the idea of omnipotent power with closest affection: "O Lord,
+thou art our father; we are the clay and thou the potter; and we are all
+the work of thy hand."  A similitude is used even gentler than a father's
+care: "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you."  "Can a
+woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on
+the son of her womb?  Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee."
+
+By the later Isaiah is shown the figure of an innocent sufferer, whose
+sorrows are to issue in the widest blessing.  This sufferer has been
+interpreted sometimes as typifying the few heroic souls among the people
+of Israel, sometimes as a prophet in Isaiah's day, last and most fondly
+as Christ.  Whomever the prophet had in mind, the idea goes home to the
+heart; somehow, undeserved sorrow borne blamelessly, bravely, even
+gladly, since for love's sake, is to have a celestial fruitage.
+"Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with
+grief;" "he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,"--and at last
+"he shall see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied."  Then the
+strain breaks into an exultant tenderness, weaving into one chord the
+deepest griefs and consolations of woman, the sublimities of nature, all
+the passion and all the peace of the heart.  "Sing, O barren, thou that
+didst not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didst
+not travail with child, for more are the children of the desolate than
+the children of the married wife, saith the Lord.  Fear not, for thou
+shalt not be ashamed.  For thy Maker is thy husband, the Lord of hosts is
+his name, and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel.  For a small moment
+have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee.  In a
+little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting
+kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer.  The
+mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall
+not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed,
+saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.  O thou afflicted, tossed with
+tempest, and not comforted!  I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and
+lay thy foundations with sapphires; and all thy children shall be taught
+of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children."
+
+To such words men and women in all times have clung, and always will
+cling.  For, so first spoke a voice in some soul which in the heart of
+the storm had found peace.  He called it the voice of God.  What better
+name can we give it?
+
+
+In the prophecies and the psalms we have seen the high-wrought poetry of
+Israel's religion.  For the requirements of daily life there needs a more
+prosaic, definite, and minute guidance.  This the Jew found in the body
+of usages and precepts which gradually grew up under the care of the
+priesthood.  The prescriptive sanction of habit attached to these
+observances was at certain memorable epochs exchanged for a belief in the
+direct communication of the code from heaven.  One such occasion was the
+finding of the "book of the Law" by the high priest, and its presentation
+and enforcement on king and people which is recorded in 2 Kings xxii. and
+xxiii.  The strong indications are that this was the book known to us as
+Deuteronomy, and that instead of the rediscovery of a forgotten book
+there was in truth a new book set forth, claiming the authority of Moses,
+and enlarging and enriching the traditional observances according to the
+most "advanced" ideas of the time.  A similar occasion, at a later
+period, is described at length in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.  The
+new legislation there imposed in the name of Moses and the fathers--or
+rather of Yahveh himself, as he spoke to the men of old--was probably in
+substance the regulations contained in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
+
+By our standards of judgment, these acts were pious forgeries.  The
+mental conditions under which they were done, the psychologic state which
+prompted them, the ethical standards which sanctioned them, are matter
+for curious study.  It would be crude to class them as the deliberate and
+inexcusable crimes which they would be in our day.  The claim of a divine
+authority for human beliefs--the idea that what is morally beneficial may
+be asserted as historically true--has worked in many strange forms.  We
+see it here in its early phase, among a people in whom, as in mankind at
+large, the virtue and obligation of truthfulness was a late and slow
+discovery.  The same instinct--to claim for what we wish to believe a
+sanction of infallible revelation--works in subtle forms to-day.
+
+As to the contents of the Law which thus gradually took form, a
+distinction may easily be traced even by the cursory reader.  The earlier
+code, Deuteronomy, is full of a generous and lofty temper.  It is one of
+the most impressive documents of the Jewish scriptures.  Here is that
+which Jesus named as the first and great commandment: "Thou shalt love
+the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
+thy might."  The teaching of the book is primarily the worship of
+Yahveh,--a holy, loving, and judging God,--who rewards his people with
+blessings or punishes them with disasters.  Promises and threats are
+equally distinct and vivid: never were blessing and cursing more
+emphatic.  The morality enjoined is charitable and pure.  With an equal
+insistence is enjoined a certain method and form of worship, including
+sacrifices at the temple, three yearly feasts, the observance of the
+Sabbath, the due maintenance of the priesthood, and the utter rejection
+of all other gods.
+
+When we turn to the other books of the Law, we come into an atmosphere
+less exalted, and with a multiplicity of ceremonial details.  There is
+endless regulation as to varieties of sacrifice, cleansing from technical
+uncleanness, and the like.  Interwoven with these, as if on an equal
+footing, are special applications of morality--inculcations of chastity,
+justice, and good neighborhood.  The principles of the Ten
+Words--themselves an inheritance from a very early day--are applied in
+many particulars.  Occasionally is a lofty sentiment, a clear advance.
+Thus we find in Leviticus the "second commandment" of Jesus, "Thou shalt
+love thy neighbor as thyself."
+
+The general increase in rigidity of ceremonial in these books is to be
+read along with the stern decrees of Ezra as to separation from family
+and friendly relations with non-Jewish neighbors.  It was, in a word, a
+Puritan reformation.  There was just the same combination of heightened
+moral conviction with urgency upon matters of form and detail, and
+hostility to all outside of one special church, which belonged to the
+Puritan.  But the Jewish reformer, unlike the English, enlarged instead
+of simplifying his ritual.  It is this interblending of outward
+observance with moral and spiritual quality which stumbles the modern
+reader at every page.  It was a confusion which needed the spiritual
+genius of Jesus to dissolve, and the leadership of Paul to definitely
+renounce.
+
+By the side of the ceremonial element in the Law there ripened gradually
+an expansion of its moral precepts.  The sacred books were expounded by
+the Scribes.  The preacher in the synagogue came to touch the people's
+heart often more closely and delicately than the priest with his bloody
+sacrifices and his imposing liturgies.  Spontaneity, inspiration,
+prophetic power, was no longer present, but in the guise of comment and
+interpretation there grew up a gentler, humaner morality.  The moral
+value of labor and industry came into recognition.  There were teachers
+like Hillel and Gamaliel in whom devout piety and homely practice went
+hand in hand.  In the ethics of Judaism--under all these various forms of
+"the Law and the Prophets"--the distinctive note, compared with the
+ethics of Greece and Rome, was chastity.  The ideal Greece represented
+wisdom and beauty; the ideal Rome was valor and self-control; the ideal
+Israel was the subjugation of sense to spirit, the approach of man to God
+by purity of life.
+
+The twofold service of Judaism was to impress this special note of
+chastity on human virtue, and to give to virtue the wings of a great
+hope.  The flowering of that hope was in Christianity; the preparation
+for it comes now before us.
+
+Under the rule of Alexander's successors the Jewish system, with its
+mixture of ethics and ritual, came in collision with the ideas and
+practice of degenerate Greek culture,--pleasure-loving,
+nature-worshiping, sensual, with gymnastics and aesthetics, tolerant and
+tyrannical.  The two systems were hostile alike in their virtues and
+vices.  The Greek ruler put down with a strong hand the religious and
+patriotic scruples of his Jewish subject.  The Jew bore persecution with
+the tough endurance of his race, then rose in revolt with the fierce
+courage and religious fervor of his race.  He won his last victory in the
+field of arms.  Brief was the independence, soon followed by inglorious
+servitude; but its sufferings and triumphs had fused the nation once more
+into invincible devotion to the Law of their God, and had rooted in their
+hearts a principle of hope which in varying forms and growing power was
+to change the aspect of human life.
+
+It seems natural to man to ascribe some impressive origin, some dramatic
+birth, to the beliefs that are dearest to him.  But if we trace back
+through Christian and Jewish lineage the idea of immortality, we are
+quite unable to discover the time or place of its beginning.  The early
+Jew thought of death much as did the early Greek,--as the extinction of
+all that was precious in life, and the transition to a shadowy and
+forlorn existence in the realm of shades.  The Hades of Homer seems much
+to resemble the Sheol of the Old Testament, though more vividly
+conceived.  The strong, ruddy, passionate life of the Hebrew found as
+little to cheer it in the outlook beyond death as did the energetic,
+graceful, joyful life of the Greek.  Ancient Egypt had, at least for the
+initiate, a noble teaching of retribution hereafter to crown the mortal
+career with fit consummation of joy or woe.  Ancient Persia had in its
+own form a like doctrine.  The Hebrews in their servile period caught not
+a scintilla of the Egyptian faith.  In their exile it is probable that
+they did get some unrecorded influence from their Persian neighbors.
+Unmistakably, their emigrants to Alexandria, meeting there the nobler
+form of Greek culture while the Palestinian Jews encountered its baser
+side, caught some inspiration from the philosophy which followed, though
+afar off, the noble visions of Plato.  Whether Persia or Greece was more
+directly the source of the new hope which crept almost unperceived into
+the stern bosom of Judaism is not certain.  But the first clear voice of
+that hope comes from the time of the martyrs.  In the second book of the
+Maccabees is told--probably by an Alexandrian Jew--the story of the men
+and women who faced a dreadful death rather than disobey the Law of their
+God.  In that last extremity--that confrontal of the soul by the
+bitterest choice, and its acceptance of death rather than
+wrong-doing--comes the sudden voice of a hope triumphant over the tyrant.
+"Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of the
+world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting
+life."  So in succession bear testimony the seven sons of one mother,
+herself the bravest of them all.  "She exhorted every one of them in her
+own language, filled with courageous spirit; and stirring up her womanish
+thoughts with a manly courage, she said unto them: 'I cannot tell how ye
+came into my womb: for I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was it
+I that formed the members of every one of you.  But doubtless the Creator
+of the world who formed the generations of man, and found out the
+beginning of all things, will also of his due mercy give you breath and
+life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake.
+Fear not this tormentor, but, being worthy of thy brethren, take thy
+death, that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren.'"
+
+Just as the death of Socrates inspired in Plato the out-reaching hope of
+a hereafter, so these Jewish martyrdoms quickened the doubtful guess, the
+dim conjecture, into fervid conviction.  From this period dates the
+settled Jewish belief in immortality.
+
+The form which that belief assumed is seen in the book of Daniel.  That
+book was a creation of this period, inspired by its sufferings,
+aspirations, and hopes.  The writer, assuming the name and authority of a
+traditional hero,--by that easy confusion of the ideal and the historical
+which we have seen before,--blends with stories of unconquerable fidelity
+and divine deliverance his own interpretation of the world's recent
+history and probable future.  It is an early essay in what we call the
+philosophy of history, the first recorded conception of a world-drama.
+Median, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies move their appointed course
+and pass away.  God's plan is working itself out, and the culmination is
+yet to come.  In vision the prophet beholds it: the "Ancient of days,"
+with garment white as snow and hair like pure wool, upon a throne like
+fiery flame, with wheels as burning fire.  Thousands of thousands
+minister before him: the judgment is set and the books are opened.  One
+like the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven, and there is given
+to him dominion and glory and a kingdom which shall not pass away.  In
+his kingdom shall be gathered the saints of the Most High.  Many of them
+that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever-lasting
+life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
+
+This was the figure in which the Jewish imagination clothed the Jewish
+hope.  The national and the individual future blent in one anticipation.
+The dead were to "sleep in the dust" until the day when the divine
+kingdom was established, and then were to rise again to life, and
+according to their deserts were to share the endless glory or shame.
+
+So philosophy makes its essay at the destiny of mankind.  So imagination
+fashions its pictures.  And back of philosophy and imagination we trace
+the elemental and highest forces of the soul.  It is martyrdom and
+motherhood that inspire the immortal hope.  Man faces the worst that can
+befall him--drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture--rather than be
+false to duty.  The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung from
+her own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service of the
+right and to an unseen keeping.  And to martyr and mother comes the
+voice, "All shall be well with thee and thine."
+
+
+Christianity, inheriting from Judaism the belief in immortality, gave it
+a more central place, and a more appealing force.  Of the older religion,
+the special characteristic--compared with the Greek and Roman world--was
+the impressing upon a whole people of a law of conduct, in which with a
+multitude of external ceremonies were bound up the fundamental principles
+of justice, benevolence, and chastity, enforced by the authority of a
+personal and righteous God.  We see the educational effect upon the
+religious Hebrew of this clearly personal God.  It constantly lifted him
+out of the littleness of self-consciousness, setting before his
+imagination the loftiest object.  It gave definiteness and impressiveness
+to his best ideals.  And, further, this anthropomorphism, as we name it
+now, was but the primitive expression of the principle which is central
+in all forms of religious faith, that man and the universe are in some
+deepest sense at one, and that man's closest approach to the secret of
+the universe lies through his own noblest development.  That is one way
+of saying what the Jew felt when his imagination gave to the sternest
+command and the highest promise the sanction, "Thus saith the Lord."
+
+
+The Hebrew religion was wrought out under constant pressure of disaster.
+It was the religion of a proud, brave people, who were constantly held in
+subjection to foreign conquerors.  Hence came a quality of intense
+hostility to these tyrannical foes, and also a constant appeal to the
+Divine Power which seemed often to conceal itself.  Hence--and from that
+sorrowful lot of the individual which often matches this national
+tragedy--hence comes the passionate, pleading, poignant quality through
+which the Old Testament has always spoken to the struggling and
+suffering,--with gleams of hope, the more intense from the clouds through
+which they shine.
+
+The note of the New Testament is exultant.  There is keen sense of
+present evil, endurance, struggle; but there is a deeper sense of a great
+deliverance already begun and to be perfected in the future.  The heart
+of this new energy, joy, and hope is love for a human yet celestial
+friend.  This love was awakened by a personality of extraordinary
+nobility and attractiveness.  The personal affection inspired imagination
+and ideality to their highest flights.  Its original object became
+invested with superhuman traits and elevated to a deity.  To trace with
+certainty and minuteness the historic lineaments of the real man is not
+altogether possible; but the essential truth concerning him is
+sufficiently plain.
+
+The biographies which we possess of Jesus were written from thirty to a
+hundred years after his death.  In these records memory and imagination
+are intimately blended.  On the one hand, the power and loftiness of his
+character and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly on
+the minds of his followers.  But on the other hand, he was so suggestive
+and inspiring--there were among his disciples natures so susceptible,
+responsive, yet untrained, and their community was soon fused in such a
+contagion of passionate feeling unchecked by reason--that the seeds of
+his words and acts fruited in a rich growth of imagination, which blent
+closely with the historic reality.  And with the central inspiration of
+his life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him,
+so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defies
+certainty of analysis.
+
+If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vivid
+impression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over natural
+forces for the benefit of mankind.  As he is described, Jesus is before
+all a worker of beneficent miracles.  He is a teacher, too, and an
+unexampled one.  But he enforces his teaching by means utterly
+transcending the credentials of other teachers.  He is a tender human
+friend, but he expresses his friendship by services such as no other
+friend can render.  He allays tempests by a word.  He creates bread and
+wine at will.  He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind.  He raises
+the dead.  In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power.  It is
+this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has
+distinguished him in the eyes of his worshipers.  What is the wisest word
+about immortality worth--what do we care for what Socrates or Plato
+said--when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself?
+What need for any argument or assurance about Providence, when here is
+one through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse of
+beneficent love?
+
+But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the
+growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in
+our time to a different conception.
+
+The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life.
+His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its
+interior harmony and its relations with the world about it.  _Love your
+enemies_,--in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of
+conduct.  _The pure in heart shall see God_,--with that he put in the
+hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision.
+
+The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chastity, justice, and
+piety.  Jesus sublimated this,--in him chastity becomes purity; in place
+of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a
+love embracing earth and heaven.
+
+Jesus taught in parables.  A story--an outward, objective fact, something
+which the imagination can body forth--often facilitates the impartation
+to another mind of a spiritual experience.  The soul has no adequate
+language of its own,--it must borrow from the senses and the imagination.
+
+The central idea of Jesus is expressed in the saying, "No man knoweth the
+Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son."
+That is, man is a mystery except to his Maker; he does not even
+understand himself.  And correspondingly, "No man knoweth the Father save
+the Son:" only the obedient and loving heart recognizes the Divinity.
+God is not known by the intellect: he is felt through the moral nature.
+Peace, assurance, sense of inmost reality, comes through steadfast
+goodness.
+
+Jesus impressed this idea by the figure of father and son.  What symbol
+could he have used more intelligible? more universally coming home?  Like
+all statements of highest truth, all symbols, it was imperfect; it did
+not furnish an adequate explanation of the workings of the universe.
+But, under the homeliest figure, under the guise of the nearest human
+relation, it expressed the greatest truth of the inner life.
+
+Further, Jesus threw his emphasis where men need it thrown,--not on
+abstract ideas, but on action.  His teaching was always as to conduct.
+Purity, forgiveness, rightness of heart were his themes.
+
+Above all, he lived what he taught.  He left the memory of a life which
+to his followers seemed faultless.  And ever since, those who felt their
+own inadequacy have laid closest hold on his success, his victory, as
+somehow the pledge of theirs.
+
+
+Jesus was a Jew, but in him there was born into the world a higher
+principle than Judaism.  The historic lineage is not to be too much
+insisted on.  When he said, "Love your enemies," "Forgive that ye may be
+forgiven," he brought into the traditional religion a revolutionary idea.
+Judaism was largely a religion of wrath.  Jesus planted a religion of
+love.
+
+The tender plant was soon half choked by the old coarse growth, and for
+many centuries the religion named after Christ had a vein of hate as
+fierce as the old Judaism.  But blending with it, and struggling always
+for ascendency, was the religion of love, symbolized by the cradle of
+Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary.
+
+
+Of the Judaic traits in Jesus, conspicuous was the prophetic feeling and
+tone.  He was possessed with an absolute fullness of conviction, and
+spoke in a tone of blended ardor and certitude.  "He taught as one having
+authority."  He rarely gave reasons.  If in his words we find appeal to
+precedent or argument, it is really as little more than illustration or
+picture to clothe his own intuition.  His followers believed his words,
+either because of some conscious witness in their breasts, or because
+their love and reverence for him won for his assertions an unquestioning
+acceptance.
+
+From Judaism he took the familiar idea of one all-powerful and holy God;
+a moral ideal which was chiefly distinguished from that of the
+Greek-Roman world by its greater emphasis on chastity; and also the
+belief in a constant divine interposition in human affairs, which soon
+was to culminate in the establishment of a divine kingdom on earth.
+
+Jesus woke in his followers an ardor for goodness, a tenderness for their
+fellow men, and a supreme devotion to himself.  His words went straight
+to the springs of character.  He brushed aside religious ceremonial as of
+no importance.  He sent the searching light of purity into the recesses
+of the heart.  He made love the law of life and the key of the universe.
+He interpreted love, as a principle of human conduct, by illustrations
+the most homely, real, and tender.  Love is no mere delicious emotion: it
+is giving our bread to the hungry, ourselves to the needy.  It is not a
+mere felicity of kindred spirits,--love them that hate you, pray for them
+that despitefully use you!
+
+Jesus was the greatest of poets.  To every fact, to every idea, he gave
+its most beautiful and spiritual interpretation.  When he speaks of God,
+his speech is the pure poetry of the soul.  Yahveh becomes to him the
+All-father.  His providence is over the lilies and the sparrows.  His
+rain and sunshine are shed on the unjust as on the just.  His inmost
+nature is set forth by the human father meeting his returning prodigal a
+great way off.  His very life is shared with his children.  It wells up
+in Jesus himself: the light in his eyes, the tenderness in his tones, the
+yearning in his heart,--it is _my Father_ ye know in me!
+
+How does that Divine Power appear in the procedure of the universe?  What
+real providence is there for the slain sparrow?  What is the actual
+destiny of those human lives which show only frustration and failure?
+Jesus does not answer these questions.  It does not appear that he tried
+to answer them.  His words are filled with a glad, unquestioning trust.
+He is not the philosopher seeking to measure life.  He is the lover
+living it, the poet delighting in it.
+
+The secret of Jesus lay in his sense of the "kingdom of God" within
+him,--of obedience, peace, and joy, which was in itself sufficient.
+Simply to communicate and impart that was to spread the Kingdom among men.
+
+A teacher like John the Baptist--possessed by the idea of righteousness,
+and of the world's deficiency, but without tranquillity in his own
+heart--could look only for a divine interposition, a catastrophe.  John
+is a sort of Carlyle.  But Jesus, hearing him, and brooding the deeper
+truth, goes about proclaiming a present heaven.
+
+The marks of this inner state defined themselves against the conditions
+of life he saw about him.
+
+Thus, he shows his estimate of wealth in the story of the young ruler.
+"Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor!"
+
+Toward the other prize which men most seek, reputation, his feeling is
+expressed to the two brethren asking chief places: "He that will be chief
+among you, let him be your servant."
+
+As to learning, intellectual attainment, his characteristic word is,
+"Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed
+them unto babes."  "Be as little children."
+
+The prevalent forms of religious observance he quietly acquiesced in,
+except where they barred the free play of human charity.  Then he set the
+form aside, as being only the servant of the spirit.  "The Sabbath was
+made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
+
+Such was his attitude toward wealth, honor, intellectual wisdom,
+ceremonial.
+
+
+Toward the outcasts, the publican and harlots, his attitude was of pure
+compassion.  Toward the Pharisees it was denunciatory.  Wealth of
+ceremony and poverty of spirit, self-complacency mixed with scorn for
+others and with hostility to new light and love, roused in him a wrath
+which broke in lightning-flashes.  "Woe unto you! whited sepulchres full
+of dead men's bones, children of hell!"
+
+In the ethics of Jesus chastity has a high place, yet he has few words
+about it.  His is an exalted and ardent goodness, of which purity is an
+almost silent element.  His effect is like that of a noble woman, whose
+presence is felt as an atmosphere.  When he speaks, his words set the
+highest mark,--"Be pure in _heart_."
+
+We may contrast the scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene with that
+between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota.  The philosopher is proof
+against allurement, and gives kindly advice, which clearly will have no
+effect; Jesus, without conscious effort, wakes a passion of repentance
+which transforms the life.  So again we may compare the check which
+Epictetus prescribes against undue tenderness, "Say while you kiss your
+child, he is mortal," with the habitual attitude of Jesus toward
+children,--taking them in his arms, and saying, "Of such is the kingdom
+of heaven."  It is in such scenes as these--in his relations especially
+with women and with children--that we best see the genius of the heart,
+the newness which came into the world with Jesus.
+
+While dwelling in an inner realm of joy, he had the keenest sense of the
+sin and sorrow in men's lives.  "He was filled with compassion for the
+multitude, as sheep having no shepherd."  Their epilepsies,
+leprosies,--the hardness of heart, the insensibility to the higher
+life,--these moved him with a great pity.  Scarcely save in little
+children did he see the heart-free joy, the natural freedom and
+happiness, which was his own.  The hard-heartedness of the rich, the
+scorn of the self-righteous for the outcasts, moved his indignation.
+Thus the holy happiness of his own life was mingled with a profound sense
+of the trouble of other lives.
+
+His reading of the trouble was very simple: there were but two forces in
+the world, moral good and evil, God and Satan, and God was shortly to
+give an absolute triumph to the good.
+
+Among the chief impressions he made was that of commanding power.  He
+must have been full of healthy and majestic manhood.  Women and children
+were attracted to him, as the weak are attracted by the strong.  In the
+storm on the lake, his spirit so rose above the elemental rage--as if
+upborne with delight by the sublime scene--that his companions forgot
+their fears, and in the remembrance it appeared to them that the sea and
+wind grew calm at his word.  His strength seemed to impart itself to the
+weak, his health to the sick.  The stories of marvel which richly
+embroider the whole story are partly the halos of imagination investing a
+personality which commanded, charmed, inspired.
+
+Sometimes evil was considered the work of wicked spirits,--so especially
+in cases of lunacy.  Over some such cases Jesus had a peculiar power.  He
+even imparted this power to some of the disciples, who caught his
+inspiration.  The disciples, and probably Jesus, believed that this power
+extended to other sicknesses.  Of the uniformity of nature there is no
+recognition in the New Testament.  Man's power over events is believed to
+be measured by his spiritual nearness to God.  "If ye have faith as a
+grain of mustard seed," ye can cast mountains into the sea.
+
+When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, it
+needs to see manifested there the divinity it has felt.  Jesus found this
+manifestation partly in his power through faith to do "mighty works,"
+partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom.
+
+These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul always
+and everywhere finds the divine presence.  Man himself masters the forces
+of nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher power
+working through him.  And he looks for a better future for himself and
+for mankind.
+
+But the peculiarity of Jesus--looked at from a modern standpoint--was
+that he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conduct
+with a simple belief that in the course of events only moral and
+spiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over nature
+in proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in God; and that
+the whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divine
+interposition.  These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with his
+ardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek and
+save the lost.
+
+In his teaching, God feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birds
+and clothes the grass.  There is no need that they should be anxious
+about their physical wants.  Their troubles will be banished if they will
+pray in faith.  Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish before
+the presence of the trusting child of God.  All the injustice and wrong
+of the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention of
+God.  It is the old anthropomorphic idea of God--the idea of the Prophet
+and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender,
+through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of
+exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary
+interpretation of the world.
+
+What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the most
+attractive human analogy.  If even an unjust human judge yields to the
+importunity of a petitioner, much more will the divine judge listen to
+the cry of the wronged and suffering.  If a human father gives bread to
+his children when they ask, much more will the divine father.
+
+We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and
+the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time.  The force in him
+which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the
+higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight.  This
+insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life.
+But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to the
+procedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science.  To the Jew
+of the New Testament period,--to Paul as much as to the fishermen of
+Galilee,--the world was directly administered by a personal being who
+habitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events.
+The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a different
+conception.  Thinkers like Aristotle had assumed the constancy of nature
+as the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it.
+But the great mass of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entire
+Jewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divine
+personality.  What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was that
+it attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied the
+highest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed multitude representing
+evil as well as good impulses.  All Jewish history was written on this
+hypothesis.  The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the Old
+Testament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or the
+individual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power.
+The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by the
+Jew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were only
+more marked and special instances of God's working.  That a man
+especially beloved of God for his goodness should be given power to heal
+the blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his loving
+compassion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall the
+hypocrite.
+
+It seems clear that Jesus, not less than his disciples, regarded his
+power over physical ills as just as truly an incident of his character
+and mission as was the power to inspire conduct and reclaim the erring.
+What differentiated him from them was that he held the physical marvels
+of far less relative account than they did.  Obscure as the detailed
+narratives must remain to us, it seems unmistakable that he habitually
+discouraged all publicity and prominence for his works of healing.  His
+spiritual genius showed him that the stimulation of curiosity and
+expectation in this direction diverted men from the principal business of
+life, and the essential purport of his message,--to love, obey, and trust.
+
+The point at which the idea of divine intervention most seriously
+affected his work seems to have been in his growing expectation of a
+speedy consummation which should in a day establish on earth the kingdom
+of truth and righteousness.  His earlier teachings include striking
+utterances upon the gradual development of character in man, the slow
+ripening of society, as in the parables of the leaven and the sower.
+Here he was on the firm ground of his own observation and consciousness.
+But as the problem of his own mission pressed for an explicit solution;
+as the lofty passion of the idealist, the yearning tenderness of the
+lover of men, were thwarted and baffled by the prodigious inertia of
+humanity,--so he was thrown back more and more on that promise of some
+swift catastrophic judgment and triumph which was the closing word of
+ancient prophecy, and which seemed to answer the cry of his soul.
+
+The later chapters of the synoptic Gospels are intensely colored with
+this anticipation of a divine judgment close at hand.  The promise, the
+threat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the early
+church.  They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church.  But that
+modern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment of
+all its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away from
+all this millennial prophecy; to weaken or ignore its significance, or to
+attribute it to the misconception of the disciples.  This modern
+Christianity fastens its attention on those teachings of purely spiritual
+and universal truth in which Jesus indeed spoke as never other man spoke.
+This exclusive insistence on the ethical and spiritual element may
+suffice for those to whom Christ is an ideal or a divinity.  But if we
+are to study the historical development of our religion, and not merely
+its present form, it seems necessary to recognize this belief in the
+Judgment and Advent as a very important factor in the story.
+
+Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstanding
+almost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom the
+prophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divine
+kingdom on earth.  The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospels
+is pervaded by this idea.  The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, the
+splendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents of
+teaching and event, the overstrained eagerness,--which will not suffer a
+son to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculous
+fruit,--all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with this
+tremendous expectation.
+
+That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this anticipation seems
+due to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elements
+which somehow mingle with human destiny.  He was not thinking chiefly of
+himself,--not even though he was to be God's vicegerent.  What filled his
+heart, was the destiny of men.  He wept over Jerusalem,--he mourned for
+those who would go away into darkness.  The realities of human
+experience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him.
+
+It seems plain--so far as anything can be plain in the details of the
+story--that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritual
+idealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the established
+religion.  He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy would
+there take an acute form, with the gravest issues.  At times the presage
+rose of his own defeat and death.  Suppose that were to happen?
