Part 6 (1/2)

The subsidence of Socialism was especially fortunate on account of the frankness with which matrimony was repudiated by the system most in vogue, that of Fourier. He had followed the spontaneous and instinctive impulses of man with the utmost consistency. Other Socialists have been more cautious; but the problem of reconciling family ties with communal life has not been solved. Some of the English Transcendentalists published a pamphlet recommending systematic encouragement of licentiousness; and an American philosopher, who turned Roman Catholic in 1844, declared that free love was ”Transcendentalism in full bloom.” The term ”higher law” was used to support the pretence of some obligation more binding than marriage. A free-love convention was held in New York about 1857; and very lax ideas had been already announced by active apostles of spontaneity known as Spiritualists.

No writer has done more to encourage purity of thought than Emerson. His life was stainless; but perhaps the best proof of this is his saying, ”Our moral nature is vitiated by any interference of our will”; and again, ”If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” No man ever wrote thus who was not either notoriously corrupt or singularly innocent. Policemen and jailers exist largely for the purpose of preventing people from planting themselves on their instincts--for instance, those which lead to theft, drunkenness, and murder. Socialism would perhaps be practicable if industry were as natural as laziness.

Almost all moralists have thought it necessary to insist on constant interference with the instincts. So earnest and able a Transcendentalist as Miss Cobbe gives these definitions in her elaborate treatise on _Intuitive Morals_: ”Happiness is the gratification of all the desires of our nature.” ”Virtue is the renunciation of such of them as are forbidden by the moral law.” Theodore Parker insisted on the duty of subordinating ”the low qualities to the higher,” but Emerson held, as already mentioned, that ”Virtue is the spontaneity of the will.”

Such language was largely due to his perception that all activity, however innocent, of thought and feeling had been too much repressed by the Puritanical churches, in whose shadow he was brought up. The same mistake was made in the Dark Ages; and the reaction from that asceticism was notorious during the Renaissance. The early Unitarians overrated human nature in their hostility to the Trinitarians, who underrated it; and Emerson went beyond his original a.s.sociates in the Unitarian ministry because he was more Transcendental. The elevation of his own character encouraged him to hope that our higher qualities are so strong as to need only freedom to be enabled to keep all impure desire in subjection. It was a marked change of tone when in 1876 he allowed these words to be printed in one of his books: ”Self-control is the rule. You have in you there a noisy, sensual savage which you are to keep down, and turn all his strength to beauty.” Similar pa.s.sages, especially a censure of the pruriency of Fourierism, occur in essays which were probably written some years earlier, but were not published until after his death. Most of the Transcendentalists have fortunately acknowledged the duty of self-control much more plainly and readily. It is a fair question whether they were more consistent. How does anyone know which of his instincts and impulses to control and which to cultivate? What better light has he than is given either by his own experience or by that of his parents and other teachers? I acknowledge the power of conscience; but its dictates differ so much in different individuals as to be plainly due to early education. Thus even a Transcendentalist has to submit himself to experience; as he would not do if it were really transcended by his philosophy.

Emerson himself was singularly fortunate in his ”involuntary perceptions.” Those of most men are dark with superst.i.tion and prejudice. It is what we have heard earliest and oftenest that recurs most spontaneously. If all mankind had continued satisfied to ”trust the instinct to the end though it can render no reason,” we should still believe in the divine right of kings, and the supremacy of evil spirits.

There would have been very little persecution if men could have known truth when they saw it. Parker believed devoutly in the intuitions, but he said that Emerson exaggerated their accuracy to such an extent that he ”discourages hard and continuous thought.” ”Some of his followers will be more faithful than he to the false principles which he lays down, and will think themselves wise because they do not study, and inspired because they say what outrages common sense.” The danger of following instinctive impressions in regard to the currency has been shown in recent American politics. Anyone who is familiar with scientific methods will see where Emerson's failed. It is true that he prized highly many of the results of science, especially the theory of evolution as it was taught by Lamarck and other forerunners of Darwin.

His inability to see the value of investigation and verification is disclosed plainly; and he preferred to have people try to ”build science on ideas.” He acknowledged that too much time was given to Latin and Greek in college; but his wishes in regard to study of the sciences were so old-fas.h.i.+oned as to call out a remonstrance from Aga.s.siz.

IV. How little scientific culture there was before 1860 may be judged from the rapid growth of Spiritualism. Transcendentalism had shown tremendous strength in helping people escape from the old churches; but it was of little use in building new ones. Churches exist for the express purpose of enabling believers in a common faith to unite in public wors.h.i.+p. No society could be so holy as solitude to a sincere Transcendentalist; and the beliefs of his neighbours seemed much less sacred than his own peculiar intuitions. Exceptional eloquence might make him pastor of a large society; but it began to decline when he ceased to speak. Transcendentalism was excellent material for weatherc.o.c.ks, but it had to be toughened by adulteration with baser metal before it supplied any solid foundation for a new temple.

