Chapter VII: Part 7

I wish now, if there are any who think it is not befitting the greatness, the nobleness of man that he should bow himself in the presence of the highest, humiliate himself, if you choose to use that term, in acts of worship, I wish now, I say, to consider worship under two or three aspects, and see what it means. And, in the first place, I ask you to note that the ability to worship is always the measure of the rank of a being, it is the test and the standard of greatness.

As you look over the animal world, which one of them are we accustomed to think of as coming the nearest to man? What one do we love to have most with us, to associate most with our joys, with the peace of our homes? Is it not the dog? And as you examine the dog, study carefully his nature and characteristics, do you not note that there is in his nature a hint, a suggestion, of that which is the root of all worship? The dog is the one animal with which man is accustomed familiarly to associate himself, who looks up with an incipient reverence, love, almost worship, to his master. And it is this quality in the dog that enables him to look up, and, however dimly, feel the life of some one that is above him, that lifts him into our society, and makes us feel this tenderness of heart-kinship with that which is finest in his nature.

And man is man simply because he is able to look above himself. The old Greeks had an anticipation of that idea when they called man anthropos; for the meaning of the word is the upward-looker. As in imagination you go back and down to the time when man first appeared, developed from the lower life which preceded him, the first thing you can think about him as human is the opening of his eyes in wonder, the lifting of his face in curiosity and question, and the birth of adoration in his soul. This is that which made him man.

You go and study the lowest type of barbaric life to-day; and you will find that the barbarian has very little curiosity as compared with the civilized man. You will find that it is very difficult to astonish him with anything. He does not wonder. He takes everything for granted. He does not see clearly and deeply enough to appreciate the marvel. Let me illustrate from a specimen of barbaric life itself. A few years ago the chief of an Indian tribe was brought from the plains of the West to visit Washington. The idea was to impress him as much as possible with the idea of our civilization, so that he might report it to his people when he went home. After they had crossed the Mississippi on their way to the West, the gentleman in whose care he was travelling asked the chief what the one thing which he had seen during his trip was which had impressed him the most; and he said at once the St. Louis bridge. But his companion said, Are you not astonished at the Capitol of Washington? "Yes," he said, "but my people can pile stones on top of each other; but they cannot make a cobweb of steel hang in the air."

You see how that perception lifted him above the average level of his people? He was showing his capacity for higher and nobler civilization. It is just this ability in the man to wonder, to see something to wonder at, to worship, to admire, which lifts him one grade higher than that of the average level of his tribe. So that which makes man a man is the capacity in him to admire. All admiration is the essence, the root, of worship. And, the more things a man admires, the greater and nobler type of man he is seen to be. If he can admire music, if he can admire painting, if he can admire sculpture, if he can admire poetry, if he can admire literature of every kind, if he can admire grand architecture, the beautiful monuments of the world, we say, Here is a large, all-round type of man. We estimate his dignity, his greatness, by the capacity that he shows for worship in its lower type; for worship is simply looking up with admiration.

There is another quality about this worship that I wish to speak of. It is the power that is capable of transforming a man, making him over into the likeness of that which he admires. You find the man without this capacity, and you know it is hopeless to appeal to him, hopeless to set up ideals, hopeless to place before him enticing examples. There is nothing in him to which these things appeal. Take Alexander the Great. It is said he carried around with him a copy of the Iliad, and that Achilles was his ideal of a hero. Do you not see how this admiration transformed the life of the young king, and made him after the type of that which he admired? It does not make any difference what this special admiration may be. Let a man admire Beethoven, and he will cultivate instinctively the qualities that make the beauty and greatness of Beethoven's character and the wonders of his career.

This ideal may be in a book, it may be embodied in fiction. I have liked always, either on the walls of my room or on the walls of my heart, to have certain portraits of persons whom I have loved, who are no longer living; and they are to me constant stimulus. They speak to me by day, and in my dreams at night their eyes follow me, and seem to look into my soul; and in their presence I could not do a mean, an unmanly thing. I love, I reverence, I worship these lofty ideals. And the quality of these characters filters down through and permeates the thought and the life.

You remember how the other aspect of this thought is illustrated by Shakspere. He says, "My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." If that with which you keep company, that you admire, is below you, it degrades; if it is above you, it lifts. In any case you are transformed, shaped into the likeness of that which you admire.

