Part 13 (2/2)

Let us come to the modern Athens for a moment, to the time of Theodore Parker in Boston. We are confronted here, again, with this strange fact. There was not a church in Boston that could abide him, not even the Unitarian churches; and in the prayer-meetings of the day they were beseeching G.o.d to take him out of the world, because they thought he was such a force for evil. And at the same time Theodore Parker stood for the very highest, tenderest, truest moral ideal of his age.

There was no man walking the earth at that time who so grandly voiced the real law of G.o.d as did Theodore Parker. And yet he was outcast by the popular religious sentiment of his time.

This, then, is what I mean when I say that we ought to be careful, and study and think in forming our religious ideals, and see that we do not identify our own unwillingness to think with the eternal and changeless law of G.o.d. This is what I have meant in some of the strictures which I have uttered during the last year upon some of the theological creeds of the time. The people have grown to be better than their creeds, but they have not yet developed the courage to make those creeds utter the highest and finest things which they think and feel. This is what I have meant when I have said that the character of G.o.d as outlined in many of these creeds is away behind and below the n.o.blest and finest and sweetest ideals of what we regard as fitting even to humanity to-day.

Religion, then, may be ahead of the moral ideal or it may be behind it.

The particular type of religion I mean, of course, which is being held at any particular time in the history of the world. But the moral ideal of necessity goes on, keeping step with the social experience of the race.

I must touch briefly now just one other point of practical importance that we need to guard, in order to be tender and true in our dealings with our fellow-men. You will find, if you look over the face of society, that there are two kinds of morality, frequently quite inconsistent with each other; and sometimes the poorer of the two kinds is held in higher esteem than the better. I mean there is conventional morality, and there is real morality.

As a hint of ill.u.s.tration: An American woman goes to Turkey to-day; and she is shocked by the customs of the women and their style of dress. It seems to her that no woman can possibly be moral who, although she covers her head, can appear on the street with feet and ankles bare.

But this same Turkish woman is shocked beyond the possibility of utterance to know that in Europe and America women carefully cover their feet, but expose their faces and their shoulders. It seems terrible to her, and she cannot understand how a European or American woman can have any regard for the principles of delicacy and morality.

Do you not see how, in both cases here, it is purely a matter of convention? No real question of morality is touched in either case. I speak of this to prepare you to note how conscience can be as troubled over things which are purely conventional as it can over things which are downright and real. Let me use another ill.u.s.tration, going a little deeper in the matter. Here is a man, for example, who is terribly shocked because his neighbor takes a drive with his family on Sunday afternoon. It seems to him an outrage on all the principles of public and social morality; and he is eager to get up a society to abolish such customs, that seem to him to threaten the prosperity of all that is good in the world. But this same man, perhaps, has been trained in a way of conducting his business that, while legal, is not strictly fair.

This man may be hard and cruel towards his employees. He may cherish bitter hatreds towards his rivals. In his heart he may be transgressing the law of vital ethics, while fighting with all the power of his nature for that which does not touch any real question of right or wrong at all.

Or take a woman who, while shocked at the transgression of some social custom in which she has been trained from her childhood, or, for example, has come to think that a certain way of observing Lent, on which we have just entered, is absolutely necessary to the safety of religion and morals both, is yet quite willing, and without a qualm of conscience, on the slightest hint of a suspicion, to tear into tatters the character of one of her neighbors or friends, does not hesitate to slander, perhaps is unjust or cruel to the servants that make the house comfortable and beautiful for her; in other words, transgressing the real laws of right and wrong, she is shocked and troubled over the transgression on the part of others of some purely conventional statute, the keeping or breach of which has no real bearing on the welfare of the world.

A good many of our social judgments are like the case of the old lady pardon me, if it should make you smile, but it ill.u.s.trates the case who criticised with a great deal of severity a neighbor and friend who wore feathers on her bonnet. Somebody said to her, But the ribbons on your bonnet are quite as expensive as the feathers that you criticise. ”Yes,”

she said, ”I know they are; but you have got to draw the line somewhere, and I choose to draw it at feathers.” So you find a great many people on every hand in society who are choosing to draw these lines purely artificial, purely conventional in regard to matters of supposed right or wrong, while they are not as careful to look down deeply into the essential principles of that which is inherently right or wrong.