+Still--so spoke his victorious faith--God's cause would triumph.  And it
+would triumph speedily and visibly.  So he heartened his followers for
+any event.  "Be prepared--you who are to me brothers and sisters and
+mother--be prepared even for my death.  All the same, my truth will
+vindicate itself, God will triumph, you shall be saved!"
+
+Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther.  Gorgeous
+buildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it a
+mass of greed, formality, worldliness.
+
+A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure.  The disciples
+childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes
+him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not one
+stone be left upon another."
+
+His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act which
+shall blaze upon the dull multitude the sense of their sinful state.  He
+goes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers and
+merchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade.
+This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handle
+against him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and they
+speedily bring about his ruin.
+
+The life of Jesus culminates in the scenes of the last night.  At the
+supper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing self-devotion
+expresses himself in that poetry of humble objects which was
+characteristic of him, and with passionate intensity.  "This bread is my
+body."  "This wine is my blood."  "I give myself for you."
+
+The scene in Gethsemane shows the dismay and recoil of the hour when his
+ardent faith met full the stern actuality.  God was not to interfere,
+defeat and death were before him.  All was hidden, save a fate which rose
+upon his imagination in dark terror.  "O my Father, if it be possible,
+let this cup pass from me!"  Then comes the victory of absolute
+self-surrender, "Not my will, but thine, be done."
+
+
+The birth-hour of the religion of Jesus was that in which he began to
+declare forgiveness to the outcast and good tidings to the poor.  But the
+birth-hour of Christianity, as the worship of Jesus, was that in which
+Mary Magdalene saw her master as risen and eternally living.
+
+The impulse which caught up and gave wings to his work just when it
+seemed crushed came from the heart of Mary.  In a spiritual sense the
+mother of Christianity was a woman who had been a sinner, and was
+forgiven because she loved much.  The faith that sent the disciples forth
+to conquer the world was the faith that their Lord was not dead but
+living, not a memory but a perpetual presence.  That conviction first
+flashed into the heart of Mary.  It was born of a love stronger than
+death, the love of a rescued soul for its savior.  It sprang up in a mind
+simple as a child's, incapable of distinguishing between what it felt and
+what it saw, between its own yearning or instinct and the actualities of
+the outward world.  It took bodily form under a glow of exaltation that
+knew not itself, whether in the body or out of the body.  It crystallized
+instantly into a story of outward fact.  It communicated itself by
+sympathetic intensity to other loving and credulous hearts.  They too saw
+the heavenly vision.  Its acceptance as a reality became the corner-stone
+of the new society.  About it grew up, in ever increasing fullness and
+definiteness of outline, a whole supernal world of celestial
+personalities.  But the initial fact was the heart's conviction--Jesus
+lives!  Our friend and master is not in the grave, nor in the cold
+underworld; he is the child of the living God, and he draws us toward him
+in that divine and eternal life.
+
+To get some partial comprehension of how the belief in Jesus'
+resurrection took possession of the disciples' minds, we are to remember
+that during the last months of their master's life he was in a state of
+tense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them.
+Something wonderful was just about to happen.  There was to be a sudden
+and amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of God
+was to triumph and thenceforth to reign.  But the way to this
+consummation might lead through the valley of the shadow of death.  In
+the soul of Jesus a sublime hope and a dark presage alternated and
+mingled.  It is not to be supposed that he held a definite and unchanging
+conception.  Cloud-shadows and sunbursts played by turns across him, with
+the intensity natural to a soul of vast emotions.  Constant through it
+all was the fixed purpose to be true to his mission, and with victorious
+recurrence came his confidence in the divine issue.  His sympathetic
+disciples were vaguely, profoundly stirred by this elemental struggle and
+victory.  They too became intensely expectant of some great catastrophe
+and triumph.  After the first shock of the Master's death, all this
+emotion surged up in them afresh, with their love heightened as death
+always heightens love, with the fresh and vivid memories of their leader
+sweeping them on in the current of his purpose and hope and faith.  His
+words were true,--he must, he will, conquer and reign.  If he has gone to
+the underworld, he will live again.  "Will,"--nay, is he not here with us
+now?  Is he not more real to our thought and love than ever before?  And
+first in one mind, then in another, the conviction flashes into bodily
+image.  Mary has seen the Master!  Peter has seen him!  And for a little
+time--for "forty days"--the electric air seems often to body forth that
+luminous shape.  The story, as it grew with years, took on one detail
+after another, became definite and coherent, was accepted as the charter
+and foundation of the little society.
+
+To rightly understand the faith of the disciples in the risen Christ, we
+must look below the stories of sense-appearance in which that faith
+clothed itself.  What they essentially felt--what distinguished their
+faith from a mere opinion or dogma--was not a mere expectation, "The dead
+_will_ rise;" not a mere fact of history, "Some one _did_ rise;" it was
+the conviction and consciousness, "Our friend _is living_."  It was an
+experience--including and transcending memory and hope--of present love,
+present communion, present life.
+
+Sight and speech lent their forms to clothe the ineffable experience of
+Mary and the disciples.  For us, the story of outward events--the visible
+form, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating up
+into the clouds--all this fades away as a mirage.  The reality below this
+symbol--the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life--this
+abides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as an
+instance and counterpart of the message which in every age comes to the
+bereaved heart--of a love greater than loss, a life in which death is
+swallowed up.
+
+The religion of the followers of Jesus became a centring of every
+affection, obligation, and hope, in him.
+
+For the first few years all this was merged in the eager expectation of
+his return.  While this lasted in its fullness, even memory was far less
+to them than hope.  They did not attempt any complete records of his
+earthly life,--what need of that, when the life was so soon to be
+resumed?  The bride on the eve of her marriage is not reading her old
+love-letters,--she is looking to the morrow.
+
+That first eager flush had already passed when the earliest gospels were
+written.  By that time hope had begun to prop its wavering confidence, by
+looks turned back even to a remote past.  Hence the constant appeals to
+the supposed predictions of the Old Testament; hence even the imagining
+of special events in the life of Jesus to fulfill those predictions.
+
+The Old Testament as conceived by the writers of the New is fantastically
+unlike the original writings.  The Evangelists found Messianic prophecies
+everywhere.  The writers of the Epistles, Paul and the rest, dealt with
+ceremonies and histories as a quarry out of which to hew whatever
+allegory or argument suited their purpose.
+
+In Luke's Gospel we first see fully displayed the idea of Christ which
+took possession of the common mind, and has largely held it ever
+since,--a personal Savior,--a gracious, merciful, all-powerful deliverer.
+It is a gospel of the imagination and the heart--inspired by the actual
+Jesus, but half-created by ardent, adoring imagination.
+
+This conception grew up side by side with Paul's.  It is far closer to
+the popular mind and heart than Paul's idea,--his was philosophic and
+metaphysic; this is pictorial.  Paul has been studied by theologians, but
+the Gospels have given the Christ of the common people.
+
+The early church was divided into two parties, of which one was led by
+Paul, who stood for the free inclusion of all who would accept Jesus as
+the Messiah, and would impose no further requirement of ceremony or
+dogma, trusting all to the guidance of "the Spirit"--the Spirit of which
+the sufficient fruit and evidence was "love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
+gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance."  The other party, led
+by disciples who had known and followed Jesus himself, maintained that
+the entire Jewish law was still in force, and treated Paul as a dangerous
+heretic.  To narrate the struggle and the final reconcilement is beyond
+the purpose of this book, but we must pause a moment on the figure of
+Paul.
+
+It marks the extraordinary force and vividness of Paul's character, that
+in a few pages of letters, in which the autobiography is only brief and
+incidental, he has so displayed himself that few historical characters
+are more familiar.
+
+We see him,--deep-hearted, vehement, irascible, tender, self-assertive;
+intensely bent on the higher life; thwarted in that aspiration by unruly
+passion,--lust of the flesh and pride of the spirit; stumbling,
+stammering, conquering; a nature full of internal conflict, brought into
+harmony by one sublime spiritual affection; thenceforth throwing its
+whole energy into the diffusion of a like harmony throughout this world
+of troubled conflict.
+
+We see a mind guided in its deepest workings by the realities of personal
+experience, but wholly untrained in logic, unversed in accurate
+knowledge; acquainted with history only through the Old Testament;
+ignorant of the philosophy of Greece; taught by intimate association with
+many men and women in their deepest personal experiences; familiar by
+travel and observation with the broad life of the time, and judging it
+from a lofty ethical standpoint; wholly credulous as to miracle; wholly
+confident in its own theories--theories gendered in the strangest wedding
+of fact and fancy; using constantly the form of argument, which often is
+pure fantasy; illumined by gleams of spiritual insight, which sometimes
+broaden into pure radiance; striving always to express the conscious fact
+of a great freedom of the soul which binds it fast to all duty; aiming at
+a human society dominated wholly and solely by the same spiritual
+principle; but often clothing both the personal and social ideal in forms
+of thought which have become obsolete, so that for us to-day his truth
+has to be stated in other language, and broadened by other truths.
+
+Where Paul has always touched men closest is in the earnestness and
+difficulty of his struggle for the good life, and in the sense of a
+celestial aid,--he calls it "the love of Christ,"--which somehow brings
+habitual victory in the conflict, and sheds peace in its pauses, and
+gives assurance of ultimate triumph and perfect fruition.
+
+The main theme for which Paul contends in most of his epistles was vital
+to the life of the early church,--that its members were not to be held to
+observance of the Jewish ritual.  In support of that theme, Paul develops
+his philosophy of the universe.  The main lines of that philosophy are
+essentially these: that when God had created man, man's sin incurred the
+penalty of death; that God chose the Jews as his peculiar people, and
+gave them the code of laws contained in the books of Moses; that the law
+was too difficult for weak human nature to perfectly obey, so that death
+still reigned on earth, with dire penalty impending in the afterworld;
+that God then had recourse to another plan.  He sent his Son into the
+world, who became a man, taking on him that fleshly nature which is the
+occasion and the symbol of human transgression, but which he wore in
+perfect holiness.  God then caused this fleshly nature of Jesus to die
+upon the cross, while the spiritual nature outlived the perishing body,
+appeared in radiant form to men, and returned to the eternal realm.  By
+this visible sign God made proclamation to mankind, "Die unto sin by
+forsaking sin, and I will give you holiness which issues in eternal life.
+The death and resurrection of my son, Jesus Christ, are the token and
+promise of my free gift, which only asks your acceptance.  Accept it, by
+turning from sin, and you shall receive the sense of companionship with
+Christ, and the consciousness of a divine power working in you and in the
+world.  Of set laws you have no longer need; rites and ceremonies were
+but the type of the reality which now is freely given to you.  Your sole
+obligation is to love; your fidelity to that shall constantly merge in
+the sense of joyful freedom; the imperfect attainment of earth shall
+issue into the eternal felicity of heaven."
+
+In such language we try to restate Paul's philosophy.  Thus, or somewhat
+thus, he thought.  Just how he thought we can never be sure, nor does it
+matter.  The mould of his belief was so different from ours that all
+which closely concerns us is to discern if we can what was the kernel of
+genuine experience, the permanent reality and truth, which vivified this
+world-scheme.
+
+In Paul before his conversion we see the man who struggles to conform to
+a standard of conduct so high, exacting, and minute, that it touches
+every particular of life, and who yet is beset by a constant sense of
+failure and disappointment.  From this slough of despond he is
+lifted--how?  By the sense of a love which extends to him from the unseen
+world.  It takes form to him as the personal love of one who has lived,
+has died, and in some inexpressible way still lives.  This friendship in
+the unseen world is the sufficient, the absolute pledge of a God who
+loves and saves.  No matter what be the theory about it, of incarnation
+or atonement, here is the reality as it comes home: the man Jesus,
+highest, noblest, dearest, makes himself real and present to me, though
+long ago he died and was laid in the grave.  This one fact carries answer
+enough for all the craving of heart and soul.  That I shall at last
+triumph over all besetting evils, that the ruler of the universe is my
+friend, that earth is the vestibule of heaven,--all this I can joyfully
+believe when once I have the sense of that single human friend still
+befriending me in the unseen world.
+
+This was what the risen Christ meant to the early church.  This was the
+common belief that bound its two parties, the Jewish and the Pauline
+Christians, at last into one.  This was what gave the full meaning to all
+the stories of Jesus told over and over and at last written down.  This
+was what fired the common heart of mankind as not the wisdom of Plato nor
+the nobility of Epictetus had touched it.
+
+Paul's experience is the more remarkable because he had never even seen
+Jesus in the flesh.  He had borne in a sense a personal relation to him,
+in the fact that he had hated and persecuted his followers.  The
+conviction that he had been in the wrong came to him with a tremendous
+revulsion of feeling.  The poignancy of remorse was followed by an
+exquisite sense of forgiveness, which shed its depth and tenderness on
+his whole after-life.  In him we first see the power of the personality
+of Jesus to touch those who never had seen him.
+
+At such points we feel how shallow is the plummet-line with which our
+so-called psychology measures the "soul" it deals with.  The influence,
+the presence, the living love, of one who has died,--how paradoxical, how
+unintelligible, to our human science; how significant to our human
+experience!
+
+What concerns us historically as to Paul is that he was the conspicuous
+agent in transforming this sentiment into a moral force.  The belief that
+Jesus was risen had great emotional power, but that emotion might easily
+waste itself, might even undermine the solid foundations of character.
+Paul held the belief in its literal form, but it had for him a further
+significance, as the symbol and type of the soul's experience in its
+every-day walk.  The death we are most concerned about is the extinction
+of evil act and desire.  Life--the only life worth thinking of, here or
+hereafter--is lofty, pure, and tender life.  Die to sin, live to
+holiness, and present or future is safe with God.
+
+Paul's theology is in one sense a passage in a long chapter of
+pseudo-science.  It is one of a series of attempts to explain the
+universe from a starting-point of fable.  These have been the
+accompaniment--sometimes as help, sometimes as obstacle--of a spiritual
+life far deeper than the stammering language they found.  And it is to be
+noted that Paul himself when at his best rises above his theology or
+forgets it.  The words of his which have lodged deepest in the world's
+heart are the vital precepts of conduct, and the utterances of love and
+hope.  In one matchless passage, he celebrates "charity"--simple human
+love--as the one sufficient, supreme, and eternal good.
+
+Some misconceptions in his philosophy became the fruitful seeds of
+mischievous harvests.  One such seed was the ambiguous sense of
+"faith"--the confusing of intellectual credence with moral fidelity.
+This misconception--which underlies much of the New Testament--was an
+almost inevitable incident of a religion generated as this was.
+Christianity based itself, in its own theory, on the bodily resurrection
+of Jesus from the dead.  This was offered as a basis for the whole appeal
+which the church made to the world.  Thus Belief--or Credulity--usurped
+the place among the virtues which of right belongs to Truth.
+
+Another misconception lay in the use of "flesh," the antithesis of
+"spirit," as the name of the evil principle.  Paul indeed uses "the
+flesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin.  With him it equally
+includes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride and
+self-seeking.  But the nomenclature and the way of thought which it
+reflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man.  In that
+stigma lay the germ of asceticism, hostility to marriage, depreciation of
+some vital elements of man's nature.
+
+Paul's conception of the church never was fully realized.  He expected to
+see the whole body of believers filled with a "holy spirit," a
+divine-human inspiration, which should of itself guide them into all
+truth and duty.  Outward law or doctrine there needed none, beyond the
+acceptance of Christ as God's son who had lived and died and risen.
+Accept that, and the divine spirit would be given you.  No need then of
+circumcision or sacrifice, of Sabbath or fast, of written code or human
+ruler.  The saint is free from all law but that of love; the company of
+saints needs no control or guidance but that.
+
+The beautiful ideal shattered itself against a stubborn fact.  Love of
+Christ did not guide his followers into all truth, or into harmony with
+each other.  Paul's life was half spent in a bitter contest with men who
+loved Christ as well as he did.  His epistles are full of the struggle
+with that great party of Christ's followers who called him a heretic and
+sought to win away his converts.  Suppose any one had asked him: "You say
+the spirit of Christ will guide his followers into all truth,--why does
+it not guide these Christian Jews and you into so much of truth as will
+make you friends instead of foes?"
+
+Paul was hoping too much.  The new impulse in the world--sublime,
+beautiful, full of power and promise--was by no means sufficient to lead
+the world straight and sure to harmonious perfection.  There was no such
+gift of "the spirit" as to supersede all search, all struggle, all human
+leadership and human groping.  That hope was almost as exaggerated as the
+expectation--with which in Paul's mind it mingled--of Christ's bodily
+return.  The road to be traveled by mankind was still long and arduous.
+
+
+Any complete history of the early church must deal largely with the
+stubborn and bitter contest between the Jewish and Pauline parties,--the
+champions of the law and the champions of liberty.  That contest gave its
+stamp to the epistles of Paul, and was indeed their most frequent
+occasion.  At a later time the attempt to harmonize the two parties seems
+to have given birth to the book of Acts, in which history mixes with
+fiction.  But we are here concerned only with such features of the
+history as made the most vital and permanent contributions to religion,
+and for this purpose we need only specify the Epistle to the Ephesians.
+
+This epistle opens the heart of the early church.  It assumes to be
+written by Paul, but there are some indications that this name was
+borrowed by the real author.  This assumption of a great name, so common
+in this age, as in the books of Daniel, Wisdom of Solomon, Enoch, and
+others, marks a timidity, a deference to authority of the past.  Only the
+greatest, like Jesus and Paul, dared to speak in their own name.
+
+Primarily the epistle is a plea for unity between Jewish and Gentile
+Christians,--broadening into an appeal for unity between all classes and
+individuals, an appeal for purity and holiness, in the name of Christ the
+head.  Occasional sentences and phrases will sufficiently show its tenor
+and spirit.
+
+"That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye, being rooted and
+grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the
+breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ,
+which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of
+God."
+
+"There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of
+your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all
+who is above all and through all and in you all."  "Endeavoring to keep
+the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
+
+Each has his appointed place, some as apostles, some as prophets, some
+for humbler service,--for "the building up of the body of Christ," "till
+we all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son
+of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the
+fullness of Christ."
+
+"Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are
+members one of another."  "Let him that stole steal no more, but rather
+let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he
+may have to give to him that needeth."
+
+The note of purity is far higher than in Stoic or Platonist.  Uncleanness
+is spurned with the horror which pure love and holiness inspire.
+
+"Fornication, and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be once
+named among you, as becometh saints.  Neither filthiness, nor foolish
+talking, nor jesting, which are not becoming, but rather giving of
+thanks.  For this ye know, that no whoremonger nor unclean person nor
+covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of
+Christ and of God.  Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because
+of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of
+disobedience."  "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled
+with the spirit."
+
+There is a tender exhortation to husband and wife, based on the likeness
+of their union to Christ and his church.  There is a special word to
+children, servants, masters.  The sweetness is matched by the strength.
+"Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his
+might."
+
+The epistle is full of the spirit of a present heaven.  There is scarcely
+any thought of the future, no reference to the second coming, no dwelling
+on the hereafter.  It is all-sufficient, all-uniting love,--Christ, a
+spiritual presence, as the head--God the Father of all.  The love of
+Christ is a pure spiritual passion.  There is no theorizing about him,
+not even much personal distinctness,--only the consciousness as of some
+celestial personality.  The seen and unseen worlds seem to blend in a
+common atmosphere.
+
+Even as an ideal, this transcends the philosophy of Epictetus, and
+outshines the vision of Plato.  As one of the charter documents of a
+society which had come into an actual existence,--as the aim toward which
+thousands of men and women were struggling, however imperfectly,--it
+marks the coming of a new life into the world.
+
+
+The Pauline idea of Christ is shown as it worked itself out in the brain
+and heart of Paul himself.  In the Fourth Gospel we have, not the
+experience of an individual, but an idealized portrait of the Master.
+
+The germ may have lain in some genuine tradition of his words, as they
+were caught and treasured by some disciple more susceptible than the rest
+to the mystical and contemplative element in Jesus.  These words, handed
+down through congenial spirits, and deeply brooded; these ideas caught by
+minds schooled in the blending of Hebraic with Platonic thought,--minds
+accustomed to rely on the contemplative imagination as the discloser of
+absolute truth; the waning of the hope of Messiah's return in the clouds;
+the growth in its place of a personal and interior communion with the
+divine beauty and glory as imaged in Jesus; a temper almost indifferent
+to outward event, too full of present emotion to strain anxiously toward
+a future, yet confident of a transcendent future in due season; an
+assumption that in this belief lay the sole good and hope of humanity,
+and that the rejection of this was an impulse of the evil principle
+warring against God; the crystallization of these memories, hopes, and
+beliefs into a dramatic portraiture of acts and words appropriate to
+Christ as so conceived; a temper in which a portraiture so inspired was
+identified with actual and absolute truth--some such genesis we may
+suppose for the Gospel which bears the name of John.
+
+The writer shows no such close contact with the actual struggle of life
+as vivifies the other biographies of Jesus and the impassioned pleadings
+of Paul.  He is a pure and lofty soul, but he writes as if in seclusion
+from the world.  His favorite words are abstract and general.  The
+parable and precept of the early gospels give place to polemic and
+metaphysic disquisition.  The Christian communities for which he writes
+have left behind them the sharp antagonisms of the first generation, and
+have drawn together into a harmonious society, strong in their mutual
+affection, their inspiring faith, and their rule of life, and facing
+together the cruelty of the persecutor and the scorn of the philosopher.
+To this writer, all who are outside of the Christian fold and the
+Christian belief seem leagued together by the power of evil.  The secret
+of their perversity and the seal of their doom is unbelief.  Let them
+accept the Christ he portrays, and good shall supplant evil in their
+hearts.  The ground of the acceptance is to be simply the self-evident
+beauty and therefore the self-evident truth of the Christ here set forth.
+
+And so we have a portrayal of Christ which at many points profoundly
+appeals to the heart, yet which constantly dissipates into a metaphysical
+mythology; together with the admonition that only a full belief can save
+the soul and the world from ruin.  The ethical and emotional elements of
+the new religion have thoroughly fused with the elements of dogma and
+exclusiveness.
+
+A kind of self-exaltation is by this writer imputed to Jesus, which is as
+much less attractive than his attitude in the Synoptics as it is less
+genuine.  "All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers"--this is
+the word of an idolatrous worshiper; far different from him whose only
+sense of superiority was expressed in a longing to impart his own
+treasure: "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will
+give you rest."
+
+But the writer rises to a lofty plane where he conceives the parting
+words of Jesus to his friends.  Here he is on the ground of what we know
+did in some wise really happen--a last interview between the Master and
+his disciples, when clouds of defeat and death lowered close before him,
+and his words deepened in their hearts the devotion which animated all
+their after-lives.  That parting scene, preserved elsewhere in
+delineations brief and impressive, was now expanded by the brooding,
+creative thought of some one in closest sympathy with the occasion and
+with the vital impulse it had given.  Literal and historical fidelity the
+description may lack, but it is in close accord with the realities of
+experience.  The tender assurances, the prophecies beyond hope, which the
+Master is here supposed to speak, had indeed been fulfilled.  The loss of
+his earthly presence had been more than made good to those in whose lives
+he had been felt as a saving power.  The Comforter had truly come.  The
+mutual love of the disciples, and their loyalty to the Master as they
+understood him, had planted a new social force in the world, and was
+working slowly to transform the world.  Thoughts which had been the
+possession of philosophers in the schools were become working forces in
+the lives of common men and women and children.  That deliverance from
+the fear of death which thinkers had vainly sought had been won even by
+the poor and lowly.  All this and more was set forth as in a psalm or
+prophecy, in the parting words ascribed to Christ.
+
+"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world
+giveth give I unto you."  "Ye shall see me again, and your hearts shall
+rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you."
+
+
+The predominant notes of the New Testament are tenderness and ardor, but
+inwrought with these is a vein of terror and sometimes of fierce wrath.
+It is like the denunciation in the Old Testament, to which the vision of
+a future world has added a more lurid hue.  "Asia's rancor" has not
+disappeared, even in the presence of "Bethlehem's heart."  Among the
+words attributed to Jesus are the threat of that perdition where the worm
+dieth not and the fire is not quenched.  To him is ascribed (whether
+truly or not) the story of Dives in hell, and father Abraham in whose
+bosom Lazarus is reposing denies even his prayer for a drop of water to
+cool his tongue.  Here is the germ of all the horrors of the mediaeval
+imagination.  The germs bore an early fruitage in that book which bears
+the name of "Revelation."  It mirrors the passions which spring up amid
+the heats of faction and of persecution.  Fell hatred fills its pages for
+the persecutor and for the heretic.  The few gleams of Paradise for the
+saved are pale in comparison with the ghastly terrors.  It is the first
+full outbreak of that disease of the imagination, bred of disease of the
+heart, which was to be the curse of Christianity.
+
+
+We have dwelt upon the central facts and ideas in which Christianity took
+its rise.  We shall pass with a few brief glances over a tract of many
+centuries.  Our special concern in this work is with the birth-periods of
+the vital and lasting principles of man's higher life.  One such phase
+was the Greek-Roman philosophy of which the best outcome was Stoicism.
+Another critical era was the birth of Christianity from its immediate
+lineage of Judaism.  The next great epoch is the marriage of rational
+knowledge with the spiritual life--which is the story of these last
+centuries, in mid-action of which we are standing.
+
+Viewing man's higher life upon its intellectual side, the common
+characteristic of the period between the time of the Apostles and our
+immediate forefathers is the prevalence of what may be called the
+Christian mythology.  In other words, the moral rules and spiritual
+ideals were almost inextricably bound up with and based upon the
+conception of a supernatural world, certainly and definitely known, and
+disclosed to mankind through a series of revelations which centred in the
+incarnation of God in the man Jesus Christ.  Upon this basis was reared a
+vast intellectual and imaginative structure--embodied in many creeds,
+pictured in visions of Dante and Milton and Bunyan, enforced by
+multitudinous appeals to emotion and reason, to love, hope, and terror.
+
+It is the dissolving of this elaborate supernaturalism, and the growth of
+a different conception of the spiritual life, which is now going on
+before our eyes.  To measure the essential significance of the change, we
+need not linger long upon the successive steps by which the mythology
+expanded and solidified itself.  We have seen its germs in the story of
+Judaism, of Jesus and his immediate successors.  The method and nature of
+its growth may be briefly indicated.
+
+We are following only a single thread in the vast web of history.  All
+the threads work in together, but we must be well content if we can trace
+the general line of one or two.  It is the history of the moral ideas
+which have most directly and closely influenced the life of men, that we
+are trying to pursue.  There was a wonderful embodiment and outshining of
+such ideas in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.  The truth he
+taught and lived was in some ways made more applicable and transmissible
+by his followers, and in some ways lowered.  There grew up the society of
+the Christian church.  Gradually it took its place among the important
+forces of the Roman empire.  It won at last the nominal allegiance of the
+civilized world.  Aiding or thwarting it, coloring and changing it, were
+a thousand influences,--side-currents from other religions and
+philosophies, social changes, Roman law and tradition, the new life of
+the barbarians; old ingrained habits of blood and brain; the constant
+push of primal instincts--hunger and sex; tides of war and trade and
+industry; slavery and serfdom; strong human personalities, swaying a
+little the tide that bore them; all the myriad forces that are always at
+work in history.
+
+One can scarcely pass by a leap of thought from the age of Paul to the
+age of Dante without an instant's glance at the intervening tract.  There
+are the early Christian communities, bound together by tender ties of
+brotherhood; storms of persecution fanning high the flame of courage and
+faith; a new purity and sweetness of domestic life spreading itself like
+the coming of the dawn.  There are wild vagaries of the mind, taking
+shape in fantastic heresies.  There is the degeneracy of a faith held in
+pureness and peril into a popular and fashionable religion.  There are
+enthroned monsters like Nero and Commodus; "Christian" emperors, like
+Constantine, ambitious, crafty, and blood-guilty; and noble "heathen"
+emperors like Trajan and Aurelius.  There is the peace of the Empire in
+its best days, with some wide diffusion of prosperity and content.  There
+are incursions of barbarians--the strange, little-known life of nomadic
+tribes--with pristine virtues of valor and chastity, half-pictured,
+half-imagined, by Tacitus.  There is conquest, rapine, subjugation,
+suffering.  There are ages in which violence is master, and in the
+disordered struggle of the violent among themselves the weak are trampled
+under foot.  There are scenes of humble happiness and content, the toiler
+in the fields, the family about the hearth-stone, which scarcely are seen
+by the chronicler busy with kings and popes.  There are superstitions and
+mummeries; wild fears of spectres and devils; sentimental piety handed
+with cruelty and debauchery.  There are inward struggles, sorrows,
+achievements; rapturous glimpses, tender consolations; the ministry of
+faithful priests; the comforting of women and the purifying of men by the
+thought of the Virgin Mother and the saints.  There are civilizers in
+state and church,--Alfred, Charlemagne, Hildebrand.  There is the
+emergence of a social and ecclesiastical order; the ranking of kings,
+barons, and vassals; of priests, bishops, and popes; the establishment of
+laws and charters; the growth of liturgies and cathedrals.