There is another aspect of this close akin to that which I have just been dealing with. It is only the worshipper who has in him any promise, any possibility, of growth. Whether it is the individual or the nation, it makes no difference. If you find no capacity to admire that which is above and beyond you, then there is no hope of progress. Take the young man who thinks he has exhausted the possibilities of the world, who has reached the stage, who prides himself on not being surprised, not being over whelmed, not admiring anything. The careful outside observer knows that, instead of having exhausted the possibilities and greatness and wonders of the universe, he has simply exhausted himself.

The man who knows how full the world is of that which is beautiful and great and true and noble walks through the universe with his head bared and bowed, and feels, as did Moses when standing in the presence of the burning bush, that he ought to take off his shoes from his feet, for the place where he is standing is holy ground. Wherever you are standing in this universe, which is full of God from star to dust particle, is holy ground; and, if you do not feel it, if you are not touched, if you are not bowed, if you are not thrilled with wonder, it is defect in you, and not lack of God.

If the musician admires his great predecessors and strives to emulate them; if the painter in the presence of the Sistine Madonna feels lifted and touched, so that he never can be content with poor work again; if the sculptor is ready to bend his knees in the presence of the Venus of Melos, as he sees her standing at the end of the long gallery in the Louvre; if the lover of his kind admires John Howard, and can never be content unless he is doing something for his fellow- men again; if we can be touched by lives like Clara Barton's, like Florence Nightingale's, like Dorothea Dix's, like the great and consecrated ones of the earth; if in any department of life we can be lifted, humbled, thrilled, at the same time with the thought of the greatness and glory and beauty that are above and beyond us, then there is hope of growth, then there is life that can come to something fine and noble in the future.

I wish, in the light of these illustrations of what worship means, to note the thought that a great many men conscientious, earnest, simple who have never been accustomed to think of themselves as religious, and perhaps would deny it if a friend suggested to them that they had in them the possibilities of worship, that perhaps they are worshippers, even if they know it not. A great many persons have thrown away the common ideals of worship, and perhaps have settled down to the idea that they are not worshippers at all, while all the time the substance and the beauty and the glory of worship are in their daily lives and always in their hearts. I want to suggest two or three grades of worship, to show that this worship climbs; and I want to call attention to the fact that on the lowest grade it is worship of God just the same as on the highest, that all worship or admiration for truth, for beauty, for good, wherever, however, manifested, is really worship of God, whether we think of it or call it by that name or not, because they all are manifestations of God.

Take the man who is touched and lifted by natural beauty, the sense of natural power; the man who loves the woods, who turns and stands to see the glory of a sunset, who is lifted by tides of emotion as he hears the surf beat on the shore, who feels bowed in the presence of the wide night sky of stars, who is humbled at the same time that he is uplifted in the presence of the mountains, who is touched by all natural scenes of beauty and peace and glory. Are not these men in their degree worshippers?

Take the feeling that is expressed in those beautiful lines of Byron. We do not think of Byron as a religious nature, but certainly he had in him the heart of worship when he could write such thoughts as these:

"'Tis midnight. On the mountains brown The cold, round moon shines deeply down; Blue roll the waters; blue the sky Seems like an ocean hung on high, Bespangled with those isles of light, So wildly, spiritually bright.

Whoever looked upon them shining And turned to earth without repining, Nor wished for wings to flee away And mix with their eternal ray?"

And Wordsworth says he feels a Presence that "Disturbs him with the joy of elevated thought, A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused."

And so you may run all through the poets, these simply as hints, specimens, every one of them worshippers, touched by the beauty, glory, uplift of the natural world.

And then pass to the next stage, and come to the worship of the human, to the admiration of the highest and finest qualities that are manifested in the lives of men and women. Who is there that is not touched and thrilled by some story of heroic action, of heroic self- sacrifice, of consecration to duty in the face of danger and death? And no matter what this manifestation of human goodness may be, if you can be thrilled by it and lifted by it, then you have taken another step up this ladder of worship which leads you into the very presence chamber of the Divine.

Let a boy read the life of Lincoln, see his earnest thirst for knowledge, the sacrifice he was willing to pay for it, his consecration to his ideals of truth, the transparent honesty of the man, the supreme contempt with which he could look down upon anything poor or mean or low, the firmness and simplicity with which he assumes high office, the faithfulness, the unassuming devotion, that he carries into the fulfilment of the trust. Take him all the way through, study his character and admire, and you are a worshipper of that which is divine.