And now at the end I wish to suggest what is a theme large enough for a sermon by itself, and say that these laws of righteousness are so inherent that they are self-executed; and by no possibility did any soul from the beginning of the world ever escape the adequate result of his wrong-doing. The old Hebrews, as manifested in the Book of Job, the Psalms, and all through the Old Testament, taught the idea, which was common at that time in the world, that the favor of G.o.d was to be judged by the external prosperity of men and women. The Old Testament promises long life and wealth and all sorts of good things to the people who do right; and I find on every hand in the modern world people who have inherited this way of looking at things. I have heard people say: I have tried to do right, and I am not prosperous. I wonder why I am treated so? I have heard women say, I have tried to be a good mother: why is my child taken away from me? As though there was any sort of relation between the two facts. I hear people say, Don't talk to me about the justice of G.o.d, when here is a man, who has been dishonest all his life long, who has prospered, and become rich and lives in a fine house, drives his horses, and owns a yacht. As if there was any sort of connection between the two, as though a man merely because he had a fine house and owned a yacht was escaping the punishment of his unjust and selfish life.

Remember, friends, look a little below the surface. There is no possibility of escape. I break some law of my body; do I escape the result? I break some law of my mind; do I escape the result? I break some law of my affectional nature; is nothing to happen? I break a law of my spiritual nature; does nothing take place as the result of it?

You might as well say that the law of gravity can be suspended, that a man can fling himself over the edge of a precipice, and come to no harm. The precipice over the edge of which you fling yourself may be a physical one, may be a mental one, an affectional one, a spiritual one; but the moral gravity of the universe is never mocked, and the man who breaks any of G.o.d's laws never goes free. He may discover that he has broken it, be sorry for it, begin to keep it again, and recover himself; but the consequences are sure, inevitable, eternal.

You look at a man who is externally prospering, and because of this you say he is not suffering the result of the evil he has done. Go back with me to Homer's Odyssey at the time when Ulysses and his companions fell into the hands of the sorceress, and his companions were turned into swine. Would you go and look at these swine, and say they are not suffering anything? See how comfortable they are. See with what gusto they eat the food that is cast into their troughs. See how happy they are as swine. They are not suffering anything Is it nothing to become swinish, merely because you have your beautiful pen to live in? Is a not suffering the result of his moral wrong when he debases and degrades and deteriorates his own nature, and becomes less a man, because he is surrounded with all that is glorious and beautiful that art can supply? Look within whatever department of nature where the law has been disobeyed, and there forever and forever read the result, the inevitable law, that the soul that sinneth, in so far as it sinneth, it shall die.

REWARD AND PUNISHMENT.

Two WEEKS ago I preached a sermon, the subject of which was ”Morality Natural, not Statutory.” Judging by the conversations which I have had and letters which I have received, it has aroused a good deal of question and criticism in certain quarters. This must be for one of three reasons. In the first place, the position which I took may not be a tenable one. In the second place, it is possible that the views expressed, being somewhat new and unfamiliar, were not found easy of apprehension and acceptance. In the third place, it is possible that, in endeavoring to treat so large a subject, I did not a.n.a.lyze and ill.u.s.trate enough to make myself perfectly clear.

At any rate, the matter seems to me of such supreme importance as to make it worth my while this morning to continue the general subject by a careful and earnest treatment of the great question of reward and punishment as applied to feeling, to thought, to conduct, the whole of human life.

Let me say here at the outset, as indicating the point towards which I shall aim as my goal, that in the ordinary use of language, in the popular use of language, I do not believe in either reward or punishment: I believe only in causes and results. This, as I said, is the point that I shall aim at. Where shall I begin?

