Part 15 (2/2)
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, grat.i.tude, 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 a.s.surance 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 G.o.d, 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; circ.u.mstances 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 att.i.tude of pure dependence, submission, pet.i.tion. 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?
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