So in the case of Jesus, the supreme soul of history in its consecration to the Father, its simple trust in the divine love, its superiority to fear, to question, to death. When we bow ourselves in the presence of the Nazarene, we are not worshipping another God. We are worshipping his Father and our Father as lie shines in the face of Jesus, as he illumines and beautifies his life, as he makes glorious the humble pathways of Galilee, and so casts a reflected glory over the humblest pathways any of us may be called upon to tread.

The next step in our ascent brings us to the conscious worship of God himself. We cannot grasp the divine idea. The finite cannot measure or outline the infinite; and so, when we say God, we mean only the grandest ideal that we can frame, that reaches on towards, but can never adequately express the Deity. And so we worship this thought, this ideal, growing as our capacity develops, advancing as the race advances, and ever leading us Godward, as when we follow a ray of light we are travelling towards its source. And the attitude of our souls in the presence of this which is divine is truest worship. The humility of it, the exaltation of it, is beautifully phrased in two or three lines which I wish to repeat to you from Browning's Saul: "I but open my eyes, and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. And, thus looking within and around me, I ever renew (With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it, too), As by each new obeisance in spirit I climb to his feet!"

Here is the significance of the thought I had in mind at the opening. We talk about humbling ourselves. When we can bend with reverence in the presence of that which is above us, the very bending is exaltation; for it indicates the capacity to appreciate, to admire, to adore. Thus we climb up into the ability to worship God, the infinite Spirit, our Father, in spirit and in truth.

Now to raise one moment the question suggested near the opening, Are forms of worship to pass away? The reply to this seems to me perfectly clear. Those forms which sprang out of and are fitted to only lower ideals of worship, ideals which humanity outgrows, these must be left behind, or else they must be transformed, and filled with a new and higher meaning. But forms will always remain. But note one thing: they sometimes say that we Unitarians are too cold, and do not have form enough. You will see that, the higher men rise intellectually, the less there is always of outward expression.

For example, before men were able to speak with any large vocabulary, they eked out their meaning by all kinds of motions and gestures. But the most highly cultivated men to- day, in their conversation, are the ones who get the least excited and have the least recourse to gestures, because they are capable of expressing the highest, finest, and most varied thoughts by the elaborate power of speech which they have developed. And perhaps the highest and finest worship of the world will not be that which has the most elaborate ceremonial and ritual; but it will have adequate and fitting ceremonial and ritual, because it will naturally seek to express in some external way that which it feels.

I sometimes wish and perhaps you will pardon me for saying it here and now that we Unitarians were a little less afraid of adequate posture and gesture in our acts of public worship. God is, indeed, everywhere as much as he is here; but this is the place we have specially consecrated to thinking about him and to going through our stated forms of worship. And if, when you enter the house of a friend, you take off your hat, you bow the head, it seems to me it would be especially fitting to do it, when one enters a Christian church. And, in the attitude of prayer, I wish that all might find it in their hearts to sit with bended brow and closed eyes as in the presence of the Supreme, shutting out the common, the outside world, and trying to realize what it means to come consciously to the feet of the eternal One.

I love these simple, fitting, external manifestations of the worshipful spirit; and, if we do not substitute them for the worship, and think we worship when we bend the knee, this appropriate expression of the spirit, or feeling, it seems to ought to help cultivate the feeling and the spirit, and make it easier for us to be conscious of the presence of the Divine.

We are men, then, in the highest sense of the term, only as we are worshippers. And the more worshipful we are, in high and true sense of that word, the nobler and higher manhood, and the grander the possibilities in us of de intellectual, moral, spiritual growth.

Let us, then, cultivate the admiring, the wondering, the worshipful attitude of heart and mind, and recognize on lowest steps of this ladder that lifts to God, the presence of the same divine power and beauty and glory as that which we see clearly on the highest, and know that always, when we are worshipping any manifestation of God, we are shipping Him who is spirit, in spirit and in truth.

When on some strain of music Our thoughts are wafted high; When, touched with tender pity, Kind teardrops dim the eye; When thrilled with scenes of grandeur, Or moved to deeds of love, Do we not give thee worship, O God in heaven above? For Thou art all life's beauty, And Thou art all its good: By Thy tides are we lifted To every lofty mood. Whatever good is in us, Whatever good we see, And every high endeavor, Are they not all from Thee?

MORALITY NATURAL, NOT STATUTORY.