+
+The contrast is great between the simplicity of a high moral ideal, like
+that of Jesus or Paul, which claims, and with such show of reason and
+right, the whole allegiance of man, and the vast complexity of good and
+evil in which the ideal works only as one obscure and partial element.
+How simple, how clear, how sweetly inviting sounds the call,--how strange
+and discordant the response!
+
+That inconsistency was explained by the church fathers, like Augustine,
+as due to the inherent badness of human nature.  That universal badness
+flowed from one sin of the common ancestor.  That sin was induced by the
+machinations of Satan, arch-enemy of God, and practically dividing the
+rule of the universe with him.  A logical and symmetrical explanation in
+its day, but it no longer explains.
+
+Neither does it explain, but it may profit, if the wondering inquirer
+turns his thoughts for a moment on his personal history.  He has had his
+hours of clear vision and high resolve,--why have they borne such poor
+fruit in his actual life?  His own riddle is one with the riddle of
+history.
+
+Again we may say, with no pretense of probing the mystery in its depths,
+but as gaining a touch of side-light, it is plain that what we look at as
+the strictly moral forces of mankind--the clear thinking, the definite
+purpose, the pure aspiration--must be reckoned with as only a part of the
+volume of force that carries along the individual and the race.  Other
+elements of that force are the physical needs; the push and play of
+passions ingrained in human nature; the inherited bias; the strength of
+habits formed before childhood had begun to reflect,--the thousand forces
+which blend with reason and choice to make up our destiny.  Man's noblest
+aim is to make reason and purpose the rulers in his little republic, but
+at the best those rulers must deal with a set of very vigorous and often
+mutinous subjects.
+
+Let us not at least wonder, though for the moment we sigh, that neither
+did the kingdom of God at once establish itself on earth, as Jesus hoped,
+nor did the Spirit guide mankind by a brief and sure path into full
+felicity and holiness, as Paul hoped.
+
+The disappointment is a blank contradiction only for those who assume a
+superhuman revelation in Scripture or in church, and then have to
+reconcile this infallibility with that most fallible groping by which
+alone mankind gets along.  Unembarrassed at least by that difficulty, let
+us note one natural cause of the imperfect progress of Christianity,
+namely, the substitution of fancy for clear and sound knowledge of nature
+and man, which was inwrought from the beginning in its creed.
+
+We may recall the piercing question of Socrates, "Can virtue be taught?"
+Can the best life be so clearly shown and so skillfully inculcated, that
+it may be transmitted from man to man and from generation to generation
+as surely and safely as the knowledge of a mechanical art or a physical
+science?  Socrates owned that he knew of no such way to teach
+virtue,--that while Pericles could teach his son to be a good horseman,
+he could not so guide him but that he became a bad man,--and Socrates
+himself found no sure way to guide men into the heroic path he walked
+himself.
+
+Now Christianity offered a sort of knowledge as the proper training to
+produce virtue.  Its knowledge included certain genuine and precious
+elements, such as the essential blessedness of purity and love; the trust
+and peace which flow from duty done; the hope which springs from the
+grave of a holy man;--ideas not new in substance, but wonderfully
+vivified and vitalized.  But along with this genuine knowledge,
+Christianity blended in ever-growing volume a pseudo-knowledge.  It had a
+professed explanation of the nature of Deity, the nature of humanity, and
+their mutual relation, which was so unreal that when applied to the
+conduct of human life its fruit was often as ashes and the east wind.
+
+To sum up the method by which Christianity wrought: its vital ideas of
+character were infolded in a triple crust of Authority, Ceremony, Dogma.
+Its ideas could scarcely have been propagated except under some such
+incrustation.  Pure gold must be mixed with alloy before it can be
+worked.  The new society would have quickly dissolved into chaos if it
+had not had established laws and usages and discipline and rulers.  The
+craving of the average man for definite symbols fastened eagerly on the
+cleansing water of baptism and the bread and wine of the love-feast.  The
+thoughtful mind must needs seek to assign to the Master his true place
+and relation as between God and man.  Here were the germs of hierarchy,
+ceremonial, and dogma.  Internal order, self-protection against
+persecuting emperors and then against barbarian invaders, led to a
+gradual strengthening and perfecting of the organization.  The craving
+for intellectual consistency and symmetry urged on the elaboration of the
+creed.
+
+That development of the Christian creed,--in one view, how natural and
+inevitable a process; yet what enormous waste of intellect, what
+diversion from sound inquiry!  The original hypothesis being pure fancy,
+all the ingenious deductions are mere excursions into cloudland.
+
+We need not follow in any detail these speculations.  A certain purity
+and loftiness marks their early stages, in which the Greek theologians
+were occupied in blending a sort of Platonic theory of deity with the
+historic fact of a noble human personality.  With the emergence of the
+church from persecution to power, we see that the intellectual degeneracy
+has set in along with the moral.  The first great council, that of
+Nicaea, occupied itself in settling by a majority of votes whether Christ
+was of _like_ substance with the Father or of the _same_ substance with
+the Father.  The assertion of his full equality was in due time followed
+by a similar definition of the personality and equality of the Holy
+Spirit, with the full doctrine of the Trinity; the double nature of
+Christ; the rank of the Virgin Mary.  The authoritative interpretation of
+human nature had its source in the personal experience and later
+theorizing of Augustine.  Himself emergent after long struggles from the
+tyranny of evil desire, by a transcendent experience in which he saw the
+hand of God,--he in effect generalized from this to the inherent and
+utter depravity of all mankind, and its entire dependence on a divine
+grace which might with equal justice be given or withheld.  The lurid
+hell which had always shared with a radiant heaven the imagination of the
+church took from Augustine a grimmer horror: in the fearful thought of
+men, its foundations were now deep sunk in eternal justice, man being
+himself from birth a wretch so abominable that hell was his natural
+destiny, save as mercy might by inscrutable selection deliver some
+portion of mankind.
+
+Later ages brought their own problems.  What was the nature of the
+atonement,--a compact between God and the Devil, by which Christ was made
+a ransom for man, the Devil being unexpectedly cheated of his pay?  Or
+was Christ's death simply the transfer of a debt on the books of divine
+justice?  The sacraments, again, what was their precise nature?  And so
+the scheme was worked out in all its details.
+
+The triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit; a hierarchy of angels; the
+creation of man, his seduction by a revolted and fallen angel, and the
+exposure of his entire posterity to the just retribution of everlasting
+misery; an arrangement between the persons of the Trinity by which the
+incarnation and death of the Son became a ransom for mankind; the
+establishment by Christ of a visible church, divinely guided to reveal to
+men the truth, and impart to them the divine grace; the offer of
+salvation upon condition of faith, repentance, and obedience; sacraments
+which were channels of divine grace; an endless heaven of bliss for the
+submissive and obedient, an endless hell of torment for the negligent or
+rebellious,--this was the universe as it existed to the belief and
+imagination of the Christian world for many centuries.
+
+Thus Christianity, instead of following a true inquiry into the facts of
+the moral life,--in place of cultivating that sound knowledge of man in
+which Socrates led the way, or that knowledge of the natural world in
+which Aristotle and the Greek physicists had wrought,--instead of such
+study, the church based its ideals, its appeals, its helps, on a purely
+fanciful interpretation of the universe.  Its refined and ingenious
+speculations were wasted upon a fantasy.
+
+This want of sound knowledge has for us here a twofold significance.  It
+points to one cause of the imperfect success of the ideals of Jesus and
+of Paul.  And by its defect it points us forward to a fulfillment, when
+at a later age Virtue and Knowledge should be wed.
+
+
+But we need to distinguish and to reverence the deep utterances of the
+human heart which spoke with stammering tongue in these crude symbols.
+
+The Catholic church was a second Roman empire in its extent and power,
+and with an inspiration loftier than that of the empire.  For, judged by
+what was most essential to it, the Catholic church--human to the core,
+human in its errors and sins, human in its upward striving--was, at its
+best, a society for disciplining men in the higher life.  And that creed
+which sounds so strange to our ears, we may best translate thus:
+_Eternity bids you to goodness_.  However much there was of error, of
+misapplied force, of moral injury, there was a vast, multiform, mighty
+culture of men in chastity, in charity, in the victories and the joys of
+the spirit.  The church set the Virgin Mother as a heavenly consoler, and
+showed as the divinest thing a man who died for love of men.  Before the
+imagination of the oppressor, the robber, the licentious, it set a
+flaming sword of retribution.  To the poor, the sorrowful, the
+broken-hearted, it offered the blessed assurance, _This world and the
+next are God's_.  It opened to them a communion in thought and feeling
+with holy and blessed souls in the invisible realm.  Life was hard and
+troublous; priests and bishops sometimes made the trouble worse; but
+there was the sense of a heavenly rule over all, the struggle toward a
+heavenly attainment.
+
+The whole moral appeal of the church rested on the superterrestrial world
+which it asserted and pictured.  It was a world whose existence was
+vouched solely by an inward assent of the mind.  For outward government,
+there were bishops and popes, kings and magistrates.  But all moral
+authority, all incitement to holiness, all spiritual joy and hope, rested
+on this unseen world as accepted by the mind.  Disbelieve, and all was
+lost!  And so, of necessity, _belief_ was the fundamental, the essential
+thing.  Obey the church, believe the creed,--that was the supreme double
+requirement.
+
+
+That imaginations when believed as these were believed exercised a mighty
+power is beyond question.  That the power was in a degree for good is
+also clear.  But the vast dislocation between the supposed and the real
+worlds involved enormous failure and waste.
+
+On the one hand, the whole tremendous imagery of the supernal world
+simply slipped off altogether from a great proportion of the men and
+women whose time and thought were absorbed in the toils and sorrows and
+pleasures of the world about them.  To make a future heaven and hell take
+any hold of them at all, the church had to translate its mysteries and
+sublimities into a very material and crude ceremonial.  It brought in
+penalties of a substantial sort,--penance and excommunication, the rack
+and the stake.  It constantly appealed to fear.  And after all, there
+remained always an enormous amount of stolid and mostly silent
+indifference and unbelief.  The priest said these things were so,--the
+priests all said so,--and the priest was backed by the bishop, and the
+bishop by the Pope.  Well, perhaps they knew--and perhaps they did n't.
+The chance that they were right made it worth while to go to church on
+Sunday, and to confession sometimes; to have one's children baptized; to
+avoid giving offense to the clergy; and to make sure of their good
+offices when one came to die.  But the belief in their heaven and hell
+was not strong enough to very much expel the greed, sloth, lust, avarice,
+pride to which men were prone.
+
+That same silent practical unbelief has been equally prevalent under all
+the forms of Protestant supernaturalism.  Part of it, no doubt, may be
+referred to the difficulty with which human nature responds to any appeal
+to look much beyond the immediate present.  But in great part too it
+springs from a suspicion of unreality in that supernatural world which
+the preacher so fluently and fervently declares.
+
+It may be said that in a more ignorant and credulous age the mass of men
+did believe unquestioningly in the teachings of the church.  But what
+hardly admits of debate is the misconception which the mediaeval church's
+doctrine involved as to some of the cardinal facts of life.
+
+This religion dealt with such primary facts of real life as the human
+body and its laws, the passion of sex, productive industry, the
+organization of society,--in short, with all the impulses, instincts, and
+powers of man,--through a cloud of misapprehension.
+
+The central misconception was the idea that this life is only significant
+as the antechamber to another.  Hence its occupations, responsibilities,
+joys, and troubles are of little account except as they are directly
+related to the other life.  This naturally bred a false attitude toward
+many of the subjects which both actually and of right do largely engage
+the attention of men.
+
+The body was regarded as not the servant but the enemy of the spirit.
+The highest state was celibacy, and marriage was a concession to human
+weakness.
+
+Study of nature was an unprofitable pursuit.  The charter of divine truth
+was the Bible, and its interpreter was the church.  Since this world was
+only the scene of a brief discipline, and was itself to pass away, it was
+idle to spend much study on it.
+
+Speculative thought was profitable only so long as it was a mere
+elucidation of the dogmas of the church.  As soon as those dogmas were
+even remotely questioned, the thinker's soul was in peril.  In repressing
+heretical suggestions by the sternest measures, the church was
+discharging a plain duty.
+
+Earthly pleasure was dangerous, but in suffering lay medicinal virtue.
+One mark of the saint was self-inflicted pain.  The highest symbol of
+religion was the cross, emblem of torture and death.
+
+The belief in a hell of endless suffering was the parent of a monstrous
+and ghastly brood of imaginations.  How far the dread thus inspired acted
+as a wholesome deterrent we can only guess.  Too well we know the torture
+it wrought in sensitive and apprehensive natures, the pangs of fear which
+mothers suffered, the sense of a curse overhanging a part of mankind,
+which even in our own day darkens many a life, and which in a more
+unquestioning age rested like a pall on countless hearts.
+
+Such were among the beliefs, the consistent and logical beliefs, of the
+mediaeval churchmen.  Thus the moral mischiefs which infested society had
+their roots partly in that conception of religion which in other
+directions bore noble fruit.
+
+
+Dante shows the culmination of the Catholic idea; he shows emerging from
+it a new idealization of human relations; and he stands as one of the
+master-spirits of humanity, to whom all after-ages listen reverently.
+
+There is in Dante a boundless terror and a boundless hope.  Compared with
+the antique world there is a new tenderness and a new remorse.  Hell,
+Purgatory, Heaven are the projections of man's fear, his purification,
+his hope.
+
+Dante shows the vision which had grown up and possessed the belief of
+men--a terror matched with a glory and tenderness.  But in Dante is a
+force beyond this theologic belief--the spiritual love of a man and
+woman.  It is personal, intense, pure, sacramental.  Thirteen hundred
+years of Christianity had inwrought a new purity.  Out of chivalry,
+half-barbaric, had grown a new sentiment toward woman.  If was truly a
+"new life."
+
+Through Dante's early story,--the vestibule by which we are led to the
+"Divina Commedia,"--through this "Vita Nuova," there runs a poignancy
+which has almost more of pain than pleasure.  Under an earthly symbol it
+is the vision of the ideal--the unattainable--the passion of the soul for
+what lies beyond its full grasp.
+
+In form Dante reproduces the Catholic theology.  In reality he lives by
+the ideal relation with Beatrice.  For him the true Purgatory is his
+self-reproach in her presence.  The boundless joy of reunion after a
+lifelong separation is checked on the threshold, that the intense light
+of that moment may illumine the soul's past unworthiness, and touch it
+with a remorse deeper than all the horrors of hell could awaken.  The
+anguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong is
+absolutely forgotten.  Then comes the full fruition, and the mated souls
+traverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches its
+reflection in the eyes of Beatrice.
+
+Yet, what does Dante show as the actuality of the world after thirteen
+centuries of Christianity?  He shows evil existing in its worst forms and
+in wide extent.  The horrors of the Inferno are the retribution which
+seemed to Dante appropriate for the crimes going on about him.  The sin
+whose punishment he depicts is not a figment of the theologians, an
+imaginary participation in Adam's trespass, or the mere human shadows
+against a dazzling ideal of purity.  In the men of his own time and in
+his own community he saw flagrant wrong of every sort,--lust, cruelty,
+treachery.  The physical hell he imagines in another world is the
+counterpart of the moral hell he sees about him in this world.  In his
+Inferno, Hate and Horror hold high carnival.  Much of it is to the modern
+reader like a frightful nightmare of the imagination.
+
+
+In the progress of the centuries, along with the growth of ethical and
+spiritual ideals has been the movement of coarser forces--often seeming
+to destroy the ethical, yet giving power for the upward movement.
+
+In the reconstruction of European society, the first power was that of
+military force.  Out of this grew feudalism,--a kind of order, with its
+own code of duties; and chivalry, with an atmosphere of noble sentiment
+running into fantasy.
+
+Next came the powers of wealth and of knowledge.  Wealth grew first by
+the association of craftsmen,--the guilds, the free cities.
+
+Then commerce spread, as in the trade of Italy and the Low Countries with
+the East.
+
+A succession of discoveries and inventions in the physical world advanced
+society.
+
+Gunpowder helped to overthrow feudalism.
+
+Printing made the Reformation possible.
+
+The Copernican theory had its practical result in the stimulation of
+discovery and commerce; its intellectual issue in the weakening of the
+church's cosmogony, and a discredit of the church's claim to real
+knowledge.
+
+The growing wealth of the middle class gave freedom to England,--the
+merchants and cities were the strength of the Puritan and Parliamentary
+party.
+
+A series of inventions has within the last century multiplied wealth--the
+use of canals, textile machinery, steam, electricity.  This has created a
+new class of rich.  It has improved the condition of the laboring man,
+not enough to satisfy him, but enough to strengthen him to demand more.
+
+Thus, military force giving strength; its organization as feudalism,
+giving the chivalric virtues and training an upper class; commerce,
+discovery, invention, raising first the middle class and then the
+lower,--these forces, not on the surface ethical, have cooperated to
+realize the ideal.
+
+
+Luther led a revolt which in its issue freed half Europe from the Roman
+court.  He made the quarrel on a moral question.  No man, he said, could
+sell a license from God to commit sin.  If the Pope said otherwise, the
+Pope was a liar and no vicegerent of God.  So he put in the forefront of
+the revolting forces a moral idea.
+
+He showed that the spiritual life, with all its aspirations, struggles,
+and victories, was open to man without help from Pope or priesthood.  He
+gave the German people the Bible in their own tongue.  He taught by word
+and example that marriage was the rightful accompaniment of a life
+consecrated to God.
+
+He had many of the limitations of the peasant and the priest.  He was
+wholly inadequate to any comprehensive conception of the higher life of
+humanity.  His ideal of character was based on a mystical experience,
+under the forms of an antiquated theology.  He was narrow; he confounded
+the friends with the foes of progress; he had no clear understanding of
+the social and political needs of the time; he was full of superstition,
+and saw the Devil present in every mischief; he was often violent and
+wrathful.  But he had a great and tender heart; he had the soldierly
+temper which prompted him to strike when more sensitive and reflective
+men held back; and he won the leadership of the new age when against all
+the pomp and power of Emperor and Pope he planted himself on the truth as
+he saw the truth: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; God help me!"
+
+
+Copernicus died in 1543--two years before Luther.  For thirty-six
+years--all through the Reformation struggle--he was quietly working out
+his theory.  The book containing it he did not venture to publish, till
+under Paul III. there was a lull in the storm.  He was a loyal Catholic,
+but his teaching was sure to conflict with the church.  He kept alive
+just long enough to see his book come from the printers--dying at the age
+of seventy.  Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo came later.
+
+
+The Protestants in the name of religion defied and set aside the Catholic
+church.  They were impelled to do it because they saw that the church,
+claiming infallibility, was practically fallible and faulty in its
+morals, as in the matter of the indulgences.  They found courage to do
+it, because men like Luther learned by experience that the sense of
+pardoned sin, of a divine communion, of peace and joy, of which the
+church had claimed the exclusive possession, were possible to them wholly
+without the church's intervention.  That was one side of the revolt: the
+other side was that the civil society, as in England, had grown strong
+enough, and the monarchical and national temper bold enough, to be
+impatient of any foreign control.
+
+But the Protestant reformers in an intellectual sense simply remoulded a
+little the old creed, detaching so much only as was inextricably blended
+with the authority of the Roman priesthood.  Theirs was in no sense an
+intellectually creative movement.  Politically and socially it had great
+effects.  Intellectually it did hardly more than _to set the door open_.
+Even this it did unconsciously and unwillingly.  The early Protestants
+found themselves face to face with elemental forces of human
+nature,--with misery, sin, and greed, with passions stimulated by the
+sense that authority was weakening.  They saw no other resource, their
+own minds prompted no other thought, their spiritual experience brought
+no other suggestion, than to continue the old appeal to the supernatural
+world.  The creed of Calvin is harsher than the creed of Rome; its
+spiritual world no less definitely conceived and authoritatively taught;
+its insistence on _belief_ no less absolute.  The traditional Protestant
+orthodoxy is only the Catholic theology a little shrunken and dwindled.
+Its appeal to the reason is hardly stronger, and its appeal to the
+imagination is less strong.
+
+
+But for more than three hundred years the whole conception of a
+supernatural universe has been growing weaker and weaker in its hold on
+the minds of men.  Shakspere paints the most various, active, and
+passionate world of humanity,--a humanity brilliant with virtues, dark
+with crimes, rich in tenderness, humor, loveliness, awe, yet almost
+unaffected by any consideration of the supernatural world.  On Hamlet's
+brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation.  No hope of a
+hereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia.  Macbeth,
+hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of
+future retribution,--assure him only of success _here_, and
+
+  "We 'd jump the life to come."
+
+
+It is impossible to pass the exhaustless Shakspere without some further
+word of inadequate comment.  Apparently no one in his day guessed that
+among the jostling throng of soldiers, statesmen, and philosophers this
+obscure playwright was the intellectual king.  But Time has more than
+redressed the wrong, for now he is not only reverenced as a sovereign but
+sometimes worshiped as an oracle.  The prime secret of his power,
+compared with the men before him and about him, is his return to reality.
+It is the actual world, the actual men and women in it, that he portrays,
+and not the puppets or shadows of a made-up world.  It is a change of
+standpoint such as Bacon made when he recalled philosophy from abstract
+speculation to the study of concrete facts, and calmly told men that
+their past achievements were as nothing compared to the truth they were
+to attain with the new weapons.  Shakspere has no thought of mankind's
+advance, no method or system to offer, but as seer and artist he beholds
+and portrays the universe about him.  We get some idea of what the change
+means when we compare the humanity which he depicts with the account of
+mankind given by a logical theologian like Calvin; the simple, sharp
+division between saints and sinners, against the mixed, particolored,
+genuinely human people who touch our tears and laughter on the
+dramatist's page.  Or again, contrast his world with Dante's, where the
+profoundest imagination and sensibility project themselves into a
+phantasmagoria.  In the change to Shakspere we are tempted to say that we
+have lost heaven and escaped hell, but have taken fresh hold on earthly
+life and found in it unmeasured richness and significance.
+
+In reading Shakspere we are never confused or weakened as between virtue
+and vice.  In simply showing us this life as it is acted out by all kinds
+of people, he shows perpetually the beauty of courage, truth, tenderness,
+purity, and the ugliness of their opposites.  Measure him at the most
+critical point, chastity.  His plays have plenty of coarseness; they have
+touches, though very rarely, of voluptuous description; but they always
+leave us with the sense that purity is noble and impurity is evil.  It is
+striking to note the tone in this respect of his successive productions.
+His youthful poem, "Venus and Adonis," is touched with the disease which
+had blighted the literature and the life of southern Europe,--the
+infection of the imagination by sensuality, a sort of intellectual
+putrescence.  In the frank daylight of the early dramas this nightmare
+has disappeared, yet in the generally clean atmosphere there occurs
+sometimes a touch of depraved Italian manners, as in "All's Well that
+Ends Well," the deliberate seduction attempted by Bertram, bringing
+little discredit and no punishment.  Later in the great plays the note of
+chastity is always clear and firm.  In his women, purity is nobly
+depicted; in his men there appears no such attainment, but often a
+passionate abhorrence of vice.  In only one play, "Antony and Cleopatra,"
+it might superficially appear that there is a glorification of lawless
+love; but in the action of the story their lawlessness ruins Antony's and
+Cleopatra's fortunes; then, with the imminence of death, their passion,
+escaping from the thralldom of flesh, soars into a sublimation that
+redeems Antony's error and half transforms Cleopatra.
+
+In Shakspere's world the supernatural sanctions have almost disappeared,
+but the moral law is still supreme.  Yet in some ways it is a very
+unsatisfying world.  In its deeper aspects woe predominates over joy.
+All phases of suffering and anguish find their language here; but of
+rapture there are only transient glimpses, of great and abiding happiness
+there is almost none, and there is scarcely a suggestion of "the peace
+that passeth understanding."  We sometimes feel the sharpest pressure of
+the problems to which Christianity had addressed itself, unlightened by
+any solution.  There is the echo of Paul's cry, "O wretched man that I
+am, who shall deliver me from this body of death!"--as in the king at
+prayer, in "Hamlet;" but nowhere is Paul's note of triumphant
+deliverance.  We see men overwhelmed by temptation, as Macbeth and
+Angelo; we nowhere see men rising over conquered temptation to higher
+manhood.  Man in Shakspere is generally the creature of Fate.  Man's
+confrontal by the mystery of existence is the real theme of "Hamlet."
+The true unity of that drama is not in the action nor in the characters;
+it is the underlying and unanswered problem,--man, in his finest
+sensibilities and noblest aspirations, beset by a world of trouble, of
+confusion, of unfathomable mystery.  The ghost from the other world is a
+mere piece of stage scenery; to the real sentiment belongs the frank
+paganism of Hamlet as he holds the skull,--_this_ is the end of Yorick,
+and that anything of Yorick may still live except these mouldering bones
+does not even occur to Hamlet as a question.  Yet when he is tempted to
+take refuge in suicide, the possibility of "something after death" is
+sufficient to deter him.  The thought suggests no hope, only a vague
+restraining fear.  But to the guilty king there is a terrible reality in
+the divine law which he has broken; he struggles to reconcile himself
+with heaven, but his will seems paralyzed to retrace the path of
+wrong-doing.  The incapable will, the baffled intellect, cast a gloom
+over the whole drama.
+
+It is not only a clew to man's relation with the unseen and eternal that
+we miss in Shakspere.  He fails to show one trait which belongs to human
+nature as truly as Hotspur's courage or Falstaff's drollery.  He nowhere
+depicts a life controlled by a moral ideal, deliberately chosen and
+resolutely pursued.  His world is rich in passion, but deficient in clear
+and high purpose and soldierly resolve.  The metal of mastery is lacking.
+He shows us life as a wonderful spectacle, but he does not directly aid
+us to live our own life.  His amazing treasury of wisdom seldom lends a
+phrase that flashes comfort into our sorrow, hope into our dejection, or
+strength to our wavering will.
+
+Yet when this has been said, it remains true that Shakspere's atmosphere
+is wholesome and even invigorating.  We are helped in our higher life by
+many influences besides direct moral teaching.  One takes a twenty-mile
+tramp over moor and mountain, and no word of admonition or guidance comes
+from rock or tree, but he comes back stronger and serener.  So from an
+hour among Shakspere's people one may well emerge with a fuller, happier
+being.  It is the inscrutable power of real life truly seen, even though
+seen but in part.
+
+The wish is as inevitable as it is hopeless that we might know the
+personality of Shakspere, the medium through which the light passing was
+thus colored.  We get but rare and slight glimpses; the boyhood in the
+sweet Avon country; the stumble on the threshold of manhood in his
+marriage; the plunge into roaring London; the theatrical surroundings;
+the great encompassing drama of Elizabeth's England; the slow winning of
+a competence; the quiet years at the end, a burgess of Stratford town.
+There is a rich, tantalizing disclosure of a phase of the inner life in
+the Sonnets; what they seem to convey is a passion delicate and profound,
+striving to sublimate and satisfy itself, but baffled by unworthiness in
+the object, and perhaps by some unworthiness in the lover.  More distinct
+is the outward closing scene; the retirement to the native country town,
+the modest prosperity, the business-like making of the will.  Prosaic
+enough it sounds, yet in substance it has this significance, that this
+great genius and passionate soul bore himself among the materialities,
+where so many make shipwreck, with a practical sense and steadiness which
+brought him to the haven at least of a comfortable and honorable age.  So
+much Shakspere certainly had in himself,--this homely yet vital
+self-command.  With this is to be taken that he had also that
+intellectual mastery of himself of which the highest proof is the
+creation of great works of art.  Self-control, prudential and
+intellectual, was one element of Shakspere, one secret of his sanity and
+strength.
+
+One loves to see in "The Tempest" the crowning utterance of his maturity.
+How wise, how noble it is, and the wisdom and nobility set forth in what
+exquisite play of fancy and wealth of humor!  As in Hamlet we seem to see
+Shakspere in his mid-life storm and stress, so in Prospero we think we
+recognize the ideal of his ripeness.  There is the wise man torn from
+books and reverie, and rudely thrust upon treachery and the stormy sea;
+there is control gained over airy powers and ethereal beauties; struggle
+with bestial evil; forgiveness of the wrong-doer; happiness in the
+happiness of his child, and willing surrender of her to her lover; the
+admonition that love perfect itself by the mastery of passion.  So wise,
+so beneficent, so lofty is Shakspere's latest creation.  A shadow flits
+across, in the thought of mortal transiency:--
+
+          "We are such stuff
+  As dreams are made of, and our little life
+  Is rounded by a sleep."
+
+
+Yet instantly Prospero marks this as the utterance of a disturbed moment:
+"Bear with my weakness, my old brain is troubled;" the coming encounter
+with Caliban has shaken him.  Most Shaksperean, too, is this: alternating
+impulses of trust and doubt; now a sense of being led "by Providence
+divine;" an instinct of a "divinity that shapes our ends;" and again, the
+mood that sees beyond the present scene only blankness and the end.