Most of the people who had lost faith in the old churches were longing after some better way of receiving knowledge about the heavenly world.

Millions of Americans and Europeans rejoiced to hear that spirits had begun to communicate by mysterious raps at Rochester, N. Y., on the last day of March, 1848. Messages from the departed were soon received in many places; but the one thing needful was that the room be filled with believers; and a crowded hall was peculiarly likely to be favoured with strange sounds and sights. Here was the social element necessary for founding a new religion. It appealed as confidently as its rivals to miracles and prophecies, while it had the peculiar attraction of being preached mainly by young women. Instinctive impulses were regarded as revelations from the spirit-land, but not considered infallible except by the very superst.i.tious. The highest authority of an intelligent Spiritualist has usually been his own individual intuition. Some of the earliest lectures on that platform had little faith in anything but science, and put their main strength into announcing those revelations of geology which have dethroned Genesis. One of the first teachers of evolution in America was a Spiritualist named Denton, who held a public debate in Ohio, in 1858, when he defended the theory of man's gradual development from lower animals against a preacher named Garfield, who became President of the United States. Some eminent scientists have become converts to Spiritualism; but its general literature has shown little influence from scientific methods of thought.

The advocates of the new religion have owed much of their success to impa.s.sioned eloquence. Opposition to Christianity has been expressed boldly and frequently. Girls of seventeen have declared, before large audiences, that all the creeds and ceremonies of the churches are mere idolatry. Among the earliest communications which were published as dictated by angels in the new dispensation were denials of the miracles of Jesus, and denunciations of the clergy as ”the deadliest foes of progress.” An eminent Unitarian divine declared in 1856, that ”the doctrines professedly revealed by a majority of the spirits, whose words we have seen quoted, are at open war with the New Testament.”

Some moderate Spiritualists have kept in friendly relations with liberal churches; but many others have been in active co-operation with the most aggressive of unbelievers in religion. The speakers at the Spiritualist anniversary in 1897 said to one another, ”You and I are Christs, just as Jesus was,” and claimed plainly that ”our religion” was distinct from every ”Christian denomination.” Spiritualists have all, I think, been in favour of woman suffrage; and the majority were abolitionists. Some of Garrison's companions, however, deserted in the heat of the battle, saying that there was nothing more to do, for the spirits would free the slaves. Anti-slavery lecturers in the North-west found themselves crowded out of halls and school-houses by trance-speakers and mediums.

One of the most eminent of converts made by the latter, Judge Edmonds, was prominent among the defenders of slavery in the free States.

Freedom from any definite creed or rigid code of morality joined with the constant supply of ever-varying miracles in attracting converts.

Those in the United States were soon estimated in millions. Spiritualism swept over Great Britain so rapidly that it was declared by the _Westminster Review_ to give quite as much promise as Christianity had done, at the same age, of becoming a universal religion. No impartial observer expects that now. Believers are still to be found in all parts of Europe and South America, and they are especially numerous in the United States. Proselytes do not seem to be coming in anywhere very thickly; and the number of intelligent men and women who have renounced Spiritualism, after a brief trial, is known to be large. The new religion has followed the old ones into the policy of standing on the defensive.

One instance of this is the opposition to investigation. A Mediums'

National Defence a.s.sociation was in open operation before 1890. A leading Spiritualist paper suggested in 1876, that the would-be inquirer should be ”tied securely hand and foot, and placed in a strong iron cage, with a rope or small chain put tightly about his neck, and fastened to an iron ring in the wall.” Early in 1897, some young men who claimed to have exposed an impostor, before a large audience in the Spiritualist Temple in Boston, were prosecuted by his admirers on the charge of having disturbed public wors.h.i.+p.

V. During the last quarter of the century, free love has been much less prominent than before in Spiritualistic teachings; but the only Americans who were able to proclaim liberty without encouraging self-indulgence, prior to 1870, were the logical and scholarly Transcendentalists. Theodore Parker, for instance, is to be reckoned among the followers of Hegel rather than of Sch.e.l.ling; for he tried by hard study and deep thought to build up a consistent system of religion and morality by making deductions from a few central principles which he revered as great primary intuitions, held always and everywhere sacred.

His faith in his ideas of G.o.d, duty, and immortality was very firm; and he did his best to live and think accordingly. He began to preach in 1836, the year of the publication of Emerson's first book, but soon found his work hindered by an idolatry of the Bible, then prevalent even among Unitarians. Familiarity with German scholars.h.i.+p enabled him to teach his people to think rationally.

His brethren in the Unitarian ministry were alarmed; and a sermon which he preached in Boston against the mediators.h.i.+p of Jesus made it impossible for him to occupy an influential pulpit. The lectures which he delivered that year in a hall in the city, and published in 1842, won the support of many seekers for a new religion. They voted that he should ”have a chance to be heard in Boston”; and on February 16, 1845, he preached in a large hall to what soon became a permanent and famous congregation.

