Part 12 (1/2)
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 G.o.d and in danger of everlasting d.a.m.nation. He must then have a vivid appreciation that Christ out of pure love had died for him, and that on this ground alone G.o.d offered him pardon and salvation. This offer he must consciously accept, with emotions of profound remorse for his wrong-doing, grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sage 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 mult.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed by. This is the essential religion of humanity, made definite and vivid by accepted symbols and rules, and made warm by the sense of fellows.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociates 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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,” ”Wors.h.i.+p,” ”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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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 statesmans.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+pwrights the keel and ribs of the new Const.i.tution. 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 h.e.l.l; 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 n.o.ble 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.