Part 16 (1/2)

Different cla.s.ses of minds require different religions. A mult.i.tude require the pictorial faith and the absolute authority of the Catholic church. A great many require the divine-human figure of Christ. A certain cla.s.s 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.e.x; 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 chast.i.ty. 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 chast.i.ty. Shakspere in one sonnet gives tremendous expression to the evil of l.u.s.t, with this conclusion:--

”This all the world doth know; yet none know well To shun the heaven, that leadeth to this h.e.l.l.”

Christianity, in a way of its own, opened a gate out of that h.e.l.l. 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 G.o.d 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 l.u.s.ts 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 sanct.i.ty, in place of the false exaltation of celibacy. And, under various influences, the relation of the s.e.xes 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 h.o.m.o,” ”No heart is pure that is not pa.s.sionate; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic.”

The modern att.i.tude 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: ”G.o.d help--no, G.o.d _bless_--man must _help_ himself.”