Part 17 (1/2)

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 pa.s.sionate 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 Was.h.i.+ngton.

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 n.o.bler 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 n.o.ble 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 inst.i.tutions 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, suns.h.i.+ne 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 ill.u.s.trates the process of discovery in the spiritual universe. We are not to soar up into infinity to find G.o.d. 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 G.o.d and is born of G.o.d.”

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 n.o.bly 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 G.o.d, From deep, ideal, fontal heavens that flow.”

Sometimes the friend whose goodness so touches us as with the very presence of G.o.d 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 n.o.bility 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 G.o.d”?

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.