I need to ask you to consider for a moment the state of mind of man, so far as we can conceive it, when he first wakes up as a conscious being, and begins to look out over the scene of nature and human life with the endeavor to interpret facts as they appear to him. Of course, he knows nothing whatever of what we mean by natural law: he knows nothing of natural cause and of necessary result. So far as we can discover by our researches, all the tribes of men about whom we have been able to gather any information have had a belief, if not in G.o.d, at least in G.o.ds, or in spiritual existences and powers that controlled within certain limits the course of human events. It may have been the wors.h.i.+p of ancestors, it may have been the wors.h.i.+p of some great chief of the tribe; but these invisible beings have been able to help or hurt their followers, their wors.h.i.+ppers; and of course they have been thought of as governing human life after substantially the same methods that they used when they were living here in the body.

That is, it has been a magical or arbitrary government of the world that has been for ages the dominant one in the human mind. People have supposed that these invisible beings desired them to do certain things, to refrain from doing certain other things, and they have expected them to reward or punish them how? By giving them that which they desired, on the one hand, or sending them something which they did not desire, on the other. They have brought the G.o.ds their offerings, their sacrifices, their words of praise, and have asked that they might be successful in war, that they might bring home the game which they sought when they went on a hunting expedition. When there have been disease, pestilence, famine, drought, no matter what the nature of the evil, they have been regarded as allotments of these divine powers sent on account of something they have done or omitted to do. It never occurred to them to interpret these as part of a natural order, because they knew nothing about any natural order. They reasoned as well as they were able to reason at that stage of culture in any particular age of the world's history which they had reached. But this has been the thought of men time out of mind concerning the method of the divine or spiritual or unseen government of the world.

Is this way of looking at it confined to primitive man, confined to pagan nations? Do we find something else, some other condition of mind, when we come to study carefully the Old Testament? Let us see. Take the first verse which I read as a part of my text. The author of this Psalm we do not know who he may have been says, ”I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.” As I have read this a great many times in the past, I have wondered as to the strange experience that this man must have had in human life, if this is a correct interpretation of that experience. I have been young: I do not like to admit that as yet I am old; but, whether I am or not, I have a good many times seen the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging their bread.

It seems to me that the writer of this verse was trained in a theory of the government of human affairs that does not at all match the facts.

He has this magical, this arbitrary theory in his mind. It was the general conception I think, as any one will find by a careful reading of the Old Testament or study of Jewish history, the ordinary conception among the Hebrews, that G.o.d was to reward people for being good by prosperity, long life, many children, herds of cattle, distinction among his fellow-men, positions of political honor and power; and the threat of the taking away of these is frequently uttered against those that presume to do wrong. In other words, it seems to me that the ordinary theory of the government of human affairs as set forth in the Old Testament is precisely this same one that I have been considering as the natural and necessary outcome of the ignorance and inexperience of early man.

As time went on, now and then some deeper, more spiritual thinker begins to question this method of reasoning, begins to wonder whether it is quite adequate; and we have a magnificent poetical expression of this kind of critical thought in the Book of Job. This Book of Job is any way and every way worthy of your careful attention. It is the nearest to a dramatic production of anything in the Bible. James Anthony Froude said once in regard to it that, if it were translated merely as a poem and published by itself, it would take rank as a literary work among the few great masterpieces of the world.

But the thing that engages our attention this morning is not its power as a dramatic production, but its criticism of G.o.d's government of the world. It has been a.s.sumed, as I have said, and we are not through with that a.s.sumption, that, if a man suffered, if he was ill, if his wife or children were taken away from him, if his property was destroyed, somehow he had offended G.o.d, and that this was a punishment for the course of wrong-doing in which he had been engaged. But the author of the Book of Job conceives that this does not quite match the facts; so he gives us this magnificent character that he declares upright, spotless, free from wrong of any kind, who yet is suffering. He has lost his property, it has been swept away, his children have been put to death, almost everything that he cared for he has lost, and he from head to feet is sick of a loathsome disease; and he sits in the midst of his deprivation and sorrow. His friends gather around him; and with this old a.s.sumption in their minds some of them begin to taunt him.

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