IT is very common for people to identify their special type of religion or their theological opinions with religion itself, and feel that those who do not agree with them are in the rue sense not religious. Not only this. It is perhaps quite less common for them to identify their particular type of religion with the fundamental ideas of morality, and think that the people who do not agree with them are undermining the moral stability of the world. For example, those who question the absolute authority of the Catholic Church are looked upon the authorities of that Church as the enemies, not only of religion, but as the enemies of society, the enemies of humanity, as doing what they can to shake the very foundations of he social order. You will find a great many Protestant theologians who seem to hold the opinion that, if you dare to question the authenticity or authority of some particular nook in the Bible, you are not only an enemy of religion, but you are an enemy of morality. You are doing what you can to disturb the stability of the world.

But, if we look at the matter with a little care, we shall see that we ought to turn it quite around, look at it from another point of view. Though every Bible, every particle of religious literature, every hymn, every prayer on the face of the earth, were blotted out of existence to-day, religion would not be touched. Religious books did not create religion, did not make man a religious being. It is the religious nature of man that made the Bibles, that uttered itself in prayers, that created the rituals, that sung the hymns and chanted the anthems. It is man, a religious being, who makes religious institutions, who creates all the external aspects and appearances of the religious life. And the same is true precisely in regard to moral precepts. If the Ten Commandments were blotted out of the memory of man, if every single ethical teaching of Jesus should perish, if the high and fine moral precepts of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and all the great teachers of the pagan world should cease to exist, if there were not a printed moral precept on earth, morality would not be touched. It is not these that have created morality. It is the natural moral nature of man that has written all the commandments, whether they have come to us by the hand of Moses or of Gautama or Mohammed or Confucius or Seneca, or no matter who the medium may have been.

Man is a moral being, naturally, essentially, eternally, and this is a moral universe, inherently, necessarily, eternally; and, though all the external expression of moral thought and feeling should be lost, the human race would simply reproduce them again.

It is sometimes well for us to get down to the bed-rock in our thinking, and find how natural and necessary the great foundations are. The Hindu priests used to tell their followers that the earth, which was flat, rested on certain pillars, which rested again on some other foundation beneath them, and so on until thought was weary in trying to trace that upon which the earth was supposed to find its stability. And they also told their followers that, if they did not bring offerings, if they did not pay the special respect which was due to the gods, if they were not obedient to heir teachings, these pillars would give way, and the earth would be precipitated into the abyss.

But we have found, as a result of our modern study of he universe, that the earth needs no pillars on which to rest; but it swings freely in its orbit, as the old verse that used to read in my schoolboy days says, "Hangs on nothing in the air," part of the universal system of things, stable in its eternal sound and motion, kept and cared for by the power that lever sleeps and never is weary. So, by studying into the foundations of the moral nature of man, we have discovered a last that it needs no artificial props or supports, but that morality is inherent, natural and eternal.

I shall not raise the question, which is rather curious than practical, as to whether there are any beginnings of moral feeling in the animal world below man. For our purpose this morning it is enough to note that the minute that man appears conscience appears, and that conscience is an act which springs out of social relations. In other words, when the first man rose to the ability to look into the face of his fellow and think of the other man as another self, like himself in feelings, in possibilities of pleasure or pain, when this first man was able imaginatively to put himself in: he place of this other, then morality as a practical fact was Dorn.

We may imagine, for the purpose of illustration, this man saying: Here is another being who appears to be like myself. He is capable of suffering pain, as I am. He does not like pain any better than I do. Therefore, I have no right to make him suffer that which I do not wish to suffer myself. This other man is capable of pleasure. He desires certain things, similar things to those which I desire. If I do not wish him to take these things away from me, I have no right to take them away from him.

I do not mean that this was thought out in this clear way, but that, when there was the first dim perception of this other self, with similar feelings, similar possibilities, similar pleasures, similar pains, then there became a conscience, because there was a consciousness of this similarity of nature. Morality, then, is born as a social fact.

To go a little deeper, and in order to trace the natural and historical growth of the moral ideal, let me say that morality in its deepest and truest sense is born of the fact of sex, because it is right in there that we find the root and the germ of permanent social relations. And I wish you to note another very significant fact. You hear people talking about selfishness and unselfishness, as though they were direct contraries, mutually exclusive of each other, as though, in order to make a selfish man unselfish, you must completely reverse his nature, so to speak. I do not think this is true at all. Unselfishness naturally and necessarily springs out of selfishness, and, in the deepest sense of the word, is not at all contradictory to that.