+
+Those elements which in Shakspere are absent or dim,--the belief in a
+divine rule and celestial destiny, and a high and fixed moral
+purpose,--these appear in full strength in men of Shakspere's time, the
+men of religion; but in their minds inextricably blent with a scheme of
+the universe which it is plain was to Shakspere as unreal as the
+mythology of the Greeks, and which he treats in much the same way, merely
+borrowing it for a dramatic purpose.  The men of religion had no such
+consummate expression in literature as Shakspere, though they had their
+Taylor and Herbert and Milton; but to appreciate them we must look at
+them in action, and we may take the Puritan as their type.
+
+But first let us note that in Catholicism as early as in Protestantism
+appeared the sharp rift between intellect and belief.  Montaigne, a man
+of the world, is outwardly a conformist, but a real skeptic.  A nominal
+Catholic, he corresponds to Shakspere, a nominal Protestant.  Montaigne
+reveals the world of one personality as, frankly as Shakspere pictures a
+world of humanity, and in each the purely religious element is almost
+totally absent.
+
+
+Shakspere shows the widest reach of the mind apart from a definite
+religious purpose or a strong religious faith.  In contrast with him is
+the Puritan effort to apprehend and follow a divine rule and achieve a
+divine destiny.  The typical Puritan addressed himself to man's
+foes,--all griefs and sufferings culminating in Death; all wrong-doing,
+as Sin; and the retribution and woe hereafter, as Hell.  To escape from
+these was his supreme object, and to win what he as firmly believed
+in--Holiness, Life, and Heaven.
+
+The creed was accepted as the form of this truth, but the earnest men
+sought to know its truths experimentally,--to take home the full sense of
+them.  This was found in the consciousness of man's supreme need; and,
+responding to that, a divine command, an invitation, and a threat.  The
+result of this was to set man upon a struggle so intense that it was
+indeed a warfare,--first, against his own lusts, then against the evils
+in the world around him.  These evils were to him embodied--in the Pope,
+the head of a false religion, the oppressor of God's people; in the
+imitation and approach to Popery in the church of England; in all false
+belief and error, all wrong-doers, and Satan himself.
+
+The Puritan believed that the sublimest possibility was open to man, and
+purposed at every cost to achieve it.  "Man's chief end is to glorify God
+and enjoy him forever."  There was also the most dreadful possibility to
+be shunned.  All earthly pleasure he held in suspicion, as a bait of the
+great adversary of souls.
+
+The belief of serious men in the seventeenth century was that theology
+was the guide to heaven.  They believed this as modern men believe that
+science is the guide to human life.  Hence, an infinite diversity of
+sects, and hence the attempts to enforce each by authority.
+
+The Bible fed the deeper substratum of the Puritan life.  It touched and
+fired the imagination of the common people.  The dominant idea on which
+the English Puritan laid hold was the Old Testament idea of God's chosen
+people,--separate from the rest of the world, given a code of written
+laws, led by a divinely appointed priesthood and prophets, disciplined by
+a constant intervention of rewards and punishments.  This conception they
+transferred to the faithful of their own time; and against them was
+Antichrist, in the Roman church, to which the English prelates seemed
+traitorously to incline.  They proposed to purify and maintain the church
+in England, or, failing there, to transplant it to America.
+
+The typical Puritan character, as most fully worked out in Scotland and
+New England, was a mixture of intense idealism and sternest practicality.
+The idealism aimed to control every action of life, and to base itself on
+the ultimate reality.  It renounced the aid of art and embodied
+imagination; it renounced human authority; it had no aid from material
+beauty, none from knowledge of nature.
+
+This religion had an appalling side.  Foremost among its teachings was
+man's depravity and the terrible wrath of God.  The worst cruelty of the
+Iroquois was mercy compared to God's dealing with sinners.  This was an
+inheritance from an older religion.  But the condition of salvation in
+the Catholic church--and in all high church religion--was practically
+obedience to the church.  But the Puritan required a conscious change of
+heart, which to many was impossible.  The utmost pains were taken that
+the most laborious right-doing should count for nothing, unless
+accompanied by this mystic experience.
+
+Catholicism put man under guardianship through the hierarchy, the
+confessional, the whole church system.  Calvinism threw him on his own
+resources,--set him face to face with God.  It, too, set a church to help
+him, but even the minister of the church exhorted him to make his own
+peace with God.  This responsibility weighted men heavily, and made them
+sombre.  It crushed the feeble, but made strong men stronger.
+
+The first half of the seventeenth century was full of religious
+enthusiasms, which carried high expectations.  Milton looked for a
+wonderful advance in truth.  The Puritan sought to build a church simple
+in forms, austere in morals and manners, exacting personal holiness of
+its members, and subjecting the ungodly to a rule of the saints.  Charles
+the First and Archbishop Laud believed in a religious monarchy; that the
+king should be chief in church and state; that beauty of ritual should go
+along with the encouragement of festivity and joyousness; and that the
+ultimate aim was a reunited Christendom.
+
+The wave passed, and these expectations had failed.  But the force of the
+Puritan movement had accomplished certain things.  It had turned the tide
+of the English civil war, it had leavened the more serious portion of the
+nation, and it had planted the New England colonies.
+
+In England the Puritan zeal gave force to overthrow despotism, but it
+then plunged the nation into chaos; it could not rule or harmonize the
+composite forces of national life; constitutional monarchy was
+established at last under William of Orange, by men of less fervent and
+lofty temper than the Puritans, but better conversant with the wants and
+possibilities of the actual world.
+
+
+Milton was a man of heroic mould.  He governed himself by a deliberate
+and lofty moral purpose.  The thirst for "moral perfection" inspired and
+ruled his life.  He was far from the narrowness of the typical Puritan.
+He was open on all sides to the noblest influences.  The heroic antique
+temper, the beauty and richness of the Greek, the religious seriousness
+of the Puritan, the English love of freedom, all met in him.  He was at
+heart a poet and scholar, but he threw himself into the active life of
+his time.
+
+Yet his genius was cramped by his theology.  He could not fuse the
+conflicting elements of thought,--just as the heroes of the Revolution,
+Pym and Hampden and Cromwell and Falkland, could not blend the elements
+of English political society.  He is like his own lion "struggling to get
+free."  His epic is a story of disaster.  His deity is undivine.  There
+is more that touches sympathy and admiration in his Satan than in his
+Jehovah or Adam.
+
+The best thing he gives us is his own noble personality, imbuing the
+majestic rhythm with a kind of moral power.  Servant and friend of
+Cromwell, sacrificing all scholarly delight to his country's need,
+champion of freedom, worshiper of truth, building in neglected solitude
+his epic,--his works are less than Shakspere's, but _he_ is greater than
+the imaginary Hamlet, Othello, or Brutus.
+
+Cromwell is in action the counterpart of Milton in thought,--a heroic
+nature struggling with irreconcilable elements.  Each is confronted by a
+situation as difficult as Hamlet's; but though they cannot fully master
+it, they deal with it like men.
+
+Here is the true advantage of the men of religion over Shakspere and his
+creations,--here is the greater world than Shakspere saw,--men grappling
+with their fate and in the struggle working out heroic lives.
+
+
+The finest type of the New England colonists is seen in the Winthrops,
+father and son.  When the migration is determined on, the son writes:
+"For myself, I have seen so much of the variety of the world that I
+esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns,
+whereof the traveler that hath lodged in the best or the worst findeth no
+difference when he cometh to his journey's end; and I shall call that my
+country where I may most glorify God and enjoy the presence of my dearest
+friends.  Therefore herein I submit myself to God's will and yours, and,
+with your leave, do dedicate myself (laying by all desire of other
+employments whatsoever) to the service of God and the company herein,
+with the whole endeavors both of body and mind."
+
+The elder Winthrop is shown to us in the Journal or chronicle of the
+Massachusetts colony, a sombre record of seemingly petty events; in his
+religious diary of an earlier period; and in his domestic letters, which
+are full of manly strength and sweetness.  He combined some of the chief
+elements of greatness,--loftiness of aim; a character disinterested,
+patient, modest, brave; deep religious experience; and personal
+tenderness.
+
+To a man like Winthrop, the heart of his creed was that man's true aim is
+moral perfection and a living relation with a Divine Lover.  The sense of
+a Divine Presence--inspiring, ruling, gladdening--is what his religion
+means to him.  In this quiet country gentleman, portrayed in his private
+diary, is an intense play of feeling and imagination, concentrated on the
+attainment of a personal and social ideal.
+
+All this introspective fervor merged into a public enterprise,--the
+transplanting of a church and colony to Massachusetts Bay.  The last half
+of his life was spent in the most assiduous, minute, exacting labors.
+The self-watchful diary gives place to a public chronicle, prosaic as a
+ship's log-book--and, like the log-book, the shorthand record of
+adventures, heroisms, and sublimities.
+
+In the Puritan of Winthrop's type the flame of spiritual emotion was
+harnessed and made to serve.  The drudgery of founding New England was
+done by men whose hearts were touched with fire,--men such as Lowell
+sings of:--
+
+  "Who, dowered with every gift of passion,
+  In that fierce flame can forge and fashion
+  Of self and sin the anchor strong;
+  Can thence compel the driving force
+  Of daily life's mechanic course."
+
+
+Winthrop set out with a great ideal--shown with statesmanlike breadth in
+the "Considerations," and with apostolic fervor in the "Model of
+Christian Charity."  His conception was cramped into conformity with the
+far narrower views of the ministers who were the leaders in the colony.
+Yet it was his ideal and his personality which gave most to success.
+
+The letters between Winthrop and his wife are an example of human love
+perfected by a higher love.  He writes to her: "Neither can the sea drown
+thy husband, nor enemies destroy, nor any adversity deprive thee of thy
+husband."  Shakspere has no note like that.  Margaret writes from her
+country home to her husband in London: "My good husband, cheer up thy
+heart in the expectation of God's goodness to us, and let nothing dismay
+or discourage thee; if the Lord be with us, who can be against us?  My
+grief is the fear of staying behind thee, but I must leave all to the
+good providence of God."  She was obliged to stay behind in England,
+awaiting the birth of a child.  On the eve of sailing he writes her: "I
+purpose, if God will, to be with thee upon Thursday come sen'night, and
+then I must take my leave of thee for a summer's day and a winter's day.
+The Lord our good God will (I hope) send us a happy meeting again in his
+good time.  Amen!  Being now ready to send away my letters, I received
+thine; the reading of it has dissolved my head into tears.  Can write no
+more.  If I live, I will see thee ere I go.  I shall part from thee with
+sorrow enough; be comfortable, my most sweet wife, our God will be with
+thee.  Farewell."
+
+A few months later, across the pages of the Journal, full of the cares
+and anxieties of the struggling colony, shines a ray of pure joy.
+Margaret has come!  And the whole community rejoices and makes cheer,
+with homely and hearty feasting, for the happiness of their good governor.
+
+The actual conditions nourished homely virtues,--industry, thrift,
+self-reliance, family affection, civic responsibility.  The greatness of
+early New England is partly measured by the fact that there were
+comparatively no dregs, no mass of ignorance and vice.  It was not the
+individuals who rise into sight at this distance who were superior to the
+prominent men of England or France,--it was the lower stratum which was
+above that elsewhere.  Two prime causes worked to this elevation,--the
+spiritual estimate of man and the economic conditions which offered
+independence to every one on the condition "work and save."  The social
+and political conditions were largely shaped by these underlying facts.
+
+The wrestle for a livelihood under stern material conditions was a prime
+factor in the making of New England.  Whatever the creed might say, in
+practice Work was the equal partner of Faith in building manhood and the
+state.  The soil was to their bodies what Calvinism was to their
+souls,--yielding nourishment, but only through a hard struggle.  Its
+sterility drove them to the sea for a livelihood; they became fishermen;
+then, carrying their fish and lumber abroad, they grew into commerce.
+They traded along the coast, to the West Indies, to Europe, and so into
+their little province came the winds of the larger world.  They learned
+the sailor's virtues,--his courage, his mingled awe and mastery of
+elemental forces, his sense of lands beyond the horizon.  Well might
+Winthrop name the first ship he launched "The Blessing of the Bay."
+
+The austere land had small room for slaves, dependent and incapable.  One
+of the first large companies included some scores of bondmen; they landed
+to face a fierce and hungry winter, and straightway the bondmen were set
+free,--as slaves they would be an incumbrance; as freemen they could get
+their own living.  The thrifty colonists of a later generation did a
+driving business in African slaves for their southern neighbors, but they
+had small use for them at home.
+
+Winthrop's constant effort, as shown in his Journal, is for reason and
+right.  It is the arguments for and against any course that he
+elaborates.  Scarce a word of their sufferings or of his own
+feelings--but to know and do the right was all-important.  The greatness
+of his own ideal is shown when he draws with a free hand, in the
+"Conclusions" or the "Model."  In the Journal, he is laboring toward this
+under the iron conditions of actualities.  He and his associates had to
+be strong-willed and stern; they were warring against tremendous
+difficulties--more tremendous to them because interpreted as the work of
+Satan, while even their God was an awful being.
+
+Superstition throws a dark shadow over the chronicle.  Even Winthrop was
+deeply infected by it.  Disasters small and great were interpreted, on
+the Old Testament idea, as divine judgments.  A boy seven years old fell
+through the ice and was drowned while his parents were at lecture, and
+his sister was drowned in trying to save him.  "The parents had no more
+sons, and confessed they had been too indulgent towards him, and had set
+their hearts overmuch on him."  A man working on a milldam kept on for an
+hour after nightfall on Saturday to finish it, and next day his child
+fell into a well and was drowned.  The father confessed it as a judgment
+of God for his Sabbath-breaking.
+
+There is not unfrequent mention of some woman driven by religious
+brooding to frenzy, sometimes to murder.  The awful possibilities of hell
+for herself and her children wrought the mother-heart to madness.  The
+religious guides of the people used unsparingly the appeal to fear.  The
+belief in witchcraft, which long had scourged Europe, broke out in a
+panic of fear and cruelty.  It was a tragic culmination of the worst
+elements,--superstition, malignity, ministerial tyranny.  Then came the
+reaction, and with it a triumph of the wiser sense, the cooler temper,
+the layman's moderation, which thenceforth were to guide the commonwealth
+on a humbler but safer road.
+
+In a dramatic sense the turning-point of the story--and the revelation of
+the saving power at the heart of this grim people--was when, after the
+witchcraft frenzy had subsided, Samuel Sewall, the chief justice of the
+colony, rose in his place in the meeting-house and humbly confessed
+before God and man that he had erred and shed innocent blood.
+
+In the more prosaic temper of the next stage, a sturdy manhood sometimes
+flashes into poetry.  So John Wise, a minister but the leader of the
+popular party in church government, strikes the high note of courage: "If
+men are trusted with duty, they must trust that, and not events.  If men
+are placed at the helm to steer in all weather that blows, they must not
+be afraid of the waves or a wet coat."
+
+In personal religion there was from the outset the intense struggle for
+an inward peace and joy, with tears and groanings,--the victory sometimes
+found, sometimes missed.  There was a resolute facing of what was held as
+truth.  The ministers and laymen battled with the problems of the
+infinite.  The issue after two centuries was an open break from Calvinism
+in Channing, and the glad vision of Emerson.
+
+A feature in the story is the New Englander's relation with Nature as he
+found her,--first like a terrible power of destruction, by cold and
+hunger; this he conquers by endurance.  Then for generations he wrings a
+hard livelihood out of her.  Then by his wits he makes her serve him more
+completely.  At last her beauty is disclosed to him,--a beauty which has
+its roots in the very struggles he has had, and the contrasts they
+afford,--no child of the tropics loves Nature as he does.
+
+So of the sea: first he dares it as explorer and voyager; then he makes
+it his feeding-ground--catches the cod and chases the whale; in his ships
+he does battle against pirate and public foe; he makes the deep the
+highway of his commerce; and at last he feels its grandeur, into which
+enters the reminiscence of all his combats.
+
+Elements which Puritanism had renounced came in later from other sources.
+The fresh contact with truth and reality was given by Franklin.  The free
+joy of religion, its aggressive love, came in Methodism.  Beautiful
+ritual returned in Episcopacy.  The frank enjoyment of life developed in
+the South, transmitted from the country life of the English squire and
+mellowed on American soil.
+
+At the outset of the story of America stands the Puritan, his heart set
+on subduing the infernal element and winning the celestial; regarding
+this life as a stern warfare, but the possible pathway to an infinite
+happiness beyond; fierce to beat down the emissaries of evil,--heretic,
+witch, or devil; yet tender at inmost heart, and valiant for the truth as
+he sees it.  After a century, behold the Yankee,--the shrewd, toilful,
+thrifty occupant of the homely earth; one side of his brain speculating
+on the eternities, and the other side devising wealth, comfort, personal
+and social good.  And to-day, successor of Puritan and Yankee, Cavalier
+and Quaker, stands the American, composite of a thousand elements, with a
+destiny which seems to hover between heights and abysses, but amid all
+whose vicissitudes and faults we still see faith and courage and manly
+purpose working toward a kingdom of God on earth and in heaven.
+
+
+The Protestant way of salvation was through "experimental religion."
+This meant the appropriation as a personal experience of the truths of
+human guilt and divine mercy.  A man must not only believe but intensely
+feel that he was wholly guilty before God and in danger of everlasting
+damnation.  He must then have a vivid appreciation that Christ out of
+pure love had died for him, and that on this ground alone God offered him
+pardon and salvation.  This offer he must consciously accept, with
+emotions of profound remorse for his wrong-doing, gratitude for his
+deliverance, and absolute dependence upon divine grace for help against
+future sin and for final reception to an endless heaven.
+
+To attain this experience was the aim and goal of the religious man,
+under all the more strenuous forms of Protestantism.  Until it was
+reached, all good actions, all fair traits of character, were worthless.
+Without it there was no escape from the unquenchable fire.  If it came as
+a genuine experience, it was the passage from death unto life.  But as
+there was great possibility of self-deception in the matter, the mind was
+constantly thrown back on self-examination, and in sensitive natures
+there was often an alternation of terrors and transports.
+
+This experience of saving faith, of experimental religion, must be
+translated for us into very different language and symbols from those
+which our ancestors used before we can have any sympathy with it.
+Perhaps the truest account of the matter for us is something like this:
+the Christian theology was a system of myths, which had grown out of
+facts of human experience.  The initial fact was a good man whose love
+went out to bad men, and woke in them a sense of their own wrong along
+with a new joy and hope.  From this centre the influence spread in
+widening circles, and was gradually transformed in the expression,--mixed
+too with earlier notions, with crudities, with sophistications,--until
+Justice and Love and Punishment and Forgiveness were personified and
+dramatized and a whole cloud-world of fancy built up.  Already in the age
+of the Reformation the human intellect was sapping the foundations of the
+structure.  But the religious imagination was still intensely
+susceptible, and when the moral sense was sharply awakened by the
+reformers both within and without the Catholic church, it fell back on
+the imagination as its familiar ally, and clothed with new life the
+ancient forms.  The Catholic turned with fresh ardor to mass and miracle
+and holy church.  The Protestant fell back on a more personal and inward
+experience; he conceived that in each heart and mind the whole drama from
+Eden to Calvary and on to the Judgment Day must be realized and
+appropriated as the working principle of life.
+
+To the mystical, the sentimental, the self-confident, it was a welcome
+and uplifting exercise.  To the timid and self-distrustful it was a
+terrible ordeal.  To the intellectual it was a perpetual challenge to
+skepticism.  Even Bunyan puts as his first and worst temptation, "to
+question the being of God and the truth of his gospel."  To the prosaic
+and practical minds it made the whole business of religion a dim and
+far-away affair.
+
+
+Experimental religion was the core of Protestantism for more than three
+centuries.  It was blended with other elements in a series of great
+movements.  In Puritanism it united with an ascetic and militant temper,
+a metaphysical theology, a stern rule of life, and a conception of the
+nation as under a divine law like that of ancient Israel.
+
+Then came Quakerism, a religion of the quiet, illumined heart, and the
+peaceful life.  Next, Methodism, a wave of aggressive love, seeking to
+save others where Puritanism had been self-saving, appealing less to the
+head and more to the heart.  Following this, in England, came
+Evangelicalism, a revival of self-conscious experience, but flowing out
+now not only as in Methodism into a crusade to save souls, but into
+labors for criminals, for slaves, for the poor, under such leaders as
+Howard and Wilberforce and Shaftesbury.
+
+These phases are from English and American history.  They might largely
+be paralleled elsewhere.  And along with them, it is to be remembered,
+went always not only a party imbued with the Catholic or high church
+idea, but also a moderate party, holding a more broadly and simply
+religious view.
+
+
+Perhaps the most effective type of Christianity has been the simple
+acceptance of the familiar laws of goodness, having in the Bible their
+express sanction, with a great promise and an awful warning for the
+future, and the embodiment of holiness, love, and help, in Christ.  This
+has been the religion of a multitude of faithful souls, manly men and
+womanly women, who did not concern themselves with any elaborate
+theology, but went along their daily way, strong in obedience to duty,
+trustful in a divine guidance, and with serene hope for what may come
+after death.  Their souls have been nurtured on whatever was most vital
+and most tender in the words of Scripture and the services of the church,
+and whatever was unintelligible or innutritions they have quietly passed
+by.  This is the essential religion of humanity, made definite and vivid
+by accepted symbols and rules, and made warm by the sense of fellowship
+with a great company.
+
+
+Recurring to the successive phases of religious thought, the next
+development of Protestantism, while in a sense world-wide, may be most
+clearly seen in America.  By Jonathan Edwards there was begun the
+application of a rationalizing process to the theology of Calvin and to
+experimental religion.  In Edwards almost the only result was a more
+lurid and tremendous affirmation of the old dogma and the old
+requirement.  But the New England mind, speculative, practical, and
+intense, worked rapidly on.  In Channing and his associates came the
+renunciation of Depravity, Atonement, and the Trinity.  In the next
+generation, Unitarianism expressed itself through Theodore Parker as
+simple theism.  A little later than the Unitarian movement, the old
+Orthodoxy itself became transformed into a new Orthodoxy.  The foremost
+interpreters of the transformation were Bushnell and Beecher; Bushnell
+translating the Atonement into terms of purely natural goodness,--not as
+a transaction, but an expression; and Beecher finding in Christ simply
+the truth that Love is sovereign of the universe.  To Bushnell and
+Beecher the historical Christ remained in a unique sense an incarnation
+of God.  By later voices of the new Orthodoxy--for example, Phillips
+Brooks--he is spoken of rather as the one actual instance of perfect
+humanity, and in this sense a manifestation of God and the spiritual
+leader of mankind.
+
+
+But for three centuries men have been studying the facts of existence
+from an entirely different side from that whence the church takes its
+outlook.  They have been finding out all kinds of curious facts, totally
+unconnected with any supernatural sphere.  First, they made such
+discoveries as that the world is not flat, but round; not stationary, but
+doubly revolving.  And so they went on.  The stars, the plants, the
+animals, the human body, yielded all manner of curious knowledge.  New
+powers came into men's hands through this knowledge; new avenues to
+happiness were opened.  Facts wove themselves together in wider and wider
+combinations.  Orderly procedure was found where there had seemed such
+confusion as only capricious spirits could occasion.  It is learned, too,
+that even as the individual man has grown up from babyhood, so the race
+of man has grown up from the beast.  The globe itself has grown from a
+simple origin into infinite diversity and complexity.  There has been a
+universal, orderly growth,--what we name "Evolution."  And it is learned
+that all mental phenomena, so far as we can explore them, stand in some
+close relation to a physical basis in the brain, and to a train of
+physical antecedents.
+
+And now the men who have come up by the path of this knowledge stand face
+to face with the men who have been climbing in the path whose signboards
+are such as "Duty," "Worship," "Aspiration;" and the question arises, Do
+our paths lie henceforth together, or do they separate, and is the one
+party losing its travel?
+
+
+Perhaps the best example of the union of the two pursuits in one man is
+given by Benjamin Franklin.
+
+Franklin worked out, through a very genuine, homely, and personal
+experience, the conviction that _moral perfection_ is the only true aim.
+He reached this conviction while still a young man, and in the main tenor
+of his life he was faithful to it.  He made no vaunt of his religion,
+founded no sect, gave his words and deeds chiefly to practical affairs;
+and perhaps few guessed, until at the close of his life he told his own
+story with consummate charm, that the secret motive and mainspring of his
+life had been the same that animates the saints and saviors,--the thirst
+for moral perfection.  The motive and method had been hidden, but the
+result had long been clear to the eyes of the whole world.  Franklin's
+character was reverenced alike in the court of France and the farmhouses
+of Pennsylvania and New England.  To the Old World he seemed the heroic
+and coming man of the New World, side by side with Washington.  The
+Virginian embodied the highest traditional virtues of the race,
+self-mastery, patience, magnanimity, devotion to the common good; the
+Pennsylvanian, if less called on for the heroic forms of antique virtue,
+added to its substance new traits of wisdom, progress, and
+happiness,--signs of a better age to be.
+
+Moral perfection was Franklin's secret and ruling principle.  But his
+life was conspicuously engaged in the fields of science and of
+statesmanship.  He was a leader in exploring the material world, skillful
+to trace its secrets, fertile to apply them to human use.  He was a
+pioneer and founder of the new nation, projecting its union before others
+had desired or dreamed of it; sharing in its first hazardous fortunes;
+winning by his personal weight and wisdom the foreign alliance which
+turned the scale of victory; laying with the other master shipwrights the
+keel and ribs of the new Constitution.  Moral perfection for himself,
+and, as the outcome to the world, not a new church or a theology or a
+missionary enterprise, but a winning of the forces of nature to the
+service of man, and a shaping of the social organism for the benefit of
+all.  That is the originality of Franklin,--that he carries the old moral
+purpose into the new fields of science and of social ordering.  His
+desire for moral perfection and his confidence that the universe is
+ordered rightly are not dependent on any visionary scheme of heaven and
+hell; they rest not on any doubtful argument; they bring sanction from no
+transport mixed of soul and sense.  He walks firm on the solid earth.  He
+has found for himself that goodness is the only thing that satisfies.
+That this is an ordered universe comes home to him with every step of his
+study of actuality.  What need of a supernatural religion to a man who
+finds religion in his own nature and in the nature of the world?
+
+Such confidence and such purpose are as old as Socrates.  But come, now,
+let us go where Socrates did not go; let us put the ideas of Jesus and
+Paul to some further application; let us use our freedom from pope and
+tyrant for some solid good!  And so he goes on, cheerfully and
+delightedly, to question the thunder-cloud and make acquaintance with its
+wild steeds,--presently some one will put them in harness.  He is always
+inventing.  Now it is a stove, now it is a fire-brigade,--a public
+library,--a post-office,--a Federal Union!  And be his invention smaller
+or greater, he takes out no patent, but tenders it freely into the common
+stock.
+
+
+The prophets introducing this age are Carlyle and Emerson.  Carlyle sees
+the disease--he convinces of sin.  Emerson sees the solution.  Carlyle
+reflects in his own troubled nature the disorder he portrays.  He is
+physically unsound; his dyspepsia exaggerates to him the evils of the
+world.  Emerson's disciplined and noble character mirrors the present and
+eternal order, and forecasts its triumph.
+
+Carlyle and Emerson give two different phases of life as experienced.
+Carlyle gives the experience of good and evil,--the tremendous sanctions
+of right against wrong, wisdom against folly.  He is not triumphant, but
+he is not hopeless.  "Work, and despair not" is to him "the marching
+music of the Teutonic race."  Emerson, from the height of personal
+victory, sees all as harmonious.  One shows the struggle up the mountain
+path, the other the view from the summit.
+
+Carlyle's gospel is summed up in "_Work_, and despair not."  "Work" was
+his own addition to Goethe's line.  "Do the duty that lies nearest thee;"
+action, as the escape from the puzzles of the intellect and the griefs of
+the heart, is his special message.
+
+Emerson is a precursor of the day when "No man shall say to his
+neighbors, Know ye the Lord, for all shall know him, from the least unto
+the greatest."  He is the first of the prophets to rise above anxiety as
+to the success of his mission.  He lives his life, says his word, sheds
+his light--concerned to be faithful, but wholly unanxious as to personal
+success.
+
+As the tribes of ancient Israel stood arrayed, the one half on Mount
+Ebal, the other on Mount Gerizim,--the one to pronounce the blessing, the
+other to utter the curse,--so Emerson is like an embodied promise and
+Carlyle a perpetual warning.  In Emerson we see the hero triumphant and
+serene.  Carlyle shows him at close grips with the devil.  "Pain, danger,
+difficulty, steady slaving toil, shall in no wise be shirked by any
+brightest mortal that will approve himself loyal to his mission in this
+world; nay, precisely the higher he is the deeper will be the
+disagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks
+laid on him; and the heavier, too, and more tragic, his penalties if he
+neglect them."
+
+
+The background for Emerson is the life of early New England.  The secret
+of New England's greatness was the combination from the first of the
+profoundest interest in man's spiritual destiny with the closest grip on
+homely facts.