Thither, as Parker said, he ”came to build up piety and morality; to pull down only what c.u.mbered the ground.” His main purpose to the last was to teach ”the naturalness of religion,” ”the adequacy of man for his functions” without priestly aid, and, most important of all, that superiority of the real Deity to the pictures drawn in the orthodox creeds, which Parker called ”the infinite perfection of G.o.d.” He was singularly successful in awakening the spirit of religion in men who were living without it, but the plainness with which he stated his faith, in sermons which had a large circulation, called out many attacks. Prayers were publicly offered up in Boston, asking that the Lord would ”put a hook in this man's jaws, so that he may not be able to preach, or else remove him out of the way and let his influence die with him.” No controversy hindered his labouring systematically for the moral improvement of his hearers, who sometimes amounted to three thousand.

His sermons are full of definite appeals for self-control and self-culture; and his personal interest in every individual who could be helped was so active that he soon had seven thousand names on his pastoral visiting list. Appeals for advice came from strangers at a distance, and were never neglected.

Not one of the great national sins, however popular, escaped his severe rebuke; and he became prominent as early as 1845 among the preachers against slavery. He was active in many ways as an abolitionist, but was not a disunionist. He seldom quitted his pulpit without speaking for the slave; and every phase of the anti-slavery movement is ill.u.s.trated in his published works. Pro-slavery politicians were as bitter as orthodox clergymen against him; and he describes himself as ”continually fired upon for many years from the barroom and pulpit.” His resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law caused him to be arrested and prosecuted, in company with Wendell Phillips, by the officials of the national Government.

Desire to awaken the people to the danger that lay in the growth of the national sin made him begin to lecture in 1844. Invitations flowed in freely; and he said, after he had broken down under the joint burden of overwork and of exposure in travelling: ”Since 1848, I have lectured eighty or a hundred times each year, in every Northern State east of the Mississippi,--once also in a slave State and on slavery itself.”

This was his favourite subject, but he never missed an opportunity of encouraging intellectual independence; and he found he could say what he pleased. The total number of hearers exceeded half a million; among them were the most influential men in the North; and he never failed to make himself understood. No one else did so much to develop that love of the people for Union and Liberty which secured emanc.i.p.ation. His works have no such brilliancy as Emerson's; but they burned at the time of need with a much more warm and steady light. No words did more to melt the chains of millions of slaves. No excess of individualism made him shrink back, like Emerson, from joining the abolitionists; or discredit them, as Th.o.r.eau did, by publicly renouncing his allegiance to Ma.s.sachusetts in 1854, when that State stood foremost on the side of freedom.

The account of a solitary life in the woods, which Th.o.r.eau published that year, has done much to encourage independence of public opinion; and Americans of that generation needed sadly to be told that they took too little amus.e.m.e.nt, especially out of doors, and made too great haste to get rich. Their history, however, like that of the Swiss, Scotch, and ancient Athenians, proves that it is the industrious, enterprising, money-making nations that are best fitted for maintaining free inst.i.tutions. As for individual independence of thought and action, the average man will enjoy much more of it, while he keeps himself in comfortable circ.u.mstances by regular but not excessive work, than he could if he were to follow the advice of an author who prided himself on not working more than ”about six weeks in a year,” and on enduring privations which apparently shortened his days.

Th.o.r.eau's self-denial was heroic; but he sometimes failed to see the right of his neighbours to indulge more expensive tastes than his own.

The necessary conditions of health and comfort for different individuals vary much more than he realised. Many a would-be reformer still complains of the ”luxury” of people who find physical rest or mental culture in innocent ways, not particularly to his own fancy. Such censures are really intolerant. They are survivals of that meddlesome disposition which has sadly restricted freedom of trade, amus.e.m.e.nt, and wors.h.i.+p.

We have had only one Emerson; but many scholarly Transcendentalists have laboured to construct the new morality needed in the nineteenth century. Parker's work has peculiar interest, because done in a terrible emergency; but others have toiled as profitably though less famously.

The search after fundamental intuitions has led to a curious variety of statements which agree only in the a.s.sumption of infallibility; but the result has been the general agreement of liberal preachers in teaching a system of ethics at once free from superst.i.tion, bigotry, or asceticism, and at the same time vigorous enough to repress impure desire and encourage active philanthropy. Theology has improved in liberality, as well as in claiming less prominence. Thus the clergy have come into much more friendly relations with the philosophers than in the middle of the century. Our popular preachers quote Emerson; but really they follow, though often unconsciously, the methods of Hegel and Kant. This increases their sympathy with Parker, who has the advantage over Emerson of having believed strongly in personal immortality. His works are circulated by the very denomination which cast him out. The most popular preachers in many sects openly accept him and Emerson among their highest authorities. Transcendentalism has become the foundation of liberal Christianity.

This agreement is not, however, necessary and may not be permanent.