For example: A man falls in love with a woman. This, on one side of it, is as selfish as anything you can possibly conceive. But do you not see by what subtle and divine chemistry the selfishness is straightway transformed, lifted up, glorified, and becomes unselfishness? The very love that he professes for her makes it necessary for his own happiness that she should be happy, so that, in seeking for his own selfish gratification, he is devoting himself unselfishly to the happiness of somebody else.

And, when a child is born, do you not see, again, how the two selfishnesses, the father's and the mother's, selfishly, if you please, brooding over and loving the child, at once go out of themselves, consecrating time and care and thought and love, and even health or life itself, if need be, for the welfare of the child?

Right in there, then, out of this fact of sex and in the becoming of the family, are born love and sympathy, and tenderness and mutual care, all those things which are the highest and finest constituent elements of the noblest developments of the moral nature of men.

Imagination plays a large part in the development of morality; for you must be able to put yourself imaginatively in the place of another before you can feel for that other, and in that way recognize the rights of that other and be ready to grant these rights to that other. So we find that morality at first is a narrow thing: it is confined perhaps to the little family, the father, the mother, the child, bound together by these ties of kinship, of love, of sympathy, devoting themselves to each other; but they may look upon some other family as their natural enemies, and feel no necessity whatever to apply these same principles of love and tenderness and care beyond the limits of their own little circle.

So you find, as you study the growth of the moral nature of man, that it is confined at first to the family, then to the patriarchal family, then the tribe; but the fiction of kinship is still kept up, and, while the member of the primeval tribe feels he has no right to rob or murder within the limits of his tribe, he has no compunction whatever about robbing or murdering or injuring the members of some other tribe. So the moral principle in its practical working is limited to the range of the sympathy of the tribe, which does not go beyond the tribal limits. We see how that principle works still in the world, from the beginning clear up to the highest reaches which we have as yet attained.

Take the next step, and find a city like ancient Athens. Still, perhaps, the fiction of kinship is maintained. All the citizens of Athens are regarded as members of the same great tribe or family. But even in the time of Plato, whom we are accustomed to look upon as one of the great teachers of the world, there was no thought of any moral obligation to anybody who lived in Sparta, lived in any other city of Greece, and less was there any thought of moral obligation as touching or taking in the outside barbarian. So when the city grew into a nation, and we came to a point where the world substantially stands to-day, do you not see that practically the same principle holds, that, while we recognize in some abstract sort of fashion that we ought to do justice and be kind to people beyond our own limits, yet all our political economy, all our national ideas, are accustomed to emphasize the fact that we must be just and righteous to our own people, but that aggression, injustice of almost any kind, is venial in our treatment of the inhabitants of another country? And it may even flame up into the fire of a wordy patriotism in certain conditions; and love of country may mean hatred and injustice towards the inhabitants of another country, or particularly towards the people of another race.

Let me give you a practical illustration of it. What are the relations in which we stand to-day towards Spain? I have unbounded admiration for the patience, on the whole, for the justice, the sense of right, which characterize the American people. I doubt if there is another nation on the face of the earth to-day that would have gone through the last two or three years of our experience, and maintained such an attitude of impartiality, of faithfulness, of justice, of right. And yet, if we examine ourselves, we shall find that it is immensely difficult for us to put ourselves in the place of a Spaniard, to look at the Cuban question from his point of view, to try to be fair, to be just to him. It is immensely difficult, I say, for us to look at one of these international questions from the point of view of another race, cherishing other religious and social ideas, having another style of government.

And there is another illustration of it that has recently occurred here in our country, which is sadder still to me. Only a little while ago a postmaster in the South was shot by a mob. The mob surrounds his house, murders him and his child, wounds other members of the family, burns down his home; and why? Under no impulse whatever except that of pure and simple race prejudice, the utter inability of a white man to put himself in the position of a black to such an extent as to recognize, plead for, or defend his inherent rights as a man.

I am not casting any aspersion on the South in what I am saying, none whatever. Were the conditions reversed, perhaps we should be no better. It is not a practical problem with us. If there were two or three times as many colored men in the State of New York as there are white men, then we might understand the question. Let us not mentally cast any stones at the people across the line. I point it out simply as illustrating the difficulty that we have in recognizing the rights, the moral rights, of people beyond the limits of that sympathy to which we have been accustomed and for a long period trained.