+
+In Calvinism, and in Christianity, the universe was at eternal war within
+itself; this was man's projection upon the world of his own moral
+conflict.  Emerson sees the universe as a harmony.  Many influences have
+contributed to this idea; it becomes distinct and vivid in a man whose
+own life is a moral harmony.  Himself truly a cosmos, he recognizes the
+answering tokens of the greater cosmos.
+
+The religious sentiment had become so inwoven with institutions, creeds,
+usages, conventionalisms,--each man believing because his neighbors do,
+or his father did,--that it was necessary to take a new observation.
+What says the heart of man at its highest?  For this Emerson is singled
+out; for him an ancestry is trained through generations; he is drawn
+apart from the church, set aside from government and all institutional
+work; practical functions are denied him; he is made an eye,--an organ of
+pure vision.
+
+To him God is not afar off but in himself.  The heart in its own purity,
+tenderness, and strength recognizes the Divine Presence.  "The soul gives
+itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure,
+who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it."
+The order of physical nature is the symbol and the instrument of a moral
+order.  The beauty and sublimity of nature are the manifestation through
+sense of the Divine Reality.
+
+So high a revelation can come at first only to souls which in their
+greatness are isolated, as the highest mountain peaks stand alone in the
+earliest sunbeams.  It is for a later time to fit such truth to all the
+conditions of human life, to fully assimilate it with older lessons, to
+weave it into the warp and woof of society.
+
+It is Emerson, child of the Puritan and disciple of the new knowledge, in
+whom joy is most abiding--its roots are in faithful living, brave and
+high thinking, the spirit of love, oneness with nature and humanity.
+
+Emerson dwells in an ideal yet real world.  He cannot give the password
+that will certainly admit; inheritance and temperament must contribute to
+that.  But he sees that one principle is the rightful sovereign in his
+inner world and in the universe,--allegiance to highest known law.  It is
+a sublimation of the idea familiar to the religious mind, but he gives it
+a new and larger interpretation; for, in place of the written Word,
+beyond the social and civic obligation, greater than the accepted
+moralities, superseding the ecclesiastical virtues, wider than the
+overworked altruism of Christianity, is the complete ideal of Man, from
+his roughest force to his finest perception.
+
+Talk about duty had become wearisome.  "Thou shalt not preach!" says
+Emerson.  So he discourses as the observer of man and nature, and bids
+men to look at realities.
+
+His imitators were beguiled into a theoretical exposition of the
+universe.  A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of their
+talk, because it is not, like Emerson's, in constant touch with active
+duty and fresh observation.
+
+His ideal includes worship, but to this he brings above all the quality
+of sincerity.  He will not observe a sacrament which has lost its
+significance to him.  He will not use language of a personal God which is
+not natural to him, nor affirm a certainty as to immortality when his
+conviction is not always clear.  But he has the profoundest sense and the
+simplest expression of that reality which we call "the presence of God in
+man."  In him it is not involved with miracle or metaphysic; it is a
+personal experience, the source of humility, energy, and peace.  "I
+recognize the distinction of the outer and inner self; the double
+consciousness that within this erring, passionate, mortal self sits a
+supreme, calm, immortal mind, whose powers I do not know, but it is
+stronger than I; it is wiser than I; it never approved me in any wrong; I
+seek counsel of it in my doubts; I repair to it in my dangers; I pray to
+it in my undertakings.  It seems to me the face which the Creator
+uncovers to his child."
+
+Emerson represents thought in its highest form--perception, vision.  The
+world interpreted by such vision supplies motive, support, and rapture.
+He is essentially and above all a poet, and to whoever can follow him he
+opens a celestial world in which the homeliest earthly fact is irradiated
+by indwelling divinity.
+
+Emerson's escape from evil is by rising to such a height of contemplation
+that evil is seen as only an element of good.  He sits like an
+astronomer, viewing the procession of the worlds in their sublime
+harmony.  For most men, the jar and dust of daily life largely shut out
+that glorious view.  They catch hope and strength from the voice of the
+seer upon his heights.  But they need other help; they need some one by
+their side; they need the love of a stronger brother, who takes their
+hand.  This men found in Jesus the friend of sinners, who went about
+doing good; they idealized it as Christ--a divinity who took upon him the
+form of a servant.  The higher stooping to the lower is still the world's
+salvation.
+
+
+In teaching, Emerson generalized for all men from his own experience.  He
+said, "Be yourself!  Follow the law of your own nature.  Trust the
+all-moving Spirit.  Be above convention and rule, above vulgarities and
+insipidities.  Give way to the God within you!"
+
+Literally obeyed, it was insufficient advice for most men, for it ignored
+what Emerson's modesty forbade him to recognize,--the vast difference
+between his own nature and bent and that of most men.  When ordinary men
+and women tried to imitate him the result was sometimes a lamentable
+failure.  But _he_ was genuine and lofty always.  He failed in no homely
+duty.  The great trial and discipline to him was the alternation in
+himself of the commonplace with the high.  In individuals he was forever
+disappointed, always looking for heroes, saints, and saviors, and seldom
+finding them.  His own work bore little visible fruit; his own teaching
+fell for a long time on scornful ears.  This perpetual disappointment he
+took with perpetual constancy, always serene under disappointment,
+gracious to the dull, indifferent to fame, careless of his own obscurity.
+The typical man of letters has his own besetting sins,--neglect of homely
+duties, self-consciousness, vanity,--from all of which Emerson was free.
+
+The faults we allege against his philosophy--its scanty recognition of
+sin and sorrow--were the natural incidents of his character and work.
+They do not debase, though they sometimes limit, his influence for good;
+his is always the speech of an angel; it strengthens, uplifts, gladdens
+us.  There are other angels to whom we must listen,--others, perhaps, who
+speak more nearly the speech of our own experience,--but his music always
+chords with theirs.
+
+In Emerson, a soul inheriting centuries of Catholic and Puritan training,
+until obedience was its instinct and purity its native atmosphere,--a
+soul endowed with genius,--spread its wings and flew with the suddenness
+and joy of a young bird's first flight.  He saw good everywhere, beauty
+everywhere, and was glad with the gladness of a seer and savior.  He is
+one of those of whom he speaks, as belonging to a better world which is
+yet to come, and who touch us with a sense of a heaven on which we are
+just beginning to enter.
+
+Though he professes an idealist philosophy, and that way of thinking can
+be traced in all his writings, he never makes of it a creed or dogma.
+His children are welcome to worship in the church which has lost its
+attraction for him.  The skeptic may freely question immortality,--nay,
+Emerson himself sometimes feels uncertainty.  The personal God, and man's
+personal immortality, which the idealist is wont to affirm as definite
+certainties, Emerson will not explicitly avow or define.  Universal good,
+beauty, order,--these he sees, feels, is sure of.  What form belongs to
+them, let each imagine as best he can.  So free, so generous, so simply
+true is he that not only men of an idealist way of thinking, but all
+strong and high souls own impulse from him,--the scientist, the
+positivist, the churchman.
+
+His distinctive note is not self-abnegation, but it is the note which
+with that makes a perfect harmony.  Joy in God and self-sacrificing love
+are the two wings of the angelic life.  Long have the preachers taught
+self-sacrifice,--now let one child of God sing the joy of God!
+
+
+The latest chapter in the story of the higher life is the conception of
+man and the world which has grown up under the influence of modern
+science.  The most original and effective expression of this philosophy
+is given by Herbert Spencer.  What new light does the evolutionary
+philosophy throw on man's chief problem, the right conduct of his own
+life?
+
+First, it defines with clearness two great forces which bear on the
+individual life, as Heredity and Environment.  Next, it defines the ideal
+to be sought, by reaffirming in substance the familiar conception of
+human morality, showing its sanctions on purely natural grounds, and
+giving new applications and extensions of its principles.  And finally,
+compared with the traditional theology, it leads to a new conception of
+the relation between man and the higher power, and necessitates, what
+Spencer does not supply, a new expression of the religious life.
+
+The discovery of Darwin, supplying the final link to the growing proofs
+of the evolutionary development of man, opened an amazing panorama of the
+past history of the planet's inhabitants.  The predecessors and
+successors of Darwin added to the panorama one after another scene of
+wonder.  The standpoint of thought seemed wholly changed, and a
+readjustment necessary which threatened overthrow to all the old creeds
+and standards.  Spencer, who has been the most successful in generalizing
+the new knowledge, comes back to the inquiry, By what law shall man guide
+his own conduct?  His answer is substantially a reaffirmation of the
+principles which good men have acknowledged for many ages.  Whatever else
+is changed, it remains true that justice, fidelity, chastity, honor,
+regard for others, are man's safest guides and his lawful rulers.
+Altruism is only a new word for the golden rule.  But the advance of
+society has brought wider and finer applications: the claim of the whole
+community comes closer home; the principles which have been recognized
+within the church and the neighborhood must be carried on to reshape
+institutions, industries, the whole social organism.
+
+The moral idea is thus reaffirmed and extended, but how can man attain
+that ideal?  By using his free will, said the Stoic.  By the grace of God
+obtained through prayer, said the Christian.  Is man then free, or is he
+the passive creature of a greater power, and of what nature is that
+power?  Now, where theologians have sought to define the Deity, and to
+conceive his government of his creatures in terms of a personal affection
+and will, scientists, contenting themselves with observation of facts,
+have shown that each man is what he is and does what he does partly
+because of what his parents and remoter ancestors were and did before
+him, and partly because of the forces of climate, institutions,
+education, companionship, event, which surround him from his birth to his
+grave.  Heredity and Environment, these are
+
+        "the hands
+  That reach through Nature, moulding Man."
+
+
+It looks at first as if the old dispute between free will and necessity
+were settled at last, and man were indeed a creature of inscrutable fate.
+Yet, in the very act of acknowledging certain ideals of character as
+desirable, we become conscious of an impulse and initial effort--call it
+automatic or call it voluntary--toward attaining those ideals.  As a
+matter of practice, we speedily recognize that both Heredity and
+Environment are in a degree under human control.  If they are deities,
+they are accessible to prayers, the prayers which are watchfulness and
+obedience.  Man is always at work to better the environment of himself
+and his fellows.  As he sees more clearly that his true good is character
+and the noble self, he shapes his environment more intelligently and
+resolutely to that end.  As to heredity, while the individual is
+powerless over his own lot, he is in a degree potential over those who
+are to succeed him.  The conception of duty is enlarged by the
+obligations of marriage and parenthood, in a wise selection and
+thoughtful care for the future offspring.
+
+Heredity and Environment, then, are partly the servants of man.  Yet
+largely they are his lords and masters.  In a degree, but only in a
+degree, do we make ourselves what we are.  And while the degree of that
+self-determining power can never be known, we learn to be charitable
+toward others and exacting toward ourselves.
+
+The new philosophy has its chief bearing on conduct, not in abstract
+conceptions about fate, free will, and responsibility, but in the
+stimulus it gives to find new tools and weapons of moral achievement.
+How shall we make men good?  No longer by the mere appeal to reason; no
+longer mainly by promise of heaven and threat of hell.  Still appealing
+to reason, to hope and fear, to imagination, we must go on to put about
+men all stimulating influences, all guiding appliances.  We must begin in
+the formative stage.  The hope of the future is in the child; we must
+educate the child by putting him in true touch with realities,--realities
+of form, color, and number; of plant and animal life; of play and
+pleasure; of imagination; of sympathetic companionship; of a miniature
+society; of a firm yet gentle government.  The education must go on
+through youth, and must introduce him to industry not as drudgery but as
+fine achievement.  So of every phase of humanity.  The criminal is to be
+met not with mere penalty but with remedial treatment.  In the sordid
+quarter must be planted a settlement which shall radiate true
+neighborhood.  The state must be so ordered as best to promote the
+material good and the essential manhood of its citizens.  The church must
+serve some distinct purpose--of ethical guidance, of emotional uplift, of
+social service--in character-building.  Such are the forces to which we
+now are turning.  Where ancient philosophy appealed through the lecturer
+at his desk, where Christianity sent its missionary to proclaim a faith,
+or set its priest to celebrate mass, or its minister to preach a
+sermon,--in place of these partial resources we now realize that every
+normal activity of humanity is to serve in building up man, and that "the
+true church of God is organized human society."
+
+The church of God,--but has man a God?  There is, says Spencer, some
+inscrutable power from which all this vast procedure springs; its nature
+we know not and cannot know.  The thought of it moves us to wonder and
+awe,--and this is the legitimate satisfaction of the religious sense.
+And here it is that his philosophy utterly fails to satisfy.  Yet it
+marks the passing away of the attempt to interpret Deity in terms of
+exact knowledge.  Whatever form religion may hereafter wear, the old
+precision of statement must be abandoned; the intellect must be more
+humble.  And further, the Spencerian view is wholly different from
+atheism.  It leaves the door open.  It recognizes that some supreme
+reality exists beyond and above man.  That reality is not intelligible to
+the intellect which analyzes and generalizes.  But may it not be
+approachable through another side of man's nature,--accessible through
+gates like those by which one human spirit recognizes another human
+spirit?  The evolutionary philosophy, in an enlarged construction, raised
+no barrier against the access to divinity through the noblest exercise of
+humanity.
+
+Live the personal life toward the highest ideals, with the faithfulest
+endeavor,--and peace, trust, hope, spring up in the soul.  So does man
+find access to the supreme power; so does he find himself encompassed and
+upborne by it; so is he drawn into closest union with his
+fellow-creatures and with the divine source of all.  It is the old answer
+and the new; it is figured in the Hebrew's assurance that the Lord loveth
+the righteous; it gives strength and courage to Epictetus; it inspires
+the confidence of Jesus, the loving and holy soul finding its heavenly
+Father; it speaks with glad voice in Emerson,--"contenting himself with
+obedience, man becomes divine."
+
+The essential truth is old, but in our day it is being disencumbered of
+the husk of myth and dogma which obscured it; while by the growth of new
+powers and finer sensibilities in man his access to highest reality
+becomes more intimate.
+
+As the evolutionary philosophy has already reaffirmed, clarified, and
+enriched the moral life, so, blending with the clearest interpretation of
+man's deepest experience, it is to reaffirm, purify, and deepen the
+religious life.
+
+
+One disciple of Spencer has applied herself with great genius and art to
+creative fiction.  George Eliot is a thorough Spencerian, and she is
+constantly, effectively, almost with over-insistence, a moralist.  Life
+may be ruined by self-indulgence,--that is her perpetual theme.  Of wide
+range and variety, she is powerful above all in picturing the appeal of
+temptation, the gradual surrender, the fatal consequence.  Shakspere does
+not show the inner springs of the fall of Macbeth or Angelo so clearly as
+she shows the catastrophe of Arthur Donnithorne, of Tito Melema, of
+Gwendolen Harleth.  Readers from whom the threat of hell would fall off
+as an old wife's tale, feel the dark power of reality in the mischief
+which dogs each of her wrong-doers.  More scantly, and with growing
+infrequence, there are scenes of a natural gospel of redemption and
+salvation,--Hetty reached in her misery by the Christian love of Dinah,
+Silas Marner won back to happiness by the little child, Gwendolen saved
+from her selfishness through dire disaster and a strong man's help.
+
+The prevailing atmosphere of George Eliot's later books is sad, and the
+sadness deepens as they go on.  A labored, over-strenuous tone increases;
+the style loses in simplicity and is overburdened with reflection.  The
+note of struggle is everywhere present, and shuts out repose, freedom,
+joy.  The sensitive reader can hardly escape an undertone of
+suggestion,--yes, life must be made the best of, but it seems scarcely
+worth the cost.  Is it the entire absence of any outlook beyond this life
+which makes the gloom of the later works?  Yet this seems only partially
+to explain.  One seeks inevitably the clew to the writing in the life.
+George Eliot's story as a woman is an open one.  She took as her life
+companion a man who was legally united to another woman.  Her
+justification apparently was that they were suited to each other, and
+that with the support of this mutual tie they could best do their work.
+Stated in plain terms, the moral question involved seems hardly to admit
+of any debate.  There is no more vital point in social morality than the
+relation of the sexes, and George Eliot's own teaching reverts most often
+to this topic, and always with its emphasis on restraint.  Her actual
+course assumed that the established and accepted law of society may be
+set aside by a man and woman upon their own judgment that their need of
+each other is paramount to the social law.  A position more contradictory
+to her avowed principles could hardly be stated.  It was no new claim of
+immunity; it had been professed and preached, especially on the
+Continent, with results patent to all, of the subversion of social
+foundations; it marks the especial danger-point of a time of swiftly
+changing standards.  It is impossible not to feel that her course was a
+precedent and example in flat contradiction of the teaching she so
+assiduously gave.  Doubtless she persuaded herself she was right, but
+such persuasion must have involved, the most dangerous sophistication
+which besets man in his groping struggle,--a claim by a leader for
+exemption from the common obligation on the plea that his welfare (that
+is, his comfort) is especially necessary for the good of mankind.  As one
+reads George Eliot's pages with her own story in mind, the shadows are
+heavy.  In the over-active, restless reflections, one feels the working
+of a mind incessantly exercised by its own self-defense.  The suggestion
+comes to us of a nature which has lavished all its energies on thinking,
+and lacked strength for living, and so has failed of that vision which
+comes not from thought but from life.  The cramping horizon, the low sky,
+the earthly limit within which love saddens and hope dies,--all seem to
+bespeak that loss of truest touch with the universe which comes when one
+is not true in act to the law he acknowledges.  The sense of a tragedy in
+herself, more pathetic than any she has depicted, touches us with awe,
+with tenderness, with compunctious thought of our own failures.  We are
+"purified by terror and by pity."
+
+
+The largest wisdom and the finest insight of our age are blended in
+Tennyson's "In Memoriam."  Written half a century ago, its truth not less
+than its beauty stands unshaken by the later thought and knowledge.
+Antedating the work of Darwin and Spencer, it accepts the principles of
+Evolution.  Its atmosphere is wholly modern.  It is pervaded by the
+sentiment of Christian faith, but it does not lean for support on dogma
+or miracle.  The difficulties it encounters are neither the terror in the
+old view of the hereafter nor the problems incident to the supernatural
+theology.  The poet stands before the amazing spectacle of nature as seen
+by science, beholding along with its prodigal beauty its appalling
+destruction and its unswerving march.  It is no longer hell, but
+extinction, which seems to threaten man.
+
+The intellectual problem of the universe is faced, but the medium through
+which it is seen is the experience of a human heart filled by a sacred
+love and then struck by bereavement.  It is the old, typical, deepest
+experience of man,--love confronted by death.
+
+The poem moves like a symphony, weaving together requiem, cradle-song,
+battle-march, and psalm, to a consummation of tender and majestic peace.
+As the recurrent theme which governs the whole may be taken this:---
+
+  "How pure at heart and sound in head,
+    With what divine affection bold,
+    Should be the man whose thoughts would hold
+  An hour's communion with the dead."
+
+These are the conditions,--fidelity, sanity, divinely bold affections;
+this is the fruition, the sense of a mystic communion with the unseen
+friend.
+
+One passage gives the reconciliation between the evolutionary view of the
+universe and a divine possibility for the individual.  The evolutionary
+process of nature is regarded as the type of the development of the
+soul:---
+
+  "Contemplate all this work of Time,
+    The giant laboring in his youth;
+    Nor dream of human love and truth,
+  As dying Nature's earth and lime;
+
+  "But trust that those we call the dead
+    Are breathers of an ampler day
+    For ever nobler ends.  They say,
+  The solid earth whereon we tread
+
+  "In tracts of fluent heat began,
+    And grew to seeming-random forms,
+    The seeming prey of cyclic storms,
+  Till at the last arose the man;
+
+  "Who throve and branched from clime to clime,
+    The herald of a higher race,
+    And of himself in higher place,
+  If so he type this work of time
+
+  "Within himself, from more to more;
+    Or, crowned with attributes of woe
+    Like glories, move his course, and show
+  That life is not as idle ore,
+
+  "But iron dug from central gloom,
+    And heated hot with burning fears,
+    And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
+  And battered with the shocks of doom
+
+  "To shape and use.  Arise and fly
+    The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
+    Move upward, working out the beast,
+  And let the ape and tiger die."
+
+
+Thus do the moral purpose and the immortal hope define themselves in the
+terms of the new philosophy.  How are they related to the terms of the
+old religion?  The poet's attitude toward the historic Christ is wholly
+reverent.  Incidents of the gospel story are vivified by a creative
+imagination.  But Christ is no longer an isolated historic fact; he is
+the symbol of all divine influence and celestial presence,--"the Christ
+that is to be."  The resurrection story is reverently touched, but it is
+not upon this as a proof or argument that the poet dwells in regaining
+his lost friend under a higher relation.  That experience is to him
+personal, at first hand.  His comfort is not solely that in some future
+heaven he shall rejoin his Arthur.  The beloved one comes to him now in
+moments of highest consciousness; associated profoundly, mysteriously,
+vitally, with the fairest aspects of nature, with the loftiest purposes
+of the will, with the most sympathetic regard of all fellow creatures.
+
+In the experience which is supremely voiced in "In Memoriam," but which
+is also recorded in many an utterance which the attentive ear may
+discern, we recognize this: that the sense of the risen Christ which
+inspired his disciples and founded the church was in truth an
+instance--clad in imaginative, pictorial form--of what proves to be an
+abiding law of human nature--the vivid realization of the continued and
+higher existence of a noble and beloved life.
+
+We may believe that in the progress of the race this faculty is being
+developed.  In its first emergence it was confused by crude
+misinterpretations.  A single instance of it was for two thousand years
+construed as a unique event, the reversal of ordinary procedure, and the
+basis of a supernatural religion.  Now at last we correlate it with other
+experiences, and interpret it as a part of the universal order.
+
+Tennyson expresses that present heaven which is sometimes revealed to the
+soul:--
+
+  "Strange friend, past, present, and to be;
+    Loved deeplier, darklier understood;
+    Behold, I dream a dream of good,
+  And mingle all the world with thee.
+
+  "Thy voice is on the rolling air;
+    I hear thee where the waters run;
+    Thou standest in the rising sun,
+  And in the setting thou art fair.
+
+  "What art thou, then?  I cannot guess;
+    But though I seem in star and flower
+    To feel thee some diffusive power,
+  I do not therefore love thee less:
+
+  "My love involves the love before;
+    My love is vaster passion now;
+    Though mixed with God and Nature thou,
+  I seem to love thee more and more.
+
+  "Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
+    I have thee still, and I rejoice;
+    I prosper, circled with thy voice;
+  I shall not lose thee though I die."
+
+
+Two men beyond all others in America have interpreted the higher life.
+Emerson revealed it through the medium of thought, beauty, and joy.
+Lincoln showed it in action, sympathy, and suffering.
+
+Lincoln had the deepest cravings of love, of ambition, and of religion.
+His love brought him first to bereavement which shook his reason, then to
+the daily tragedy of an unhappy marriage.  His ambition--he said when he
+entered his contest with Douglas--had proved "a failure, a flat failure."
+In his crude youth he exulted in the rejection of Christianity; then he
+felt the pressure of life's problems, and was powerless before them.  He
+could believe only what was proved,--all beyond was a sad mystery.  He
+bore himself for many years with honesty, kindness, humor, sadness, and
+infinite patience.  He did not for a while rise to the perception of the
+highest truth in politics, but he was faithful to what he did see.  He
+lived in closest contact with ordinary men and knew them thoroughly.  His
+training was as a lawyer and a politician.  This brought him in touch
+with the every-day actuality and all its hard and mean facts.  He was
+disciplined in that attempt to reach justice under a code of laws which
+is the practical administration of society, distinct from the idealist's
+vision of perfection.
+
+The time came when in the new birth of politics he rose to the perception
+of a great moral principle,--the nation's duty toward slavery.  At the
+same time, his ambition again saw its opportunity.  He had a strong man's
+love of power, but he deliberately subordinated his personal success to
+his convictions when he risked and lost the fight with Douglas for the
+senatorship by the "house-divided-against-itself" speech.
+
+In the anxious interval between his election and inauguration, he went
+through, as he said long afterward, "a process of crystallization,"--a
+religious consecration.  He made no talk about it, but all his words and
+acts thenceforth show a selfless, devoted temper.
+
+He bore incalculable burdens and perplexities for the sake of the people.
+He met the vast complication of forces which mix in politics and war--the
+selfishness, hatred, meanness, triviality, along with the higher
+elements--with the rarest union of shrewdness, flexibility, and
+steadfastness.  His humor saved him from being crushed.  The atmosphere
+he lived in permitted no illusions.  "Politics," said he, "is the art of
+combining individual meannesses for the general good."
+
+He came to the sense of a divine purpose in which he had a part.  He grew
+in charity, in sympathy, in wisdom.  His private griefs, such as the
+death of his boy, deepened his nature.  He bore burdens beyond
+Hamlet's,--a temperament prone to melancholy, the death of the woman he
+loved, a wife who was little comfort, an ambition which long found no
+fruition and no adequate field, a baffled gaze into life's mystery; then
+the responsibility of a nation in its supreme crisis, and the sense of
+the nation's woe.  Through it all he held fast the clew of moral fidelity.
+
+A lover of peace, he was forced to be captain in a terrible war.  "You
+know me, Voorhees," he said to an old friend; "I can't bear to cut off
+the head of a chicken, and here I stand among rivers of blood!"
+
+Under overwhelming perplexities and responsibilities, amid a ceaseless
+drain on his sympathies, he learned and practiced a higher fidelity and
+deeper trust.  At the outset was "the process of crystallization;" at the
+end came "malice toward none, charity for all," "fidelity to the right as
+God gives us to see the right."  At last the sunrise of the nation's new
+day shone full upon him.  Then suddenly, painlessly, he passed into the
+mystery beyond.  He was loved by his people as they never loved any other
+man.  The world prizes its happy souls, but it takes to its inmost heart
+him who is faithful in darkness.
+
+
+
+[1] Jowett's translation.
+
+[2] I have followed George Long's translation of Epictetus.
+
+[3] In the language of Renan: "By this word [supernatural] I always mean
+the _special_ supernatural act, miracle, or the divine intervention for a
+particular end; not the general supernatural force, the hidden Soul of
+the Universe, the ideal, source, and final cause of all movements in the
+system of things."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+GLIMPSES
+
+The virtue of truth-seeking is a modern growth.  The love of
+speculative truth, indeed, shines far back in antiquity, in individuals
+or in little companies.  But the truth-seeking quality has had its
+special training through the pursuits of physical science.  The
+achievements of three centuries in this direction have been made under
+the constant necessity of attention to reality, at whatever cost to
+prepossession or desire.  Watchfulness, patience, self-correction are
+the requisites.  There is the discipline of what Huxley calls "the
+perpetual tragedy of science,--the slaying of a beautiful theory by an
+ugly fact."  This courage, patience, humility of the intellect, long
+exercised on secondary problems, wrought into habitual and accepted
+traits of the explorer, are called on at last to face the direst
+ordeal.  The human mind confronts the question, "Are my dearest faith
+and love and hope based on reality?"  To face that question, and face
+it through; to yield to no despondency, however dark the answer; to
+hold sometimes the best attainable answer, whether of affirmation or
+denial, as only provisional, and wait for further light, whether it
+come now or in a remote future, whether it come to him or to some
+other,--this measures the greatness of the human spirit.
+
+It is in this respect that our moral standards, compared with those of
+Christendom for eighteen hundred years, have in a sense undergone not
+merely a development but reversal.  In that passage upon charity in
+which the genius of early Christianity wings its highest flight, one
+note alone wakes no response in us.  "Charity beareth all things,
+hopeth all things, endureth all things."  Amen!  But at "believeth all
+things" we draw back.  For us, the word must read "proveth all things."
+
+So long as moral obligation was based solely on the sanction of a
+supernatural world; so long as the condemnation of murder and theft and
+adultery was supposed to rest on the fact that God gave two tables of
+stone to Moses; so long as brotherhood and hope and trust ascribed
+their charter to an incarnate Deity,--so long a _belief_ in the charter
+and its history seemed the first requirement, the necessary condition
+of morality.  But to the modern mind the first and great commandment is
+to see things as they are.  The foundation of our morality, our
+happiness if we are to be happy, our trust and worship if we are to
+have a trust and worship,--in any event, our rule of life, our guide
+and law,--must be, _follow the truth_.  No sect monopolizes that
+principle.  It was orthodox old Nathaniel Taylor who used to bid his
+students, "Go with the truth, if it takes you over Niagara!"
+
+The question presents itself to man: "Is the Power that rules the
+universe friendly to me?"  It certainly does not offer the kind of
+friendship which man instinctively asks.  It does not give the
+friendship which saves from pain, which insures ease, pleasure,
+unchecked delight.  Not an indulgent mother, certainly.
+
+The starting-point for getting the question truly answered must be a
+practical acceptance of the highest rule and ideal known to man.
+Accepting that and following it, he rises higher and higher.  He feels
+himself in some inward accord with the moving forces of the universe.