I believe the day will come when we shall be as jealous of the right of a man as we are now of the right of an American. We are not yet. There have been foregleams and prophecies of it in the past. Long ago a Latin writer said, I am a man, and whatever is human is not foreign to me. But think what a lone and isolated utterance that has been for hundreds of years. Jesus taught us to pray, not my Father, but our Father, and we do pray it every day in the-year; but how many are the people in any of the churches that dream of living it? A hundred years ago that heretic, who is still looked upon as the bugaboo of all that is fine and good, Thomas Paine, wrote, "The world is my country, and to do good is my religion," a sentence so fine that it has been carved on the base of the statue of William Lloyd Garrison on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, as being a fitting symbol of his own philanthropic life.

How many of us have risen to the idea of making these grand sentiments the ruling principles of our lives? But along the lines of moral growth it is to come. The day will be when, as I said, we shall feel as keenly whatever touches the right of any man as to-day we feel that which touches the right of one of our own people; and the moral growth of the world will reach beyond that. I love to dream of a day when men will no longer forget the inherent rights of any inhabitant of the air or of the waters or of the woods or any of the domesticated animals that we have come to associate with our lives.

We feel towards them to-day as in the old days a man felt towards another man who was his slave, that he had a right to abuse, to maltreat, even to kill, if he pleased. We have not yet become civilized enough, so that we feel it incumbent upon us to recognize the fact that animals can suffer pain, that animals can enjoy the air or the sunshine, and that they have a right to each when they do not trespass upon the larger rights of humanity. I was something of a boy when it first came over me that it was not as amusing to animals to be shot and killed as it was to me to shoot and kill them. From the time I was able to lift a gun I had always carried one; but I soon learned that for me there was no pleasure in taking needlessly the life of anything that lived. We are only partially civilized as yet in the treatment of our domesticated animals. How many people think of the torture of the curb bit, of the check, of neglect in the case of cold, of thirst, of hunger? How many people, I say, civilized and in our best society, are careful yet as to the comfort, the rights, of those that serve them in these humble capacities?

The time will come when our moral sympathetic sense shall widen its boundaries even farther yet, and shall take in the trees and the shrubs, the waters, the hills, all the natural and beautiful features of the world. I believe that by and by it will be regarded as immoral, as unmanly, to deface, to mar, that which God has made so glorious and so beautiful. As soon as man develops, then, his power of sympathy, so that it can take the world in its arms, so soon he will have grown to the stature of the Divine in the unfolding of his moral nature.

I wish now to raise the question, for a moment, as to what is to be our guide in regard to moral facts and moral actions. I was trained, and perhaps most of you were, to believe that I was unquestioningly to follow my conscience, that whatever conscience told me to do was necessarily right. The conscience has been spoken of as though it were a sort of little deity set to rule man's nature, this little kingdom of thought and feeling and action. But conscience is nothing of the kind. Half of the consciences of the world to-day are all wrong.

Let me hint by way of illustration what I mean: Calvin was just as conscientious in burning Servetus as Servetus was in pursuing that course of action which led him to the stake. One of them was wrong in following his conscience, then. You take it to-day: some people will tell you there is a certain day in the week that you must observe as sacred. Your conscience tells you there is another day in the week that you must observe as sacred. Can both be right? Many of the greatest tragedies of the world have come about through these controversies and confusions of conscience. The Quaker in old Boston went at the cart's tail, in disgrace, because he followed his conscience; and the Puritan put him there because he followed his conscience. Were both of them right? The inquisitor in Spain put to death hundreds and thousands of people conscientiously; and the hundreds and thousands of people conscientiously went to their deaths.

What is conscience, then? Conscience is not a moral guide. It is simply that monitor within that reiterates to us forever and forever and forever, Do right. But conscience does not tell us what is right. We must decide those questions as a matter of calm study and judgment in the light of human experience. It is the judgment that should tell us whether a thing is right or wrong. And how shall we know whether it is right or wrong? Simply by the consequences. That which helps, that which lifts man up, that which adds to the happiness and the well-being of the world, as the result of human experience, is right. That which hurts, that which injures men and women, that which takes away from their welfare and happiness, that is wrong. All these things, as we shall see before I get through, are inherent in the nature of things, not created by statute, not the result of the moral teaching of anybody.

This leads me to extend this idea a little farther, and to raise the question as to what is the standard by which you are to judge moral action. If you will think it out with a little care, you will find that the standard of all moral action may be summed up in the one word "life." Life, first, as continuance; second, to use a philosophical term, content, that which it includes. Life, this is the standard of right and wrong.