+The prime requisite is for him to obey, to do the right, be the heavens
+kindly or hostile or indifferent.  Just so, long before man knew
+anything of the general laws of nature, he planted and reaped,
+struggled for food and clothing, took care for himself,--he must do
+long before he comprehends.  So he must work righteousness and love,
+God or no God.  And in the summoning voice within him, the play upon
+him of powers forever urging him to choose the right,--powers to which
+he grows more and more sensitive as his effort is earnest,--in this he
+comes to recognize some reality which has to him more significance and
+impressiveness than any other thing in the world.
+
+The working principle of the modern mind is that the universe is
+orderly.  Everything has its place and meaning.  Man discerns in his
+personal life this much of clear meaning, that he is to strive toward
+the noblest ideal.  As he accepts that, the conviction comes home to
+him that in the highest sense the universe is friendly, for it is
+attracting, urging, compelling him to the realization of his highest
+dreams.
+
+
+The highest intellect is always serene.  Shakspere and Emerson stand at
+the summit of human thought and vision; unlike as they are, both view
+the spectacle of life with an intense interest, and a great though
+sober cheer.  If we analyze the elements which Shakspere portrays, we
+might incline to judge that the sadness outweighs the joy.  But the
+impression left by his pages is somehow not sad.  Some deeper spirit
+underlies and penetrates.  Back of Lear's heartbreak, Hamlet's
+bewilderment, Othello's despair, we feel some presence which upholds
+our courage.  It is the mind of the writer, so lofty and wise that it
+is not daunted by all the terrors it beholds, and which conveys to us
+its own calm.
+
+
+In a like mood, we may often look for ourselves on the drama of real
+life, profoundly stirred by its comedies and tragedies, but not
+overwhelmed,--least overwhelmed when our sight is clearest.
+
+The sense of assurance--not of mere safety from special harm, but the
+uplift of some unspeakable divine reality--comes in presence of the
+grandest scenes of nature,--mountain or ocean or sunset.  They supply
+an external image, answering to some faculty in the soul.  And when
+through failure of sense or spirit the vision is obscured, the soul
+becomes conscious in itself of that to which mountain and ocean are but
+servants,--the reserve power to endure and to conquer which springs to
+life at the stern challenge.
+
+The deepest assurance comes not as an intellectual view nor as an
+impression from the sublimities of nature.  It is the outcome of the
+severest conflicts and the heaviest trials.  We cannot explain the
+process, but we see in others or feel in ourselves this: that out of
+the hardest struggle in which we have held our ground comes the deepest
+peace.  What serenity is to the intellectual life, that to the moral
+life is this "peace which passeth understanding," this blending of
+gladness and love.  It is not a passive condition, but of the highest
+potential energy,--the parent of all great achievements and patient
+fidelities.
+
+
+The soul learns to draw courage, trust, joy, and hope from its resolute
+encounter with realities, without leaning on any explanation.  It is
+the onlooker only who despairs.  Literature, so much the work of
+on-lookers, exaggerates the depression.  Men of action, toilers,
+helpers, fathers, mothers, saints,--these do not despair.  The world as
+a whole, and the best part of the world, lives a life of action,
+feeling, exercise of every faculty,--which generates courage, strength,
+tenderness.  Under all the confusion and wrong, there are still the
+deep springs of that same experience, that "peace of God" which always
+fed the highest life.
+
+There is an experience sometimes felt of perfect assurance, peace, and
+joy.  It is "love which casteth out fear,"--the sense of being "God's
+child;" it is communion with the Highest.
+
+This is the heart of religion.  It is known to "babes and sucklings,"
+unknown to many otherwise very learned people.  It speaks with an
+absolute authority the message of love and peace, of joy and hope.
+
+The mind is wont to clothe this message in some crude form, which
+serves to convey it to others, but is like the alloy which makes the
+pure gold workable, yet debases it.
+
+This gladness of the spirit was the gospel of Jesus.  He had it as no
+one ever had it before.  His followers caught it.  They debased,
+necessarily, but they spread it.  They worshiped it in him, made him
+their leader, master, and finally their God.  They loved him as a
+present reality, while they treasured the record of his human words.
+In such exaltation, like the intoxication of a heavenly wine, the
+untrained mind is creative in its ecstasy; hence the beautifully
+conceived and easily believed stories of announcing angels, miracles of
+healing, bodily resurrection.
+
+Then came a long development of dogma and church,--much of obscuration,
+much of degeneracy.  Through it all survived the truths that love is
+supreme, and that the law of life is goodness sublimed to holiness.
+
+The revivals of religions have been the rediscovery of the glad truth,
+freed each time from some accompanying error.
+
+The discovery of Luther was that the soul's life in God was possible
+outside of the Catholic church.  Others had found this, too, but he
+made it a militant truth, and successfully revolted.
+
+Calvinism was partly a reversion; its emphasis on sovereignty was
+tyrannical, but it trained the mind in exact and intense thought.
+
+Fox, after long searchings amid sects and parties, made the new
+discovery again,--God's spirit given directly, freely to man!  Hence a
+sort of intoxication in the early Quaker, sobering to a sweet religion.
+
+Always, in the various churches,--Roman, English, Genevan,
+Lutheran,--was something of the divine fire, though often hidden and
+choked.
+
+In the Wesleys, the saving and seeking love of Christ was the form the
+revival took; and with this went "free grace," as against fatalism
+which crushed the will.
+
+Edwards had something of the love-element, but it was fettered by his
+Calvinism.  His main service was to stimulate religious thought, which,
+from a Calvinistic basis, worked out through Hopkins to Channing.
+
+The revival in Liberal Orthodoxy is essentially a recognition of the
+true character of Jesus, and an idealization and enthronement of this
+as the sovereign ideal, with a clinging as yet to the supernatural
+basis, which inevitably grows weaker.
+
+Meanwhile, new "ways into the Infinite" have been opened,--through
+nature, as by Wordsworth; through humanity by Emerson.
+
+Science has swept away the whole supernatural machinery with which this
+inner life of the soul has been connected in men's minds.  It finds
+everywhere order, growth, a present rooted in the past and flowering
+into the future.  Opening immense vistas for the race, it sometimes
+seems to shrivel the individual to a transient atom.
+
+But still there wells up in the heart of man the mysterious, profound,
+irresistible gladness in its Divine source,--the love that casts out
+fear.  We may look at it soberly, assign it place, limit it in a way;
+it can no longer give us a cosmogony, but unimpaired is its message,
+"Obey and rejoice!"  We correlate its impulse with the sense of moral
+obligation and the code of ethics which has grown up in the world's
+sober experience.  We learn to cultivate the religious sense more
+wisely than of old.  We make bodily health its minister.  We administer
+and reorganize civil society, instead of confining ourselves to the
+church.  We open our hearts to the revelation of nature and humanity.
+And we wait patiently the slow coming of the Kingdom; the slow growth
+of religion in our own character; the slow upbuilding of human
+societies.
+
+Side by side with this slow process lies always the present heaven into
+which at times the soul enters and finds perfect peace,--a peace which
+embraces past, present, and future, time and eternity.  We study and
+practice obedience, diligence, patience; and at unforeseen moments,
+under shocks or in highest tranquillity, comes the divine revelation.
+
+The belief that the perfect life had actually been lived by Christ was
+a help to men whose aspiration felt itself unsuccessful,--the very
+height of the aspiration deepening the sense of failure.  The mind
+fastened on an actual and perfect goodness outside of itself.  The
+Stoic ideal kept a man self-watchful, giving him no higher personality
+to look up to.  There was in Christianity the feeling that the perfect
+life has been lived, and this somehow may help to save me.  This was
+the core of the Atonement.  All theories of it--ransom, substitution,
+and the like--were intellectual explanations of the fact of experience.
+
+Forgiveness is the soul's delighted sense that its sin is not mortal.
+It comes only after sin has been felt as a burden.  Conscious of
+wrong-doing, man feels helpless and even accursed,--imagines or credits
+stories of a fall, of measureless guilt, and an endless hell.  What
+gives poignancy to these ideas is the real sense of wrong-doing, which
+projects a monstrous and exaggerated shadow.
+
+The sense of duty, constantly worked, breeds in sensitive souls the
+despair of an unattainable perfection.  The outward ceremonial does not
+help or enrich,--the moral and spiritual ideal tantalizes by its
+impossibility.  This happens even to the strenuously righteous.  In the
+gross wrong-doer, especially if he falls under the ban of society,
+there is wrought a despair which probably expresses itself in a
+hardened recklessness.
+
+Among these "lost sheep" came Jesus as a friend.  His love divined the
+deeper soul within them,--its yearning for the good it had perhaps
+ceased even to struggle for,--its untouched possibilities.  He said,
+"Be of good cheer!  Thy sins be forgiven thee!  Go in peace!"  At his
+word and touch, a new life sprang up in them,--a new force lifted
+humanity in its lowest depths.
+
+To this new sense of life out of death Jesus gave the name of _Your
+Father's love_.  He typified it in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
+And as the appropriate attitude for this recovered sinner, he set, not
+merely a glad and thankful acceptance of the gift, but the passing of
+it on to others.  He bound inseparably the receiving and the giving.
+"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."
+
+Just the experience of the pardoned miser or harlot came to Paul when
+he saw that in his pride and willfulness he had been persecuting the
+holy and innocent, yet felt himself reached and loved and restored by
+that same innocent and holy soul.
+
+The experience was constantly repeated in the early church.  It was the
+most striking of all those genuine "miracles"--the wonders of spiritual
+creation and growth--which were the wealth of the Christian society.
+
+At the most dark and depressing hour of that society; when in gaining
+dominion it had lowered its purity, and before the barbarian invasion
+the whole social fabric shook,--that same miracle of a divine love,
+realized as a saving and transforming force, was wrought in the great
+personality of Augustine, and inspired through him anew the life of the
+church.
+
+The intellectual vestment of this experience--the form under which the
+crude thought of these men gave it body and substance--was the
+Incarnation and the Atonement.  Those doctrines have lasted through all
+changes, even until this day, because of the pearl of truth cased in
+their rough shells.
+
+When now we try to express that truth in its simplicity--finding always
+a great difficulty in putting in articulate words the deep things of
+the spirit--we say that the man who sees and sorrows for and seeks to
+escape from his wrong deed or habit may come into the consciousness
+that he will escape,--may feel with a profound assurance that he is
+upborne by some power of good which will save him and bless him.  He is
+recoverable; he is lovable; he is loved, and shall be saved.  And the
+way in which that consciousness is awakened is oftenest by the contact
+of some soul which the sinner reverences as better than himself, which
+knows his guilt and loves him in spite of it, and declares to him that
+he shall live and recover.  The minister of forgiveness may be a mother
+or a wife; it may be the sincere priest speaking to the sincere
+penitent; it may be Christ or Madonna; it may be the unnamed Power
+whose token is the sunset, or the rainbow, or the voice within the
+heart.
+
+
+The especial limitation of Christianity at its birth was the
+expectation of the speedy ending of the existing order.  Hence an
+indifference to such subjects, belonging to permanent human society, as
+industry, government, knowledge, the control of the forces of nature.
+
+As to all these, the limitations of Christianity hindered its progress;
+as to each, the natural and secular world exercised an influence
+unconfessed or striven against; as to each, the perception was reached
+that it must be recognized by religion, until in our day the _Here_ and
+_Now_ takes the foreground in place of the _Hereafter_.  The personal
+life in its present relations, the human society under earthly
+conditions,--these give to us the main field and problem.  The
+hereafter of the individual gives background and atmosphere.
+
+
+For "holy living and dying" we put simply holy living.  To give
+fullness and perfection to each day, each act, is all and is enough.
+The thought of death should not swerve or alter a particle.  When the
+last hour of life comes, what retrospect shall we wish?  Only to have
+filled life with the best.
+
+
+The religious emotion will often and freely personify, and must do so.
+The highest feeling takes on a quality of love, and love goes to a
+personal object.  It is sometimes as toward one divine friend and God,
+sometimes toward the one beloved human being, sometimes the Christ,
+sometimes a universe of living and loving beings.  These are
+distinctions of form rather than of substance, the expression by
+different minds of the same reality.
+
+To the modern mind, the distinct personification of deity is less
+natural than formerly.  The very vastness of the Infinite, as we
+conceive it, precludes this definite personalizing of it as a habitual
+mode of thought or basis of conduct.  Yet under lofty and high-wrought
+emotion, the yearning of the soul toward the Supreme Power often breaks
+spontaneously into the language of personality.  In the exquisite sense
+of deliverance from sharp trouble,--when the trouble itself seems more
+than justified by the heightened gladness, as in Titian's Assumption
+the face of the Virgin Mother shines in the welcome of that heaven to
+which the way has led through all earthly and motherly sorrow,--in such
+emergence, the heart utters again the very words of the Psalmist: "I
+love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.
+The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon
+me; I found trouble and sorrow.  Then called I upon the name of the
+Lord, O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul!  Gracious is the Lord
+and righteous; yea, our God is merciful.  Return unto thy rest, O my
+soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with me.  For thou hast
+delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from
+falling."
+
+
+If we would weigh and measure the value of mankind, we have no scales
+or measures.  As much is to be said for the badness of men as for their
+goodness.  Still more impossible is it to trace their individual
+responsibility for what they are.  But the determination of the value
+of mankind, even the lowest, is by a different process from that of the
+speculative intellect.  Are men worthy of love?  Love them, and you
+shall know!  The attitude of love vindicates itself.  No one who has
+heartily given himself to the service of others turns back saying,
+"They are not worth it."
+
+Encompassing light creates in the developing creature an eye.  So
+encompassing love--human love--draws out response in its object, makes
+it lovable.
+
+
+One class of truths are certain for all and at all times.  These are
+such as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; the
+obligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true attitude;
+receptivity toward knowledge, beauty, and humor.
+
+There are other perceptions which vary greatly in their frequency and
+vividness.  They are impulses of reassurance, joy, hope, victory.  They
+surpass all other sources of strength and comfort.
+
+They cannot, in their clearness and fullness, be transferred or
+expressed; they cannot even, by the mind experiencing them, be resolved
+into intellectual propositions.
+
+They are not peculiar to what we usually call religion.  The experience
+of love between man and woman opens a new world.  So does music; so do
+all the finer forms of happiness.
+
+All these, when they come, are felt as gifts,--as revelations.  They
+are not within our direct and immediate command.
+
+What relation do they bear to the life which is within our command,--to
+our deliberate, purposeful, self-ordered life?  First, in that life we
+cultivate the two traits which fit us for the vision, though they do
+not command it,--sensitiveness and self-control.
+
+So no man or woman can foresee whether the love of wedlock shall come
+to them, but each can render himself worthy of love, and no high
+experience of love is possible except to one trained long beforehand in
+purity and unselfishness.
+
+Next, these higher moods, when they come, should be accepted as giving
+law to the unillumined hours.  They do not change, but they intensify,
+the aim at rightness of life, and they add to it the spirit of courage,
+of trust, of joy.
+
+
+The hope of immortality--the assurance of some good beyond, which we
+express by "immortality"--is born from a sense of the value of life.
+Life is felt to be precious as it is consecrated by the moral struggle
+in ourselves, and as it is viewed in others with sympathy.  We give our
+moral effort and our sympathy, and these are encountered by the
+tremendous play of human joys and sorrows, and the result is a sense of
+life as intensely significant.
+
+The feeling of communion with Christ, with angels and saints,--its
+natural basis is the reverence and love for great souls.  As such
+reverence and love is deep, and as death removes the objects, the sense
+of a continued communion arises spontaneously.  No form of our
+consciousness is more vivid and profound than this.  It has a
+background of mystery,--mystery scarcely deeper or other than that
+which envelops the earthly love.  _What_ do I love in the friend whom
+here I see?  Is it the individuality, or that higher power of which it
+transmits a ray?
+
+The sense of this blending of the human and divine does not weaken or
+perplex our affection for the friend we see; it intensifies and
+sublimates it.  So, in the sense of communion with the unseen friend,
+it disturbs us not that we cannot say how much is there of the
+remembered personality, how much of the one eternal deity.  The essence
+of what we loved and love is sure and undying.
+
+
+The creature succeeds as its functions and organs become fitted to its
+environment.  Man succeeds as he fits himself to a moral environment.
+To the undeveloped man the world is full of forces which are hostile or
+indifferent to his right action; a thousand things distract him from
+doing right; he is like a creature in a watery world with
+half-developed fins.  But as a man becomes morally developed he finds
+moral opportunity everywhere,--finds occasion for service, for
+admiration, gratitude, reverence, hope.  This moral development
+includes the whole man: he needs a good body; he needs much that only
+inheritance can supply.  His own effort is one factor, not the sum of
+factors.  We must be patient with ourselves,--accept our inevitable
+imperfections as part of the grand plan, and find a joy in what is
+above and beyond ourselves.
+
+
+Man first solves the problem of his own life,--finds the key in
+devotion to the highest ideal of character,--finds the answer in moral
+growth following his effort, forgiveness meeting his repentance, human
+love answering his love, beauty meeting his desire, truth opening to
+his search, a support and assurance found in emergency.
+
+Then, and only then, he can rightly study the world.  For he must first
+have the standard of values in human life; he must have, too, the utter
+devotion to truth.
+
+Studying the universe, he learns that man has come into being through
+the processes of material law,--that the aeons of astronomy and geology
+have been working toward his production.  He finds that man develops
+into moral man, with the power of choice and of love; develops into a
+being loyal and sensitive to duty and to his kind.  This type of man
+tends to become the universal type.  Human goodness tends to spread
+itself.  There is a society, living from age to age, of those devoted
+to the good of man: this sentiment grows purer, more enlightened, more
+enthusiastic; it is the heart of all reforms, all social progress; no
+equal power opposes it.  It is combated by selfishness, greed,
+ignorance, violence, but these forces have no spiritual cohesion among
+themselves, no inner unity; they are destined to fall before the
+advance of the higher spirit.
+
+Hand in hand with this advancing goodness goes advancing knowledge,
+growing sense of beauty, greater powers of happiness.
+
+We see thus a power working for good through man, making him its
+instrument, absorbing him into itself.
+
+The movement is continuous, from the star-mist to the saint.
+
+This is one element in the sum of things.  It is the element that man
+knows best.  The lives of the gnat and the tiger he scarcely more than
+guesses at.  Other possible existences than his own there may be, even
+within this mundane sphere, of which he knows nothing.  Of humanity he
+knows something, and he sees that it is moved toward the goal of
+perfection.
+
+The power which thus moves it he inevitably identifies with that which
+he has found urging himself toward goodness, touching him in his best
+estate with a sense of harmony, and sustaining him in all emergencies.
+To this Power of Good he devotes himself and trusts himself.  His
+supreme prayer is, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done."  He seeks to
+be used by this power for its own ends; better than any wish he can
+frame must be the end to which it works.
+
+The final product of the world-forces, the flower of the universe, the
+child of God, is man, in his fidelity, tenderness, yearning.  To him
+belong the saint's aspiration, the poet's vision, the mother's love.
+And this highest type, by all its finest faculties, reaches toward a
+hereafter.
+
+The ruling power turns often a harsh face upon its creatures.  There is
+unbounded suffering.  There is the perpetual destruction of the
+individual.  Even the moral growth meets obstacles often
+insurmountable; inheritance limits; circumstances betray; we see sudden
+falls and slow deterioration; whole races wane.
+
+But we see that evil is somehow a stepping-stone to all our good.
+Heroism, piety, tenderness, have been born out of pain.  The
+expectation of a hereafter gives hope that no individual moral germ is
+lost.  And we see that the crowning victory of life is the persistence
+of man's good against the evil; as in the mother whose love the
+prodigal cannot exhaust; in the Siberian exile who will not despair; in
+Jesus when before the cross he prays, "Thy will be done."  This is
+faith, this is the soul's supreme act,--the allegiance to good, the
+trust in good, in face of the very worst.  Man, in that depth feels
+lifted by a power transcending himself.  So, when the beloved is taken
+by death, the heart, in face of that loss, loves on; feels its love
+greater than that which has befallen; says, "O Death, where is thy
+sting!  O grave, where is thy victory!"
+
+
+The best living unites us closely and mysteriously with some greater
+whole of which we are a part.  The three great faculties are knowledge,
+conduct, love.  Knowledge finds always new objects, new connections, a
+more perfect and wonderful whole.  Right conduct brings a sense of
+being in true relations,--of fulfilling some high destiny.  Love blends
+the individual with the universal; its successive steps are the highest
+form of human education.
+
+
+Christianity was a feminine religion in its virtues, as purity and
+tenderness; and also in its attitude of pure dependence, submission,
+petition.  The masculine elements have not been duly recognized as
+religious, even when having a great place in the actual working of
+things,--self-reliance, physical hardihood, civic virtue, the pursuit
+of truth.
+
+
+In her subject state, woman has learned piety.  She brings that as she
+emerges into her free state, her gift to man, as his to her is strength
+and self-reliance.
+
+
+The moral power of the dogmatic systems has been very limited.  They
+pretended to all knowledge and all power, but they have only gone a
+little way to sweeten and purify human life.  The "enthusiasm of
+humanity" advances society farther in a decade than the old religion
+did in a century.
+
+
+We are taught by scientists the extreme slowness with which races have
+improved.  But do we know how fast races or families can improve if
+brought in contact with the most helpful influences of other races or
+families?  Has that experiment ever been fairly tried?  Do not results
+with hardened convicts, with Indian and negro pupils, suggest that
+there may be an immense acceleration of moral progress?
+
+
+Different classes of minds require different religions.  A multitude
+require the pictorial faith and the absolute authority of the Catholic
+church.  A great many require the divine-human figure of Christ.  A
+certain class of minds will be pantheistic.  To some the wonders of the
+physical world will be the most impressive revelation.  Natures strong
+in spiritual insight will be transcendentalists.  Those in whom
+personal affection is profound will have the gospel of "In Memoriam"
+and Lucy Smith.  Active, serviceable, unimaginative men will often be
+content with a cheerful agnosticism.  Some, after pushing their inquiry
+to the farthest, and keeping it united with right living, will rest in
+"devout and contented uncertainty."
+
+
+The advance of knowledge has been the great fact of the world's
+intellectual life for the past century.
+
+The increase by this means of material good; the upward push of the
+people, strengthened by knowledge and by prosperity won through
+knowledge; the widening and deepening of human sympathy,--these are the
+great social facts.
+
+The imminent situation is that knowledge has destroyed the old
+religious basis, and is only just beginning to construct a new
+religious cultus.  Socially, the common people seem on the point of a
+great advance, while the too eager push for material good brings
+temporarily a moral injury.
+
+Among the constructive forces are: a knowledge of man and the world
+which enables us to build on broader foundations than Jesus or St.
+Francis; a vivified sense of humanity which gives the emotional force
+which is always the strongest dynamic factor; and a new sense of
+natural beauty which feeds the religious life and imparts peace.
+
+The immediate future is uncertain,--the barbarian invasion and the
+religious wars may have a parallel in another period of disasters.  But
+the large onward movement is clear, and the personal ideal was never at
+once so reasonable and so ardent as now.  Though storms should rise
+high, faith and hope may hold fast, remembering that
+
+      "all the past of Time reveals
+    A bridal dawn of thunder-peals
+  Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact."
+
+
+Democracy is just a continuation of the upward push which out of the
+mollusk has made man.  Altruism is not the only nor the primary upward
+force.  Before it and along with it goes the individual's struggle for
+his own betterment,--the outreach, first, of hunger and sex; then
+toward finer forms of pleasure; then of moral aspiration.  Democracy,
+socialism are an effort for _common_ betterment; the egoistic merges
+with the altruistic impulse.
+
+The mind must be held open to the free winds of knowledge.  If they can
+shake the foundations, let them.  And just as one's personal courage
+must often tremble before personal risks, so there must sometimes be
+intellectual tremors.
+
+
+If in the ardent temper and sweet spirit of the New Testament we try to
+discriminate as to what phases of human conduct receive the chief
+stress, we find the strongest emphasis is on brotherly love and
+chastity.  The ethical service of the Christian church has been
+greatest in the direction of these two qualities.  What it has done for
+purity is beyond our power to measure.  And it is just at that point
+that even yet the struggle of humanity to emerge from the bestial
+condition seems most difficult and doubtful.  Some writer has remarked
+that Christianity apparently introduced no really new virtue into human
+society, with the exception of male chastity.  Shakspere in one sonnet
+gives tremendous expression to the evil of lust, with this conclusion:--
+
+  "This all the world doth know; yet none know well
+  To shun the heaven, that leadeth to this hell."
+
+
+Christianity, in a way of its own, opened a gate out of that hell.  The
+gate was the power of a pure spiritual affection.  Paul describes, in
+language that strikes home to-day, the war of flesh and spirit.  For
+him, its conclusion is: "O wretched man that I am!  Who shall deliver
+me from the body of this death?  I thank God through Jesus Christ our
+Lord!"  At the crisis there rises in his spirit the consciousness,
+vivid as a personal presence, of that great, pure, loving soul; and
+temptation falls dead.  Augustine relates more fully a like experience.
+The turning-point of his life comes when, still bound after long
+struggles by a sinful tie, there comes to him the message, "Put ye on
+the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill
+the lusts thereof."  The church has not confined itself to a single
+form of influence.  It has invested the command to purity with the
+sanction of a divine behest; has used threats and penalties; has
+employed asceticism, often with most disastrous results; has appealed
+variously to the spiritual imagination with legend and story.  The
+fresh blood of the Northern peoples has come in to reenforce the spent
+and struggling morality of the South.  A romantic conception of love
+has blended nature's two great forces--sense and spirit--instead of
+setting them in opposition, and has invested wedlock with its true
+sanctity, in place of the false exaltation of celibacy.  And, under
+various influences, the relation of the sexes has upon the whole been
+so far heightened that we see this at the end of two thousand
+years,--that marriage, which Paul himself looked upon as a kind of
+necessary evil, is recognized as the best guardian and teacher of
+purity.
+
+The connection between the two most strongly marked phases of Christian
+morality--between love and purity--is not an arbitrary or accidental
+one.  It is an ideal affection that best masters the sensuous nature.
+In the words of "Ecce Homo," "No heart is pure that is not passionate;
+no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic."
+
+
+The modern attitude has two broad differences from early Christianity.
+Man addresses all his energy to understanding and controlling the
+forces of nature, instead of regarding them as alien or hostile and his
+own salvation as a matter of supernatural relation.
+
+
+And his relation with the Infinite and the Hereafter is far more
+various, subtle, intimate.
+
+
+Epictetus gives the heaven of the conscience, Jesus of the heart,
+Emerson of the intellect.
+
+Man's problems now are to find the physical and the social heaven,--to
+rightly correlate the spirit with the body and the earth, and to more
+perfectly organize society.
+
+
+The modern man, instead of appealing to Jehovah or Christ, grasps the
+powers of nature and of life as they are put into his own hands.
+Walter Scott writes in his journal, in a sharp exigency: "God help--no,
+God _bless_--man must _help_ himself."
+
+
+"Love God and man; what higher rule can there be?" we are asked.  But
+the actual work of the modern man is widely different from what Jesus
+or Paul perceived.  To understand natural forces and ally himself with
+them; to rightly order that vastly complex organism, the state; to
+frankly enjoy the pleasures of the healthy body; to discern the beauty
+of the surrounding world; to reproduce beauty in art; to relish the
+humor of the world,--these are aims which would have sounded strange to
+Paul, to Jesus, or to Epictetus.
+
+To seek the best, not for ourselves alone but for others, even at cost
+to ourselves; to control our lower natures by our higher natures; to
+feel a relation with the Supreme,--these were the aims and inspirations
+of the earlier Christianity; and they remain, but with enlarged and new
+application.
+
+
+Science has not penetrated to the inner secret of life, which is best
+reached by other approaches.  But it has enormously affected all
+thinking by the discovery of Evolution.  The recognition of growth--a
+gradual, causal process--in mankind's whole advance, alters the entire
+face of history and prophecy.  Just as it eliminates supernaturalism
+from the past, so it guides present progress and inspires while it
+moderates anticipation of the future.
+
+
+There grows the sense of some unfathomable unity.  Creator and creature
+are not sharply separated, as by the theologians: they are even more
+closely united than the "father" and "son" of Jesus.  So, too, the
+unity of humanity--of all souls--until the idea of personal immortality
+blends with some dimly conceived but greater reality.
+
+
+It is impossible to portray under a single image the ideal of to-day,
+because many ideals coexist.  There is infinite difference of moral
+development, as many characters as there are men; the variety of the
+spiritual world is like that of the material world, and the diversity
+gives richness and charm.  And the forward movement of the ages is
+immeasurably complex.  Yet certain broad movements are traceable.
+
+"Do right and fear nothing," was the word of Stoicism.
+
+"God is holy; be ye holy," was the word of Hebraism, growing clearer,
+stamping itself by institutions and inheritance.
+
+"God is love; love ye," was the word of Christianity.  The life of
+Jesus was the symbol of that idea, and gave impulse and law to the new
+society.
+
+It was in keeping with the Stoic doctrine of Providence, but it came
+through the imagination to the heart, more powerful than the calm
+utterance of reason.
+
+The Christian sense of sin was the intense force to rouse the ancient
+world from its easy-going content.  It was necessary that purity should
+become a passion.  The dogma of depravity was the intellectual
+exaggeration of this.  A God who died to save men from sin and hell was
+its natural counterpart.
+
+When the church had worked under the control of these ideas for fifteen
+hundred years, there woke again in mankind the sense of joy, beauty,
+knowledge, as good in themselves and God-given.  Humanity was only half
+ripe for this truth, and again the austere impulse reasserted itself in
+Calvinism, in Puritanism, in the Jesuits.  But knowledge, joy,
+naturalness, went on growing; they have changed the conception of
+religion itself, turning it to the sense of a present as well as a
+future fruition.
+
+The sense of human suffering comes in our day to full realization.  The
+best impulse of the time throws itself against that, as formerly
+against sin.  Just as the evil of sin was overstated and became an
+exaggeration and terror, so the sense of human suffering is often
+overstretched and becomes pessimism.  But, essentially, a fresh and
+powerful enthusiasm assails the evils of mankind.  It aims to educate
+and elevate the whole being,--to save men.  It has in science a new
+instrument.
+
+The old hope of some speedy millennium is gone.  We see that the
+general advance must be slow.  But we also see that the imperfect
+condition is not so terrible as it was once supposed: it does not incur
+hell; it does not imply total depravity; it may even serve as
+stepping-stone to higher things.
+
+All the higher phases of man's nature point together.  The highest
+thought says, "All is well;" the deepest feeling, "God is love;" the
+human affection realizes its immortality; the seeing eye finds
+universal beauty; the profoundest yearning enfolds the promise, "I
+shall be satisfied."
+
+
+We may follow the story by another thread.
+
+A human society inspired and bound together by the highest traits,
+consciously ensphered in a divine power and inspired by it,--this is
+the ideal which has been reached toward and grown toward through all
+the ages.
+
+Its primitive germ was Israel's hope of a splendid national future.
+
+In Jesus this expanded into the Kingdom of God among men,--that is, the
+perfect reign of goodness, love, and the human-divine relation of son
+and father.  He looked for its realization by miracle, and when that
+failed said, "Thy will be done," and died, trusting all to the Father.
+
+His followers, at first under the dream of his second coming, settled
+into a society bound together by common rules and ideals.  The Catholic
+church was born and grew.  Mixed with all human elements of
+imperfection, it advanced a long way toward the goal, then divided its
+sway with new energies.
+
+In the political and social life of Europe, and especially of England,
+there slowly grew up a population fit for self-government in place of
+government by the few.
+
+Thomas More foresaw prophetically a community which should realize the
+loftiest vision, and whose bond should be human and social, not
+theologic.
+
+The Puritan tried to enforce the will of God, as he understood it, by
+authority,--to build a commonwealth on Hebrew lines.  He failed, in
+England and America, but stamped his character on both peoples.
+
+Then came the essay of the Quaker toward a reign of peace.
+
+Next, the Wesleyan movement, quickening the English heart and
+conscience, and sending the wave which did in a degree for the West of
+America what Puritanism and Quakerism did for the East.
+
+Then the uprising in France,--the passionate aspiration for "liberty,
+equality, fraternity,"--at war with Christianity, instead of at one
+with it like English freedom, and working great and mixed results.
+
+We see the American republic, founded by a blending of hard common
+sense, experience, devotion, and widening purpose, and best typified in
+Washington.
+
+In Lincoln the problem of the American commonwealth--to maintain unity,
+yet purify itself--and the problem of a human life are both solved by
+the old virtues, honesty, self-rule, self-devotion.
+
+The present movement of the world is toward a nobler social order.  It
+is to lift the common man upward, on material good as a stepping-stone,
+toward the height of the saint and seer.  This is the better soul of
+democracy, the noble element in politics, the reformation in the
+churches, the bond of sympathy with Christ.
+
+Along with this goes a new personal ideal, exemplified in
+Emerson,--accepting the present world as the symbol and instrument of a
+celestial destiny.  "Contenting himself with obedience, man becomes
+divine."
+
+
+In the Gospel history, the figures of the woman and the child take a
+high place.  In Jesus himself the feminine element blent with the
+masculine.  Medieval religion and art found their best symbol in the
+figure of the mother clasping her babe.  Our modern time is giving
+freedom to woman and recognizing her equality with man, and we are
+learning that the secret of the world's advance lies in the right
+training of children under natural law.  So the sentiment which grows
+up in the natural relations of life is elevated by religion, then
+developed and perfected by freedom and by science.
+
+
+For us the practical problem is the cultivation of the religious nature
+along with the other elements of a complete manhood.  We are not
+obliged by intellectual process to create a religious sentiment in
+ourselves.  We inherit that sentiment.  It is like the sense of purity
+or of beauty,--beyond demonstration, except the demonstration of
+experience.  We need only to supply the right conditions for its
+education and application.
+
+The belief that the spiritual life was dependent on certain
+institutions and beliefs was the key to the ecclesiastical tyranny of
+the past.  We have virtually escaped that tyranny.  Now, in the
+atmosphere of freedom, we cultivate the spiritual life, and it proves
+deeper and fairer than ever before.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+DAILY BREAD
+
+When Charles Lyell addressed himself to the problems of geology, he found
+that his predecessors in the study had accounted for all the stupendous
+phenomena whose story is written in the earth's crust, on the supposition
+of vast catastrophic disturbances in the remote past, because they held
+that these effects were too prodigious to have been wrought by the
+ordinary slow processes of nature with which we are familiar.  Lyell took
+up the question by the near and homely end.  He patiently watched the
+workings of heat and cold, sunshine and rain and frost, summer and
+winter, in the fields about his own house.  He learned there what these
+familiar forces are capable of, in what directions they operate, and in
+them he found the clew to the story of the past aeons.  Right about his
+doorstep were the magicians that had done it all.
+
+That illustrates the process of discovery in the spiritual universe.  We
+are not to soar up into infinity to find God.  The only air that will
+support our wings is that which encircles closely this familiar planet.
+Let us look for a divine significance in homely things.
+
+Here is Goodness.  It is right about us, in people whom we know and meet
+every day, plainly visible to eyes that know how to see it.  Here are all
+its forms.  Innocence,--the very image of it looks upon you from many a
+child's face.  Courage, firmness, self-control,--you may read them in the
+lines of many a manly countenance.  Purity,--who has not felt its
+hallowing regard fall upon him from the eyes of maid and matron?  Pity,
+tenderness, sympathy,--these angels move about us in human forms, and he
+that hath eyes to see them sees.
+
+Fineness of character must be recognized by sympathetic observation.
+There must be the watchful attentiveness, like that of the sculptor
+studying his subject, the hunter tracking his prey.  And there must be in
+the observer himself some quality akin to that he would detect.  Only the
+good see goodness, only the lover sees love.  A mother would convey to
+her little daughter some full sense of the motherly feeling that yearns
+within her, but how can it be done?  In just one way: let that daughter
+grow up and have children of her own, _then_ she will know how her mother
+felt.
+
+Would we know something of the Divine Mother-heart?  We must first get in
+ourselves something of the mother-feeling.  "Every one that loveth
+knoweth God and is born of God."
+
+Perhaps there has been given to us some human friend,--parent or comrade,
+husband or wife,--in whom as nowhere else we see the beauty of the soul.
+Best, divinest gift of life is such a friend as that,--a friend who fills
+toward us a place like that to which our poet so nobly aspires:--
+
+  "You shall not love me for what daily spends,
+  You shall not know me on the noisy street,
+  Where I, as others, follow petty ends;
+  Nor when in fair saloons we chance to meet;
+  Nor when I 'm jaded, sick, anxious, or mean;
+  But love me then and only, when you know
+  Me for the channel of the rivers of God,
+  From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow."
+
+
+Sometimes the friend whose goodness so touches us as with the very
+presence of God is one whom we have never seen.  To millions of hearts
+that place has been filled by Christ.
+
+These lines of Emerson--heroic idealist that he was--ask to be loved only
+when he is at his highest, and so is felt as a revelation of something
+higher than himself.  But our best friends--comrade, mother, or
+wife--love the ideal soul in us, and love us no less when we are "jaded,
+sick, anxious, or mean," covering with exquisite pity our infirmities,
+and by their nobility lifting us out of our baseness.  And in that
+affection which embraces our best and our worst, those human friends are
+the symbols--yes, and are part of the reality--of the Divine love.
+
+And what is all beauty, all grandeur, but the manifestation, through the
+eye to the soul, of the one Supreme Being?  The mountains, the sea, the
+sunset, touch us with more than pleasure: they stir in us some awe, some
+mystic delight, some profound recognition of sacred reality.  How can we
+better frame the wonder in speech than by saying, "Just as my friend's
+face manifests to me my friend, so Nature is as the very face of the
+living God"?
+
+In the processes of human life,--the life we live and the life we
+see,--there is discernible a significance which grows more impressive,
+more solemn, more inspiring, just as we learn to read it intelligently.
+What a wonderful drama is this play of human lives,--this perpetual
+tragedy and comedy, of which some slight and faint transcript finds
+expression in the pages of poet and novelist!  We needs must continually
+see and feel something of it, but we are apt to miss its best
+significance.  What fastens our attention most in our experience, or in
+what we sympathetically watch in others, is the element of enjoyment or
+suffering.  Pain and pleasure are so very, very real!  We ache, and we
+are sorry for another's ache; we are joyous, and glad in another's joy.
+And there it often stops with us.  But all the while something is working
+under the pain and pleasure.  Character is being made or marred.  Yonder
+man bleeds, and you sigh for him,--ah! but a hero is being moulded there.
+And here one thrives and prospers, expands and radiates,--but a spiritual
+bankruptcy is approaching.
+
+
+When we look closely and deeply at the world about us,--whether at this
+ordered world of nature, moving steadily in its unbroken and majestic
+course, or at the external aspect of grandeur and loveliness, or at the
+drama in which all men are actors, as it is disclosed to insight and
+sympathy, or at the inner world of each one's personal experience,--do we
+not find ourselves in the perpetual presence of Goodness, Order, Beauty,
+Love?  Are not these the very presence of Deity?
+
+"But," you say, "there is also confusion to be seen,--what does that
+signify?"  Just so fast as human intelligence advances, it finds that
+what seemed disorder is really governed by strictest order.  You say, "We
+see ugliness as well as beauty,--what does that mean?"  Ugliness serves
+its purpose in aiding by repulsion to train the sense of beauty.  Beauty,
+and man's delight in it, is the end; ugliness, and our repulsion from it,
+is but an incident and means.  You say, "We see wickedness,--what of
+that?"  May we not hope that wickedness, in the broad survey of mankind's
+upward progress, is the stumbling of a child over its alphabet?
+
+The instinct that the shadow is the servant of the light, that seeming
+disorder, ugliness, sin are but veiled instruments of good,--this seems
+one of the truths which flash upon mankind in gleams, and which as the
+race rises actually into nobler life tend to become clear and steadfast
+conviction.
+
+
+It is the vastness of the Divinity that overwhelms us.  Suppose a man,
+simple-hearted and imaginative, who, in a distant country, has read of
+America, and has fashioned her in his thoughts as a heroic female
+figure,--a kind of goddess.  He has taken as literal reality such poetic
+descriptions as those in Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" and Emerson's
+"Boston Hymn,"--
+
+  "Lo! I uncover the land
+  Which I hid of old time in the West,
+  As a sculptor uncovers the statue
+  When he has wrought his best."
+
+And he comes to you and says, "Show me America!"  And you show him a
+little of this country, its mountains and lakes and rivers, its shops and
+farms and people.  He is interested and gratified.  Yet this is not what
+he expected; and he says, "But show me America,--that radiant, heroic
+form, that goddess to charm the eyes and the heart."  And you tell him:
+"But America is too great to be taken in so, at a glance.  You have just
+begun to see it.  You have seen New England's hill-farms, but you have
+not seen the prairies of the West.  You have seen the Penobscot and
+Kennebec, the Connecticut and Hudson; but you have yet to see the
+Mississippi and Niagara.  I have taken you to Katahdin and Monadnock and
+Mount Washington, but you have yet to behold the Alleghanies and the
+Rockies and Tacoma.  Our people you have just begun to see: our armies of
+free toilers, our happy households, our strong men and lovely
+women,--these you are only beginning to know." And he says, perhaps: "But
+all this is so diffuse, so various, so difficult to comprehend!  I had
+fancied _America_ as some one beautiful, some one to love.  How can one
+love such a scattered, immense, diversified thing as this you describe to
+me?"  Well, you tell him: "You may not understand it yet awhile; but this
+country which you say is not a thing to love was in peril of its life a
+few years ago, and it was so loved that men by hundreds of thousands left
+home, and risked life and all for it, and their mothers and wives and
+sisters sent them forth.  That is how America can be loved!"
+
+In some such fashion as this do we grope after a God whom we can
+comprehend at a glance; and, lo! his presence fills the universe.  "Say
+not, Who shall ascend into heaven to bring him down, or who shall descend
+into hell to bring him up? for he is nigh thee, before thy eyes and in
+thy heart."
+
+
+The chief revelation we need is the education of our own perceptive
+powers.  Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, in a very striking passage,
+that the material world may convey itself through other senses than the
+five which we possess, that there may be innumerable other senses, and
+that some of these may perhaps be already developed in other creatures
+than man.  Such a suggestion stirs our curiosity and desire; but how few
+of us have learned to rightly use the five senses we have!  And of the
+moral perceptions we have but a most rudimentary development.  We are
+unconscious of most of the world we live in, unconscious even of what
+many of our fellow-men discern.  Did you ever happen to be in the
+presence of a sunset, flooding the heavens with glory, with a companion
+who showed no sign of perceiving the splendor?  Ah! perhaps he was
+blinded to it by some secret grief or care, some trouble which you might
+have discovered in him and comforted, had your sympathy been as acute as
+your sense of beauty.  But did his blindness, whatever its cause, suggest
+to you that you perhaps were at that moment in the presence of sublime
+realities, to which your consciousness was closed as his was to the
+sunset?
+
+
+To recognize consciously the spiritual elements in the universe belongs
+partly to a right cultivation of character, and partly it is due to
+natural endowment, to an intellectual faculty.  It is not, after all, of
+so much account that we _see_ the divine in life as that we have it in
+ourselves.  In this one sentence, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for
+they shall see God," Jesus puts spiritual vision as the result of a moral
+quality.  But it is the moral quality itself on which, in one form and
+another, his blessing is constantly pronounced.  So, if you say, "I
+cannot see,--God is in no sense visible to me," yet there remain still
+most precious gifts, if you will take them.  Blessed are the gentle, the
+peacemakers, the merciful, they that do hunger and thirst after
+righteousness; blessed are the sympathetic, the stout-hearted, the
+open-eyed, the open-handed; plain and simple and sure are these
+benedictions.
+
+The presence of Divinity which it is most essential that we recognize is
+the choice perpetually presented to us between a higher and a lower
+course of action.  Whether one has the joyful, uplifting vision is of
+small consequence in comparison with whether he steadily chooses and
+follows the right.
+
+
+No one can be reasoned or persuaded into any living faith in God or
+immortality, any more than reason and persuasion can draw from the cold
+April furrow the field of waving wheat.  The faith _grows_ in the
+individual and in the race, under that culture to which the higher powers
+subject us,--a culture in which the elements are experience and fidelity,
+thought and action, love and loss, aspiration and achievement.  Love and
+Loss, the sweetest angel and the sternest one, join their hands to give
+us that gift of the immortal hope.
+
+If one asks, How shall I gain faith in God and hope of immortality? what
+better answer can we give him than this: Be faithful, live, and love!
+Work and love press their treasures on you with full hands.  Open your
+eyes to the glory of the universe.  Watch the world's new life quickening
+in bud and bird-song.  Get into sympathetic current with the hearts
+around you.  Be sincere; be a man.  Keep open-minded to all knowledge,
+and keep humble in the sense of your ignorance.  Seek the company that
+ennobles, the scenes that ennoble, the books that ennoble.  In your
+darkest hour, set yourself to brighten another's life.  Be patient.  If
+an oak-tree takes a century to get its growth, shall a man expect to win
+his crown in a day?  Find what word of prayer you can sincerely say, and
+say it with your heart.  Look at the moral meanings of things.  Learn to
+feel through your own littleness that higher power out of which comes all
+the good in you.  Join yourself to men wherever you can find them in that
+noblest attitude, true worship of a living God.  Know that to mankind are
+set two teachers of immortality, and see to it that you so faithfully
+learn of Love that Sorrow when she comes shall perfect the lesson.
+
+
+Love in its simplest and most common forms is often strangely wise.  Many
+a mother learns from the light of her baby's eyes more than all wisdom of
+books can teach.  When the little, unconscious thing is taken from her
+arms, there is given to her sometimes a feeling, "My baby is _mine_
+forever;" a feeling in whose presence we stand in reverent, tender awe.
+It is not every experience of bereavement which brings with it this
+uplift of comfort.  But to the noble love of a noble object there comes
+the sense of something in the beloved that outlasts death.  To the
+_noble_ love, for most of our affection has a selfish strain in it; the
+clinging to another for what of present enjoyment he yields to us brings
+small illumination or assurance.  But as self loses itself in another's
+life, there comes to us the deep instinct of something over which death
+has no power.  Above all, when we unselfishly love one in whom dwells
+moral nobility,--when it is a great and vital and holy nature to which we
+join ourselves,--there comes to us a profound and pregnant sense of its
+immortality.  It is when death's stroke has fallen that that sense rises
+into full, triumphant bloom.
+
+No wonder the disciples felt that their Master lived!  Theirs was the
+experience that in substance repeats itself whenever from among those who
+love it a noble soul goes home.  It was because Jesus was supremely
+noble, and they had loved him with consummate affection, that their
+experience was so intense and vivid.  Its true significance lay in this,
+that it was not supernatural but natural.  It is standing the pyramid on
+its apex to deduce all human goodness from the goodness of Jesus, and to
+argue a universal immortality solely from his rising.  Let us place the
+pyramid four-square in the universal truth of human nature.  Let us
+ground our religion upon the moral fidelity, the human love, the
+spiritual aspiration, and the sober regard for fact, in which all loyal
+souls can agree.  Then at its summit we shall get that character of which
+Jesus is the type, a character in which self-sacrifice and joy divinely
+blend, and which in its passage from earth imparts the irresistible
+assurance of a higher life beyond.
+
+This morning the sun rose upon earth and trees encased in blazing jewelry
+of ice.  Fast, fast the beauty melted and was gone,--and in its place,
+behold the brown earth touched with living green and teeming with
+promise; the trees' strong limbs tipped with swelling buds; and over all
+the tender, brooding sky of spring.  Even so, the pageant of the
+miracle-story dissolves, to give place to the natural consciousness of
+eternal beauty and eternal life.
+
+A group of Americans meet in a foreign city, and they talk fondly of
+home, and to each of them home has its special meaning.  One says: "I
+remember the green hill-pastures and the great elms and the white
+farmhouses; I know just how the autumn woods are looking, and the stocked
+corn, and the pumpkins ripening in the sun; and I am homesick for a sight
+of it all."  Another says: "It is the nation that I think of.  To me
+America seems the home of the poor man, the common man.  She is working
+out great and difficult questions in government and society, and I have
+strong faith that the outcome of it all is going to be a great good to
+the world.  I long to take part once more in that national life; and over
+here among strangers I want at least to Le no discredit to the dear old
+country, and if possible to pick up some bit of knowledge or experience
+that I can add to the common stock when I get home."  A third man says:
+"Yes, that's all true; but I don't often think of it in so big a way as
+that.  I want to see my old neighbors.  And in these foreign Sundays I
+get hungry for the old church I've been to ever since I was a boy, and
+the prayers, and the old tunes."  Another, perhaps, is silent; but to his
+heart all the while are present the faces of his wife and children.
+
+As they end their talk and go out together, up the harbor comes a gallant
+ship, and at her peak float the stars and stripes; and at the sight
+through each heart runs a common thrill of love and devotion.  One man's
+thought of home is the broader, and another's is the tenderer; but
+America is home to them all.
+
+So into each loyal soul there shines a ray from the divine Sun and Soul
+of the universe.  Each, according to his individual capacity, receives of
+the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.
+
+To some minds the beauty of nature brings a deep and inspiring sense of
+divinity.  As one who has this sensibility looks on the hills and woods
+flushing in the tender radiance of autumn, there comes to him perhaps no
+articulate and conscious thought.  He may not name the name of God, or
+think it.  But the soul is uplifted.  There flows in upon it some high
+serenity, some mysterious sense of ineffable good.  If from such a scene
+one returns to life's activities in braver, truer, and gentler mood,
+there has been to him a divine revelation.
+
+Some men are of a metaphysical turn of mind, and not only their thoughts
+but all their emotional experience, all that directs their purpose and
+animates their feeling, is cast in the mould of highly abstract ideas.
+They express themselves in phrases which to most people seem cold or
+meaningless,--an empty substitute for the warmth of religious life.  But
+to the thinker himself these phrases stand for profound realities.  It
+may be that words which have to other ears the dryness of a mathematical
+formula are to him the expression of moral purpose and sacred trust.
+Such an one may say: "I do not recognize a personal God, I do not know
+that I shall have any personal immortality; but I believe in the moral
+order of the universe and seek to conform to it.  I fearlessly trust my
+destiny here and hereafter."  Perhaps on most of his hearers the words
+fall coldly; but if they see that the speaker's life bears fruit of
+goodness and heroism and service, they may be sure that, though in a
+language strange to them, God has spoken to his soul.
+
+There are a great many people, and some of the very best of people, who
+never get any vivid or distinct apprehension of realities above the
+sphere of their personal activity.  Often they conform to the usages and
+the language of a religious faith in which they have been educated, and,
+very likely, feel some self-reproach that they know so little of the
+spiritual experiences which others speak of.  There are men, too, who
+frankly say, "I don't know much about God; I can't get hold of what folks
+call religion; but I try to do my work honestly, and I want to help other
+people just as much as I can."  Some of the most genuine religion in the
+world exists in people who are almost unconscious that they have any
+religion.  The simple desire to do right, and the constant readiness to
+"lend a hand,"--that is the revelation which such souls receive.
+
+Another very large class--a class which once included most of the
+distinctively religious world--crave and find the warmth of a personal
+relation with Christ as the only satisfying thing.  It is one of the
+great and wonderful facts of human history, this personal devotion of
+unnumbered souls throughout the ages to Jesus.  In its intensest form it
+is affection to a living personality.  Any attempt to explain it as an
+appreciation of beneficent influences of which Jesus was the historical
+originator, or as the reproduction of a temper and purpose resembling
+that which was in Jesus, fails to satisfy those in whom love to Christ is
+the ruling sentiment.  It is a person, and a living person, that they
+love.  One may decline to accept the theories which are wont to accompany
+the sentiment; one may not believe that Jesus was God, nor that personal
+love for him can be required as an essential part of religion; and, at
+the same time, one may believe that when a noble soul passes from earth,
+it rises into yet nobler existence, and may be truly apprehended and
+profoundly loved by those who are here.  Certainly we see this: that to
+many men and women the strongest and holiest sentiment of life is
+affection for a personal embodiment of goodness and love, who once walked
+in Galilee and Jerusalem, existing now in the invisible realm,
+sympathizing with all human aspiration, pitiful to all human weakness and
+sorrow, inspiring to all effort and hope and trust.  That sentiment is
+surely a blessed revelation to those in whom it exists,--the warm and
+living symbol of an eternal reality.
+
+To many, the disclosure of God is made in some way especially personal to
+themselves.  Very often some human friend is the best manifestation and
+assurance of divinity.  Our faith leans on the faith of the best and most
+loving person we have known.  Sometimes the heart's natural language is
+"My father's God," "my mother's God."  With some, the life beyond death
+first becomes real to consciousness when the heart's treasure has been
+taken there.  Sometimes, in looking upon one's own life, one becomes
+deeply conscious of the higher guidance that has led it.  There are hours
+in which past sorrows shine out as heavenly messengers of good.  There
+dawns upon us a sense of the blessedness that life has held; all its
+highest experiences become instinct with the suggestion of a celestial
+meaning that we as yet but half apprehend.  We escape for the moment from
+the thralldom of self; personal happiness merges in something higher; we
+are glad and still in the sense of a divine Will working in us and in all
+things.  In such hours the soul says, "_My_ God."
+
+There is infinite variety of personal experience; "so many kinds of
+voices in the world, and none of them without signification."  One man
+has been deep in drunkenness and debauchery, he has grown reckless and
+hopeless; but through some friendly voice there reaches him an impulse to
+a new and successful effort; there comes in upon him the sense of a
+divine love; a mighty forgiving and restoring force seems to seize him
+and draw him back to life.  In his religion thereafter there may be the
+glowing emotion of one who has been forgiven much and loves much.
+Another man walks always in steady allegiance to conscience and right,
+and never has any rapturous emotions; is not he, too, the child of God?
+We dislike the prodigal's elder brother for his jealousy; but his
+father's word to him, despite that touch of unworthiness, was: "Son, thou
+art ever with me, and all that I have is thine."
+
+One whose life flows with smooth current may find the significance of
+religion in duty rather than in trust.  To such a one God may appear as
+an ideal, inspiring conduct, but not as a power, controlling events.  But
+upon him, it may be, there breaks some great emergency of life and death;
+the heart cries out like a child waking frightened in the night, and
+there answers it, from some depth far below its fear, a voice that says
+"Peace!"  In that hour the soul finds its father.  Thereafter passing
+doubts and fears can but ruffle the surface for a moment.
+
+
+In our northern winter, how perfectly the trees blend with the scene
+about them!  They seem wholly a part of winter's grand but lifeless
+world, and with what beauty do they crown that world,--the columnar
+trunks, the mighty grip of the roots upon the firm earth, the arching
+sweep of stalwart boughs, the delicate tracery against the sky!  They
+answer to the season's mood, bending in patient grace beneath a load of
+snow, casing themselves in jewels, or springing up again in slender
+strength; silent, except when the deep voice of the wind speaks through
+them.  Their shadows soften the sunlight glittering on the snow, or weave
+a black fretwork when the cold moon shines.  Yet vital in their hearts
+the trees hold summer's secret.  A little while, and they will be clothed
+in the leafy glory of June.  The robin and catbird and oriole will sing
+hidden among their branches.  Of that summer season the trees will be the
+delight and crown, that now stand like true children of winter.  They
+stand now so strong and true because of that hidden life within them
+which summer will fully disclose.  It is because it is alive that the
+trunk bends to the storm but does not break, and the twigs hold up their
+load of snow.  So, there are lives that so fit themselves to this world
+in which they stand that they become its finest part.  Their sympathy
+finds out the secret needs and possibilities of those about them.  Their
+insight discerns the work which society most needs, and their fidelity
+accomplishes that part of the work which falls to them.  Their natures
+stand open to all the glad influences of earth; their hearts rejoice with
+them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.  They make full proof
+of those experiences in which fortitude and silent endurance are the only
+resource.  Sometimes they are happy, and sometimes they are sad; but
+always other people are happier because of them.  They are the children
+of a better country.  For them the soul's full summer waits.  Knowing
+them, we do indeed know something of God and the eternal life.
+
+
+There is freedom to be achieved from the pettiness of our lives.  They
+never, perhaps, look so pitiful as when they seem made up altogether of
+little, necessary details.  Our planting and reaping, building and
+buying, all the half-mechanical operations that absorb our thought and
+time, seem sometimes little better than the bustle of a colony of ants.
+When we look down upon it all from the height of some quiet, meditative
+hour, are we not at times oppressed with a sense of its triviality and
+worthlessness?  Trivial and worthless it is, except as amidst it all we
+are working out something higher.  But to a man whose heart is set on
+noble ends; one whose great aim is, not to get his bread and butter, but
+to be a man; one who wants, not just to make a profit out of his
+neighbors, but to serve them and help them, these details are no more
+trivial or degrading than the rough dress and homely tools of a sculptor
+are unworthy of the marble beauty that is growing under his hands.  The
+high purpose consecrates and transfigures all, the want of purpose
+degrades all.  I have stood in Switzerland upon the Gorner Grat, looking
+upon the grandest scene in Europe.  On every side a circle of towering
+heights look down; against the sky rise dazzling snowy summits,
+celestially pure, celestially tender; the Matterhorn frowns in awful
+majesty; vast ice-rivers sweep down toward the valley in solemn, silent
+march.  If there be upon earth a spot that of itself has power to hush
+the soul with noblest emotion, it should be that.  Yet there I have seen
+a company of travelers spend their half-hour in senseless gabble and
+banter and the laughter of fools.  Amid the squalid surroundings of a New
+York tenement-house, I have seen a poor Irish woman living with such
+fortitude and faith and generosity that it was a comfort and inspiration
+to meet her.  That brave soul ennobled its mean surroundings with a glory
+which not the Alps and the sky could flash in upon a heart made blind and
+dull by ignoble thoughts.