To illustrate, take me physically, leave out of account all the rest of my nature now for a moment, and consider me as an animal. From the point of view of my body, that which conduces to length of life, to fullness, to completion, to enjoyment of life, is right, the only right, from this physical point of view. That which threatens my life, that which takes away my sum of strength, injures my health, takes away from my possibility of enjoyment, that, from a physical point of view, is wrong; and there can be no other right or wrong from the point of view of the body.

But I am not simply body. So this principle must be modified. Come up to the fact that I am an intellectual being. In order to develop myself intellectually, I may have to forego things that would be pleasant on the bodily plane. I sacrifice the lower for the higher; and that which would be right on the physical plane becomes relatively wrong now, because it interferes with something that is higher and more important.

Rise one step to man as an affectional being. If you wish to develop him to the finest and highest here, you may not only be obliged under certain conditions to sacrifice the body, but you may be obliged to sacrifice his intellectual development. In order that he may be the best up here, he must put the others sometimes, relatively, under his feet. So, again, that which would be right on the physical plane or the intellectual plane becomes relatively wrong, if it interferes with that which is higher still.

And so, if you recognize man as a spiritual being, a child of God, then you say it is right, if need be, to put all these other things under his feet, in order that he may attain the highest and best that he is capable of here. But you see it is life all the way, it is the physical life or it is the mental life or it is the affectional life or it is the spiritual life; and that which is necessary for the cultivation and development of these different grades of life becomes on those grades right, and that which threatens or injures one or either of these grades becomes, so far as that grade is concerned, wrong.

Life, then, continuance, fullness, joy, use, this is the standard of right and wrong; a standard which no book ever set up, which no book can ever overthrow; a standard which is inherent, natural, necessary, a part of the very nature of things.

I wish now for a moment I must of course do it briefly to consider the relation of religion to this natural morality. And perhaps you will hardly be ready some of you, at any rate for the statement which I propose to make, that sometimes, in order to be grandly moral, a man must be irreligious. I mean, of course, from the point of view of the conventional religion of his time, he must be ready to be regarded as irreligious. In the earliest development of the religious and moral life of a tribe, very likely, the two went hand in hand, side by side; for the dead chief now worshipped as god would be looked upon as in favor of those customs or practices which the tribe had come to regard as right. But religion perhaps you will know by this time, if you have thought of it carefully is the most conservative thing in the world. Naturally, it is the last thing that people are willing to change. This reluctance grows out of their reverence, grows out of their worshipful nature, grows out of their fear that they may be wrong.

But now let me illustrate what I mean. Religion, standing still in this way, has become an institution, a set of beliefs, of rites and ceremonies, which do not change. The moral experience of the people goes right on; and so it sometimes comes to pass that the moral ideal has outgrown the religious ideal of the community. And now, as a practical illustration to illume the whole point, let us go back to ancient Athens for a moment at the time of Socrates. Here we are confronted with the curious fact that Socrates, who has been regarded from that day to this as the most grandly moral man of his time, the one man who taught the highest and noblest human ideals, is put to death as an irreligious man. The popular religion of the time cast him out, and put the hemlock to his lips; and at the same time his teaching in regard to righteousness and truth was unspeakably ahead of the popular religion of his day.

Let us come to the modern Athens for a moment, to the time of Theodore Parker in Boston. We are confronted here, again, with this strange fact. There was not a church in Boston that could abide him, not even the Unitarian churches; and in the prayer-meetings of the day they were beseeching God to take him out of the world, because they thought he was such a force for evil. And at the same time Theodore Parker stood for the very highest, tenderest, truest moral ideal of his age.

There was no man walking the earth at that time who so grandly voiced the real law of God as did Theodore Parker. And yet he was outcast by the popular religious sentiment of his time.

This, then, is what I mean when I say that we ought to be careful, and study and think in forming our religious ideals, and see that we do not identify our own unwillingness to think with the eternal and changeless law of God. This is what I have meant in some of the strictures which I have uttered during the last year upon some of the theological creeds of the time. The people have grown to be better than their creeds, but they have not yet developed the courage to make those creeds utter the highest and finest things which they think and feel. This is what I have meant when I have said that the character of God as outlined in many of these creeds is away behind and below the noblest and finest and sweetest ideals of what we regard as fitting even to humanity to-day.

Religion, then, may be ahead of the moral ideal or it may be behind it. The particular type of religion I mean, of course, which is being held at any particular time in the history of the world. But the moral ideal of necessity goes on, keeping step with the social experience of the race.