+
+
+If there dwells in us the spirit of life we shall be freed from the
+bondage of doubt.  On how many earnest and aspiring lives does doubt
+throw its chill shadow!  The world is crossing the flood that divides the
+old form of faith from the new.  The rising water strikes cold to many a
+heart.  Here and there the waves sweep men off from all moral footing.  I
+know not that for the resolute and thoughtful there is any escape from
+some suffering in the transition.  Could we be always sure that it is
+only a transition,--could we know always that a better country lies
+waiting us,--all might be easily borne.  The suffering we may not
+decline; but safety, utter safety, we may keep through all.  _Life_ is
+always possible to us.  Fidelity, purity, self-sacrifice,--these may
+always be ours.  Are we baffled in our search for a divine plan in the
+universe?  Let us look nearer home; can we not find the clew to a divine
+plan in our own lives?  Yes, there need never fail to us an immediate
+token of divinity.  There is always, at the lowest, a duty to be done.
+There is always, at the very lowest, a burden to be bravely borne.  There
+is always some one to be helped.  Do we say, But this does not comfort
+me, does not reassure me?  Then let it guide me!  It is not essential
+that I should be always in the sunshine.  It is only essential that in
+sunshine or in darkness my steering should be true.  And I am never
+without a compass while I see that there is for me a higher and a lower,
+a right and a wrong, to choose between.
+
+
+Does any sense of bondage weigh you down?  Disappointment, it may
+be,--failure, life's fair promise blighted.  It may be the bitter slavery
+of evil habit.  It may be a dull and apathetic way of life, stirred with
+a vague yearning toward higher possibilities.  It may be the darkness of
+a lost faith.  It may be a bereavement that has emptied life.  Whatever
+it be, the angel of deliverance stands beside you.  He is perhaps in very
+humble garb, unsuspected of you.  Some lowly duty awaits you.  Some
+saddened life, unnoticed by your side, asks you to cheer it.  Whatever
+opportunity of duty or of service lies in the path before you is God's
+own messenger.  Meet it like the messenger of a king!  So meet every
+duty, every opportunity.  Find them, make them, for yourself.  Live no
+longer in solitude but in brotherhood.  So shall the very spirit of God
+dwell in you; so in his service shall you find perfect freedom.
+
+
+The end of February is near, and not a hint or whisper of spring does
+Nature give us yet.  We are wont to have earlier than this a few days at
+least that seem to start the sap in the trees and the blood in the veins,
+when the first bluebird is heard, and we get one swift, delicious glimpse
+of the good time coming.  But this year the cold only takes a sharper
+clutch.  At its average, our northern winter has a fierce and almost
+merciless persistence.  Those first days of spring are hardly more than
+the taste of freedom with which the cat tantalizes the mouse.  It is this
+lingering close of winter that is hard to bear.  The supplies begin to
+give out.  The wood-pile that stood so high when the first snow came is
+getting lowered to very near the ground.  The poor man's little hoard,
+that was to bridge him over till the season of good work, is perilously
+shrunken.  Vitality, too, begins to run low.  The body pines for the
+out-door life from which it has too long been shut off.  Winter is a
+hard-fisted churl who does n't give just measure.  He drives off the
+mellow and jolly Autumn before its mid-month October is fairly gone.  He
+bullies Spring so that the poor, gentle-hearted thing has to get almost
+under the wing of Summer before she dares take possession of the remnant
+of her own.  The great robber gets almost half the year.  The very bears,
+curled up for their long nap, must in these days wake sometimes with an
+uneasy shiver and wonder whether their stock of fat will hold out.
+
+This last and worst onset of winter may stand for those experiences that
+come as the sharpest test of the stuff that is in men.  The pressure of
+adversity goes on and on, until we say it has reached the last point of
+endurance, and then another turn is given to the screw!  For three long
+days the battle has raged around the heights of Gettysburg, and each side
+seems to have done its utmost, when the word is given for Pickett's
+division in solid column to throw itself straight against Cemetery Hill,
+that becomes a volcano to meet it.  Those are the times that mark men for
+the rest of their lives as heroes.  Yet there are finer heroisms than
+this.  The very splendor of such an hour, with a nation's fate at stake
+and the world looking on, is enough to find out and kindle any spark of
+manhood in a man.  With no such inspiration as that, there are in every
+community men and women who are battling with poverty and adversity and
+all kinds of trouble with a finer courage than that of the battlefield.
+They cover an anxious heart with a cheerful face, for the sake of husband
+or wife or children who are watching the face.  No winter is long enough,
+no lifetime is long enough, to tire out their fortitude and patience and
+love.  There are resources in human nature that never are known until
+things are at their hardest.
+
+So at winter's worst--come it in one form or another--man summons up his
+courage, and though the winter be longer and sharper than he had
+thought--though poverty pinches him or trouble weighs upon him--he sets
+himself stoutly to bear it.  Alone and unhelped he seems, perhaps,--the
+march of the seasons and the vast order of the universe taking no account
+of him; yet manfully he will face whatever comes.  Whatever comes?  It is
+the summer that is coming!  As certain as to-day's snow and cold, the
+season of all beauty and warmth and delight is on its way!  The
+apple-blossoms, the wild-flowers, the budding of every twig, the
+greenness of the pastures, the rejoicing life of animals and birds and
+insects, the sweet airs of May, the sunshine of June,--these, and all
+varied loveliness beyond imagination's reach or heart's desire, lie just
+before us.  So for every soul that patiently endures an unimagined summer
+waits.  Our patient endurance seems to us now a great matter, and indeed
+if we have it not we are little worth; but when the more genial season
+comes--when there fully reveals itself to us that high meaning of our
+lives and that divine destiny of which now we catch but a glimpse--we
+shall say, not "How well we endured the winter," but "How glorious is
+God's summer!"
+
+Take the case of a man who, having engaged in the active business of
+life, feeling himself amply capable of it and longing for it, finds
+himself by force of circumstances kept out of work.  Perhaps he has his
+living to earn, perhaps he has a wife and children to support, and he can
+get nothing to do.  Well, that is about as hard a place as a man can be
+called to stand in.  Idleness in itself is hard.  It is a burden even to
+those who have wealth and all the luxuries and amusements that can be
+devised to while away their leisure.  It is the very nature of a man who
+is good for anything to _do_.  Idleness is as unnatural and trying to the
+mind as sickness is to the body.  But to see those you love in need, to
+see them threatened with suffering, to know that you could amply provide
+for them if you had a chance, and not to find a chance,--what is so hard
+as that?
+
+It is so hard, my friend, that, if you can bear it and not be conquered
+by it, you are a hero.  If under that load you can keep your patience and
+your temper and your courage, you have won a victory such as makes life
+worth living.  Just as in battle it is the post of danger that is most
+honorable, so always the hard place is the place of honor.  "But," you
+say perhaps, "I don't care about being a hero; I want to see my wife and
+children taken care of."  That is the best of all reasons for keeping up
+heart.  When a good wife sees her husband unfortunate and out of work,
+what is it that she most dreads?  Not that they will starve,--starvation
+seldom happens in this country.  Not that they will be poor, though of
+that she may be somewhat afraid.  Her greatest fear is lest her husband
+should get discouraged and down-hearted; should take to drink, perhaps;
+at any rate, should become so despondent and embittered that the light
+shall go out of their lives and their children's.  Now it is his business
+not to let that happen.  It is his part to keep up for her sake a
+resolute heart and a cheerful face.  And if she is a true woman, how
+gladly will she do the same for him!  Out of just such circumstances
+there come two opposite results, according as people meet them.  There
+comes failure of effort and resolution, then despondency, then
+recklessness, drunkenness perhaps, and at last ruin, the break-up of
+character, the destruction of the children's prospects, or sometimes
+suicide.  When a man, under pressure of such trouble, really gives up,
+even for an hour, the effort to be brave and make the best of things, he
+takes a step on a road at the end of which is suicide.  _That_ is the
+consummate act of cowardice; that is the last logical result of refusing
+to face and conquer our troubles.  Heaven have mercy on the man who seeks
+in death a refuge, and so multiplies the suffering of those he leaves
+behind!  And at the point where begins the wretched road of despondency,
+which if followed out leads to this or some other ruin, there branches
+another road--manly endurance of the worst, courage which is strong
+because it is loving,--a road which leads to heights beyond our sight.
+To bear trouble together, and for each other's sake to rise above
+it,--what knits hearts together like that?
+
+Take, again, the case of a man who is by circumstances shut off from work
+that he could do and longs to do for the large benefit of mankind,--the
+man who has a gift of teaching and is not allowed to teach, or who has
+the statesman's quality and finds no place in public affairs, or who,
+with any large executive and beneficent faculty, finds himself denied all
+opportunity of exercising it.  For a faculty to be repressed is hard just
+in proportion as its quality is noble.  A caged canary is hardly a
+painful sight, but a caged eagle stirs one with regret.  And the world
+has such need of all noble talent; such exigent and hungry need of the
+true teacher, statesman, seer,--of the word of inspiration and the act of
+leadership!  How shall one who feels in him the power and sees the need;
+who grasps in his hand the keen sickle, yet is held back, while before
+his eyes the fields are white with the harvest which threatens, unreaped,
+to perish,--how shall he reconcile himself to his lot?  How escape the
+thought that he and all mankind are but playthings in the grasp of cruel
+and ironic fate?
+
+What, then, does the world most need of us?  Is it wisdom, or
+statesmanship, or executive power?  These things it greatly needs.  But
+most of all it needs character.  Most of all it needs that quality of
+personality which is moulded by the interplay of loyal will with the
+shifting course of outward event.  For our wisest thoughts the world can
+very well wait, or do without them altogether; almost certainly some one
+else has thought them and said them.  Our executive power to be added to
+the world's work,--it is but a fly's strength contributed to a
+steam-engine.  One thing the universe asks of us, which no one else can
+give,--_ourselves_; our highest and fullest self.  It is not what we do
+externally, but what we are, that measures our worth.  The real and
+lasting value of a word or an act depends largely on the weight of
+character behind it.  And in character no higher effect is wrought out
+than that which comes through endurance and heroic passivity.  To stand
+long before closed doors of opportunity and keep serene; to see work
+waiting, see others working, and in patience and self-control to bide
+one's time,--that is more than to do any work; it is to be a man.  The
+time comes when manhood finds itself to be power.
+
+A brook goes singing on its way, marking its course through forest and
+field with a track of beauty and freshened life.  Men throw a dam across
+its path, and through many a long day its course is stopped and its
+waters silently accumulate.  And the brook says, "Alas for my lost
+freedom and service!  Alas for the rush and sparkle and joy of my
+cascades!  Alas for the parched meadows, the unwatered ferns and mosses!"
+But the day comes when with a cataract leap it crosses its barrier;
+meadow and mosses and ferns revive; and now the stored power of the
+stream is turning great mills and grinding bread for men.
+
+Washington rode as a subordinate in Braddock's army; ignorance commanded
+and knowledge looked on powerless until the mischief was done.  Twenty
+years of quiet follow; great events are impending, eloquent men are
+rousing and leading; what is there for this silent Virginian? till
+suddenly he finds himself the chief commander.  Then comes waiting to
+which all before was easy; holding away from the stronger enemy, holding
+steady under the impatience and the doubts of friends; for one bold
+stroke, a year of waiting and watching; till, at last, victory!  And not
+to Washington victorious at Yorktown do we turn for inspiration so much
+as to Washington in the dead of winter at Valley Forge.
+
+There are a great many women whose capacities and desires seem much
+beyond their opportunities.  This is especially true of our New England,
+who stimulates the brains of her children, and consigns many of her
+daughters to a secluded life with small scope for action.  There are many
+women who, being unmarried, or being married and childless, or left by
+the flight of the young birds to brood an empty nest, have not the full
+natural outlet of a woman's activities and affections, and suffer
+consciously or unconsciously from a partial emptiness and idleness of
+what is best in them.  The burden upon such lives is that of isolation.
+Isolation may be in the midst of a crowd as well as in solitude; it is
+when the heart is not filled that we are truly alone.  And this real
+solitude, this isolation of the affections from their proper objects, is
+something so bad, so against the law of our nature, that, broadly
+speaking, it is a matter not so much for endurance as for speedy getting
+rid of.  Do you feel yourself alone and empty-hearted?  Then you have
+necessity indeed for fortitude and brave endurance, but above all and
+before all you are to get out of your solitude.  You cannot command for
+yourself the love you would gladly receive; it is not in our power to do
+that; but that noble love which is not asking but giving,--that you can
+always have.
+
+Wherever your life touches another life, there you have opportunity.  The
+finest, the most delicate, the most irresistible force lies in the mutual
+touch of human lives.  To mix with men and women in the ordinary forms of
+social intercourse becomes a sacred function when one carries into it the
+true spirit.  To give a close, sympathetic attention to every human being
+we touch; to try to get some sense of how he feels, what he is, what he
+needs; to make in some degree his interest our own,--that disposition and
+habit would deliver any one of us from isolation or emptiness.  There is
+but one sight more beautiful than the mother of a family ministering
+happiness and sunshine to them all; and that is a woman who, having no
+family of her own, finds her life in giving cheer and comfort to all whom
+she reaches, and makes a home atmosphere wherever she goes.  Though she
+have not the joy of wife and mother, she has that which is most sacred in
+wifehood and motherhood.  She shares the blessedness of that highest life
+the earth has seen, of him who, having no home nor where to lay his head,
+brought into other homes a new happiness, and who spoke the transforming
+word, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."
+
+Take, again, the case of an invalid, who is for a long period shut out by
+illness or weakness from all ordinary activities.  There are many such to
+whom pain and physical endurance are less trying than the feeling of
+being excluded from use and service, and having their moral life stunted
+or disordered by this stoppage of the natural play of the faculties.
+There are kinds of illness, especially those of the nervous system, which
+seem to invade the seat of the will and soul itself, to irritate the
+temper and sap the resolve and foster a self-centring egotism, by a power
+that is literally irresistible.  Before such experiences as this one
+thought rises: it is part of mankind's business to lessen, and so far as
+possible to extirpate, these maladies.  The individual sufferer must meet
+as best he can the conditions thrust upon him, but to prevent such
+conditions from arising is the lesson for the rest of us.  We are only
+beginning to appreciate how largely the salvation of mankind must be
+worked out through physical means.  The pestilences, the transmitted
+diseases, the insanities, the nervous disorders, bred of violated
+law,--all these and the like curses, which not merely destroy human life
+but degrade it, are to be fought and extirpated.  We must secure for
+soul-life some fair room and chance as against these pests and tyrants.
+Here lies the noblest work of science; here, in prevention rather than in
+cure, lies the best field of that unsurpassed profession, the
+physician's.  And, too, in this preventive work each man must learn to be
+his own physician, and minister to himself.
+
+But what, meantime, is our disabled and secluded invalid to do?  He is
+like a man set to fight a battle with one arm tied behind him.  Others
+may pity, but for him his disablement must be a motive to greater
+exertion; he must supply by courage and skill the place of the lacking
+strength.  It is what man can do under limitations and disabilities that
+shows his high-water mark of achievement.  Any one can be cheerful in
+perfect health, but to be cheerful under weakness and pain,--_that_ is
+worth trying for!  To be considerate and unselfish, when one is at ease
+and has all he wants, does not cost much; but to take thought for others
+and to spare them, and to be sympathetic with their joys and troubles,
+when pain forces you to be self-conscious, and long endurance tempts you
+to become self-centred,--well, if you can do that, you are good for
+something.  If you can do that, have no fear that you are useless.  Such
+fruit is rare enough to be precious.  The lessons taught from many a
+sick-bed of bravery and gentleness and love,--we get no other teaching so
+good as that.  There is many a family where it is the one who can do the
+least who does the most,--where it is the invalid's room from which goes
+out the strongest influence of patience and sweet courage and that divine
+quality which transforms trouble.
+
+In one sick-room in a foreign land, for years a home-loving woman has
+been an exile; a woman of active and eager disposition, with large,
+executive capacity and ripe experience, shut up almost to idleness; a
+woman of large benevolence, who had entered on work of peculiar
+excellence and attractiveness, cut off from all such activities.  This,
+with frequent pain, with fluctuation of hope and discouragement as to the
+future; and yet there is about her an atmosphere as serene as the Alpine
+heights that look down upon her, as cheerful as the sunny Alpine pastures
+with their tinkle of sheep-bell and hum of mountain bee.  Her constant
+thought goes out to distant friends and brings them near; her close
+attention follows the march of the world's great interests, the fortunes
+of England and Russia and America, the course of freedom and reform; a
+sense of nature's beauty, trained to fineness through years of enforced
+quietude, brings exquisite ministrations; she shares the lives of the
+little circle of friends about her; heart and mind are at rest in the
+peace of God.  Patience has had her perfect work.
+
+
+Up, friend! leave your law case, your sermon, your accounts, and come out
+for an hour into this delicious March day, bracing as winter and sweet as
+spring.  The new life of the year is stirring in the trees whose tops
+begin to redden, and in the brown pastures where watchful eyes can
+already see the green.  The joy of the season is singing in a million
+bluebirds' and robins' throats; the cocks crow gayly; the caw of the big
+black crow flapping overhead with ragged wing has a cheery tone.  All
+living creatures feel the tingle and throb of the great tide of life that
+sweeps in with the returning sun.  See yonder two dogs, how they frolic,
+how they crouch and wheel and charge and roll each other over and pretend
+to bite.  "Pure mongrels," both of them, and as happy as if they were the
+most aristocratic of Irish setters!  See near by the tree full of flowers
+that has lasted the winter through.  That is a tulip-tree, holding up its
+thousand delicate ghostly cups.  Its grand trunk rises straight and
+unbroken full thirty feet, then branches in symmetry, and holds up as if
+to catch the sunshine and the rain its fairy goblets.  And here is an oak
+that has not yet let go its grip on last year's dead leaves.  How sharply
+the snow rattled on them, as if clashing on the iron which naturalists
+say the sturdy tree holds in its blood!  Who ever sees these last oak
+leaves fall?  And who knows where this dry, dead grass vanishes when the
+green blades fill all its room?  Look at the horse-chestnut; already its
+buds are shiny.  It must wait a good while before their
+
+        "little hands unfold,
+  Softer 'n a baby's be at three days old."
+
+
+Sharp whistles the wind to-day, but it is the breath of life that it
+breathes into us.  It comes down from yonder hills where the snow is
+shining yet.  Grandly on the horizon lies Mount Tom, like a crouching
+lion, guardian over the fair valley.  Where the mountain line breaks,
+between him and his twin sentinel, Holyoke, we know that the broad
+Connecticut sweeps past Hockanum.  The glorious river,--what an unfailing
+joy it is to the eye as it curves and winds on its leisurely, steadfast
+course to the sea!  Here at our feet is another river, a little brook
+flowing in clear stream over the roadside sand, born of the last
+snow-drift and living till the sun drinks it up.  And beside it are half
+a dozen happy boys, paddling with their bare feet, making mud dams,
+scraping new channels and short cuts for the stream.
+
+How black is the still water of this pond, smooth as a steel mirror! what
+perfect pictures it gives back of its woody and snow-touched banks!  The
+woods above are solemn as that grandest work of man, an Old World
+cathedral, and free as only the Lord's own works are free, with the music
+of the wind in the great pine-tops; the gracious, infinite sky revealing
+itself through their tracery; the columnar trunks swaying now like a
+ship's masts.  How at evening the setting sun glows through their black
+shafts; how ethereal the light that then fills the spaces of the wood;
+how the stars look down through the branches in the living stillness of
+the night!  A few steps, and below us in the hollow we see the city, all
+its commonplaceness charmed away, the vulgar noises of the streets
+blended in a soft murmur.  Not one human life moves in those streets,
+commonplace and vulgar though it may seem, but has its own charm and
+beauty, if we could find the right view-point, or if our sight went deep
+enough.
+
+Across a plowed field darts in swift zigzag a gleam of blue; then,
+perched on a fence-rail, sends a thrilling song.  The bluebird is the
+true voice of early spring, as is the bobolink of later spring.
+Bobolinks and apple-blossoms come together in the prodigal time of May.
+Our Northern spring is the most arrant of coquettes,--the most delicious
+in allurement, the swiftest in retreat.  One day she seems to pour her
+whole heart out to us, and we think she is ours once and for all; next
+day she pelts us with sleet; buffets, freezes us; she--nay, she is gone,
+and we never shall see her again; it is the sourest shrew in the whole
+sisterhood of the year that has come in her stead!  But the true lover
+thinks not so.  He knows her woman's heart,--coying it a little, holding
+back her treasure till she sees if her worshiper be faithful, to pour it
+out all unstinted at the last, when May's perfect bridal day shall usher
+in the full and fruitful marriage blessing of the year.
+
+On this June morning, place yourself here, under the shade of this noble,
+wide-spreading apple-tree on a garden lawn.  Last night the earth was
+washed by showers, and a thunder-storm cleared the air.  This morning a
+fresh northwest wind breaks the clouds, and opens pure, sweet depths of
+sky.  Around us the flowers of early summer are blooming.  Over the grass
+trip the young birds, mottle-breasted robins and bluebirds; the trees
+ring with frequent song; from the barnyard comes cheery cackle and cluck,
+and the chickens stray forth to investigate the secrets and riches of the
+world.  A catbird pours out an opera in which he takes all the parts in
+succession, and the voice of the wind rises and falls in mysterious,
+delicious cadence.
+
+"Oil and wine:" the oil poured on the wounds to soothe and heal, the wine
+drunk to revive and hearten with cordial life.  The Hebrew symbolism has
+its roots in strong material soil: its imagery is vigorous and
+ruddy,--"wine of gladness," "oil of joy," "wine that maketh glad the
+heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which
+strengtheneth man's heart."  A modern psalmist might add, "and coffee
+which uplifts his spirit, and tobacco which soothes his cares."
+
+Jesus chose, as the two symbols by which he would be remembered, bread
+and wine.  Bread stands for nourishment and substantial support, wine for
+exhilaration and joy.  When his disciples were full of the sorrow of
+approaching parting, he showed them that the loss was only in semblance:
+the reality was to be a higher energy, a purer joy,--bread to eat, wine
+to drink,--not death, but life.  The sorrow attendant on death and loss
+is to be esteemed but the pangs that usher in life.  "A woman when she is
+in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is
+delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that
+a man is born into the world."
+
+"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach
+the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to
+preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind,
+to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of
+the Lord."  What a key-note is that,--how jubilant, tender, strong!
+
+As the earth revolving passes alternately into light and shadow, so human
+life in its divine appointment moves by turns through sorrow and through
+joy.  Each has its service for the soul, as for the earth has day and
+night each its ministry and message.  Of pain come hardihood and strength
+and sympathy.  What a sapless, fibreless thing is a man untrained by
+endurance and untaught by suffering!  How flaccid in muscle, how narrow
+in intelligence, how shallow in affection!
+
+Yet, as to an all-beholding eye the sun pours light through all the
+planetary spaces, and the night, which to us on the world's darkened side
+seems all-enfolding, is in truth but a shadowy fleck in the vast
+sun-steeped sphere: so, of the soul's universe, the native, all-pervasive
+element is conscious good.  Gladness is man's proper atmosphere.  It is
+by the impulse of his deepest nature that he seeks joy, it is by the
+force of spiritual gravitation that he is drawn to it.  But two hard
+lessons await him.  One is, that to reach that goal he must trust himself
+to a higher Power, his own effort and purpose being to obey that Power.
+The other is, that the goal is not for one alone, but for all; and he can
+reach it only as he shares the common lot, making himself partner in the
+vicissitudes of his comrades, rejoicing with them that rejoice and
+weeping with them that weep.  On our long voyage the stars by which we
+steer must be Duty and Love.  The stars guide us, the winds and currents
+bear us, to the port of perfect good.  The instinct of our journey's end
+we call Hope; the instinct by which we cleave to our true course, even
+when wholly doubtful of its end, and though false lights beckon us
+alluringly,--that instinct we call Faith.
+
+Open your eyes upon the world on such a morning as this.  Forget your own
+cares long enough to really see, but for a moment, yonder spray of roses
+waving in the breeze.  Watch the play of light and shade in the
+flickering leaves overhead.  Listen to the chorus of voices from bird,
+insect, and wind.  The wine of gladness!  Nature pours it in a sparkling
+flood, unceasing by day and night, for every one who will drink.
+
+Nature pours the wine of gladness, but only from the mingling of human
+hearts comes the oil of tenderness.  From sorrow it gets its sacred
+fragrance, from mutual service it draws its healing power, from the
+bitterness of parting it wins the sweetness of an inexpressible hope.
+
+It was under the stroke of a great bereavement, the death of his child,
+that Emerson, in the "Threnody," gave utterance to highest consolation
+soaring out of sorrow's darkness.  It was under the shadow of that loss
+that he heard the voice,--
+
+  "Saying, What is excellent,
+  As God lives, is permanent;
+  Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain,
+  Heart's love will meet thee again."
+
+
+It is the same voice that speaks through all the ages.  It speaks through
+Isaiah, "to give beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the
+garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness."  It speaks in Paul, when
+in one sentence he gives the relation with God and his fellows into which
+man may come when out of darkness is born light.  "Blessed be God, even
+the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God
+of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be
+able to comfort them which are in any trouble by the comfort wherewith we
+ourselves are comforted of God."
+
+Where, asks the stricken heart, shall I find the God of comfort?  O
+heart, only God himself shall answer you!  But know this, that the very
+end and purpose of grief is that it shall be comforted.  Comfort?  The
+word has no meaning except to those who have mourned; was never stamped
+with its sacred significance except by those who had been through the
+deep waters of grief.  "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I
+comfort you."  A man child, a woman child, He trains you to fullness of
+stature, to greatness of experience, to capacity for noble joy, for
+heart-sufficing love.  To greatness and to joy he calls us, and draws us
+slowly by the changing years.  The cross is the symbol of a passing
+experience.  The end, the attainment, is figured to us by that face of
+Nature which is the face of God, with the strength of the mountains, the
+gladness of the sunlight, the freedom of the sky, the infinitude of the
+ocean.
+
+
+The ripe days of early autumn open their best joys only to the sturdy
+walker, who turns his back on the streets to seek the country roads, and
+leaves the roads behind him to explore the forest nooks, the ravines, and
+the sheltered meadows, hidden deftly away from the incurious traveler,
+and keeping a wild sweetness for him who finds them out for himself.  If
+one is in good tune, he may get the finest flavor of such a walk by
+taking it alone, or with only rarely perfect companionship.  The ideal
+companion is one who can fully enjoy, who will help you to glimpses
+through another pair of eyes, and who will never obtrude inopportunely
+between yourself and nature.  If a satisfactory human comrade be not at
+hand, one may find these qualities in no ordinary degree in--a good dog.
+But then to appreciate them one must be a true dog-lover, a gift which
+is, alas! denied to some otherwise exemplary and worthy people.
+
+What does the dog think of it all?  He has his own keen pleasures.  His
+nose is an organ of intelligence and enjoyment which his master does not
+possess.  He explores woodchuck holes; he tracks real or imaginary
+squirrels; one barks and scolds at him from a high limb, and throws him
+into a delicious fever of excitement.  As Fox said the greatest pleasure
+in life was to win at cards, and the next greatest to lose at cards, so
+apparently the dog finds even an unsuccessful chase to be the second best
+joy he knows.  Look at him, tense and motionless with excitement, as he
+watches the noisy chatterer overhead!  No doubt the squirrel will brag to
+all his acquaintances of how he openly defied and triumphed over his huge
+enemy.
+
+A chestnut bough swings low, and with hospitable hand proffers a
+half-open burr, out of which shine the glossy brown nuts.  Sweet is the
+taste of the nuts.  Sweet is the crisp red apple into which we bite, and
+with just a hint of the flavor of stolen fruit.
+
+What audacious pen will try to reproduce or even dryly catalogue the
+glories poured out for eye and ear, for heart and brain, upon a bright
+and cool September day?  The deep-glowing sumacs, the asters purple and
+white mixed with flaming goldenrod, in a splendid audacity of color such
+as only One artist dare venture on; the occasional dash of scarlet upon a
+maple, a first wave of the great tide that is sweeping up to cover the
+whole north country; the masses of yet unbroken green left neither dimmed
+nor dusty by the generous, moist summer; the oaks that will long hold
+their green flag in unchanging tint, as if "no surrender" were written on
+it, and then, last of all the trees, change to a hue of matchless depth
+and richness, like the life-blood of a noble heart that shows its full
+intensity only just before death's translation falls upon it; the
+separate tint of each leaf and vine, "good after its kind;" the soft
+whiteness of the everlastings in the hill-pastures; the reaped buckwheat
+fields heaped with their sheaves, stubble and sheaves alike drenched in a
+fine wine of color; the solemn interior of the woods, with the late
+sunlight touching the shafts of the pines; the partridge-berry and the
+white mushroom growing beneath, as in a cathedral one sees bright-faced
+children kneeling to say their prayers at the foot of the solemn pillars;
+the masses of light and of shadow--one cannot say which is the
+tenderer--lying on the cool meadows as evening draws on; the voice of
+unseen waters, the voice of the wind in the pines.
+
+And so, with song, with autumn colors, with sunset lights, the Mother
+calls her children home.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Chief End of Man, by George S. Merriam
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