I must touch briefly now just one other point of practical importance that we need to guard, in order to be tender and true in our dealings with our fellow-men. You will find, if you look over the face of society, that there are two kinds of morality, frequently quite inconsistent with each other; and sometimes the poorer of the two kinds is held in higher esteem than the better. I mean there is conventional morality, and there is real morality.

As a hint of illustration: An American woman goes to Turkey to-day; and she is shocked by the customs of the women and their style of dress. It seems to her that no woman can possibly be moral who, although she covers her head, can appear on the street with feet and ankles bare. But this same Turkish woman is shocked beyond the possibility of utterance to know that in Europe and America women carefully cover their feet, but expose their faces and their shoulders. It seems terrible to her, and she cannot understand how a European or American woman can have any regard for the principles of delicacy and morality.

Do you not see how, in both cases here, it is purely a matter of convention? No real question of morality is touched in either case. I speak of this to prepare you to note how conscience can be as troubled over things which are purely conventional as it can over things which are downright and real. Let me use another illustration, going a little deeper in the matter. Here is a man, for example, who is terribly shocked because his neighbor takes a drive with his family on Sunday afternoon. It seems to him an outrage on all the principles of public and social morality; and he is eager to get up a society to abolish such customs, that seem to him to threaten the prosperity of all that is good in the world. But this same man, perhaps, has been trained in a way of conducting his business that, while legal, is not strictly fair. This man may be hard and cruel towards his employees. He may cherish bitter hatreds towards his rivals. In his heart he may be transgressing the law of vital ethics, while fighting with all the power of his nature for that which does not touch any real question of right or wrong at all.

Or take a woman who, while shocked at the transgression of some social custom in which she has been trained from her childhood, or, for example, has come to think that a certain way of observing Lent, on which we have just entered, is absolutely necessary to the safety of religion and morals both, is yet quite willing, and without a qualm of conscience, on the slightest hint of a suspicion, to tear into tatters the character of one of her neighbors or friends, does not hesitate to slander, perhaps is unjust or cruel to the servants that make the house comfortable and beautiful for her; in other words, transgressing the real laws of right and wrong, she is shocked and troubled over the transgression on the part of others of some purely conventional statute, the keeping or breach of which has no real bearing on the welfare of the world.

A good many of our social judgments are like the case of the old lady pardon me, if it should make you smile, but it illustrates the case who criticised with a great deal of severity a neighbor and friend who wore feathers on her bonnet. Somebody said to her, But the ribbons on your bonnet are quite as expensive as the feathers that you criticise. "Yes," she said, "I know they are; but you have got to draw the line somewhere, and I choose to draw it at feathers." So you find a great many people on every hand in society who are choosing to draw these lines purely artificial, purely conventional in regard to matters of supposed right or wrong, while they are not as careful to look down deeply into the essential principles of that which is inherently right or wrong.

And now at the end I wish to suggest what is a theme large enough for a sermon by itself, and say that these laws of righteousness are so inherent that they are self-executed; and by no possibility did any soul from the beginning of the world ever escape the adequate result of his wrong-doing. The old Hebrews, as manifested in the Book of Job, the Psalms, and all through the Old Testament, taught the idea, which was common at that time in the world, that the favor of God was to be judged by the external prosperity of men and women. The Old Testament promises long life and wealth and all sorts of good things to the people who do right; and I find on every hand in the modern world people who have inherited this way of looking at things. I have heard people say: I have tried to do right, and I am not prosperous. I wonder why I am treated so? I have heard women say, I have tried to be a good mother: why is my child taken away from me? As though there was any sort of relation between the two facts. I hear people say, Don't talk to me about the justice of God, when here is a man, who has been dishonest all his life long, who has prospered, and become rich and lives in a fine house, drives his horses, and owns a yacht. As if there was any sort of connection between the two, as though a man merely because he had a fine house and owned a yacht was escaping the punishment of his unjust and selfish life.

Remember, friends, look a little below the surface. There is no possibility of escape. I break some law of my body; do I escape the result? I break some law of my mind; do I escape the result? I break some law of my affectional nature; is nothing to happen? I break a law of my spiritual nature; does nothing take place as the result of it? You might as well say that the law of gravity can be suspended, that a man can fling himself over the edge of a precipice, and come to no harm. The precipice over the edge of which you fling yourself may be a physical one, may be a mental one, an affectional one, a spiritual one; but the moral gravity of the universe is never mocked, and the man who breaks any of God's laws never goes free. He may discover that he has broken it, be sorry for it, begin to keep it again, and recover himself; but the consequences are sure, inevitable, eternal.