Chapter V: The Progressive Professor (3)

Behold a worn foot-path in which we may walk and gather immortelles! It leads to a city whereof the houses are low and hide none of the sky; narrower than these, but straitness does not inconvenience dwellers who have no call to go to and fro; not uniform--the occupants' names are cut into fronts of marble and granite and mossy red sand-stone. Some are marked by columns, others by crosses. Around many plants are set. But here are others. The tenants were poor or friendless folk, or strangers; they have only clay walls and roofs of sod, upon which every blade, green or sere, all day long and all night, bending lightly to airs of summer or swept low by winter winds, keeps sighing, "May he rest in peace."

Old neighbors are here; but no looks of theirs question us as to what we have done in the world, or in what failed.

Did the sight of these at last turn inward? and did lips that were so ready with the Pharisee's prayer close with the cry of the publican?

Old friends! But their hands are cold and will never clasp ours again. Enemies! Between them and us may judgment be the offspring of Christian kindness!

And here, hedged with arbor-vitæ, is the place of our kin. Those of them who passed hither before our time we could never realize. Others are dim remembrances; like the baby sister that came one wild winter night, to our great wonder, and, to our equal sorrow, left us in spring for this small habitation.

These were not long separated. Dear old folks! one roof and one tablet for two who had but one mind and one heart. Here lies the little cousin we quarrelled with at evening, to shed over her in the morning our first remorseful tears. Look through the break in the hedge, on that square slab--

EVELYN GRANT.
Aged 35.

Our first school-mistress. We hated her with the impotent bitterness of childish hearts outraged. For did she not show partiality to the dullest scholar she had?--because his father was rich, the big boys said; and thus we repeated it to our fond if not judicious friend, old Diana, when we complained to her of Miss Evelyn's injustice in sending Alf Whitfield up head every Monday.

"He is the oldest," she would say. "As if oldness is any reason why a great fellow like that should have a better chance than the rest," we would think. If we had understood how much of Miss Evelyn's support depended upon the favor of rich Squire Whitfield, we might have felt differently. They say that Alf's mother used to beg of the mistress to encourage and make much of the bashful half-wit, who often wept because he could not learn like the others.

We will pull the old weeds from her grave. They shall not choke flowers planted by the orphan nephews she worked so hard to bring up respectably--worked without a complaint long after the cough we mocked behind our primers had hacked into her vitals.

Let us follow this road, beyond the pines--a little higher--here. The spot we have thought and dreamed about but never before seen.

If any one should ask why we came, hardly pausing, by so many mounds of soldiers who died in the same cause, as may be read on their tablets, we would answer that, with the soul of this one, all glory for us passed out of our marvellous sunsets, warmth from the color of our autumns, charm from our ice-bound winters, sweetness from the breath of our springs.

Down there, bordering this field consecrated to Catholic dead, is the "colored folks' ground."

How tidy it looks. Formerly it was a huddle of neglected hillocks; many of them sunken as if they who, deprecating scorn, had crept through the world in the shadow of the wall, shrank even here from obtruding.

How many of us Catholics, of the thousands that crowd that church of which we see the cross above the hill-top, or lie here with hands crossed to God, ever offered a prayer for those neglected souls, living or dead?

Before that church was built there came from the West Indies, following the fortunes of an exiled family, a gray-haired negro. He did not persevere in hearing Mass because the children insulted him on the street--waited for him with stones in their hands at the corners of the church. He died, and, to fulfil his last wish, some of his people planted a cross upon his unsodded grave.

I used to know every mound, from that Egyptian-faced vault,

"Against whose portal I had thrown,
In childhood, many an echoing stone;
And shrank to think, poor heart of sin,
It was the dead that groaned within;"

to the cheerful nook where the nurseryman's children sleep under their coverlet of flowers. From the hero's pillar by the highway, with the record,

"He lived as mothers wish their sons to live,
He died as fathers wish their sons to die,"

to the monument of the beloved woman whose husband and daughters came every year from distant homes to add a tribute of plants and garlands to the granite offering they had raised to her memory.

Here, broken and half buried, is the old slab with death's-head and bones, and the verse exhorting all Christians to pray for the soul of Peter Curran.

Under this willow--she that planted it, in the belief that it would shade her rest, lies far away--our patriarch is buried: a father to orphans; to the poor a brother. That memorial in the stranger's ground--the only one--he caused to be placed above the remains of the decayed gentleman he entertained so many years and laid to rest at his own cost. Another, to whom he gave shelter, lies beside "the chevalier." The droll Swede, the whaleman, is buried behind them both. In our village foreigners were not looked upon with favor in those ante-emigration times; and this one was so blundering that no one would give him work after his honesty was proved. They were going to send him to jail as a vagrant, when Uncle Allan made up his mind that he needed just such a man for odd jobs. Bastian never learned enough English to thank him, but the tears that wet his parchment cheeks the day they brought his benefactor here were expressive.

Figures homely yet gracious, how they rise in memory!

Some fell asleep in hope; others drew back in doubt, or struggled with doom. Some, having done their best, lay down, offering it and that wherein they had failed to God, beside others who had nothing to offer but remorse.

All these yet speak to us, with more significance on this October afternoon in the October of our life than they did in past autumns; while to every one, according to his need, they teach a lesson.

They say to the covetous, "Not one of your things shall pass through the gate of this city."

To the envious, "Behold the state of him you wished to change places with yesterday."

They promise those who are kept awake by care "a blessed sleep."

They speak of rest to the world-weary; to the good, of beatitude; to the bad, of judgment; to all, of the end that is hastening on swift wings.

FREE RELIGION.[37]

This Free Religious Association appears to be composed of men and women who, some thirty years ago, were, or would have been, called _come-outers_ in Boston and its vicinity, but who are now generally called radicals, a name which they seem quite willing to accept. They are universal agitators, and see or imagine grievances everywhere, and make it a point wherever they see or can invent a grievance, to hit it; at least, to strike at it. They were conspicuous in the late abolition movement, are strenuous advocates for negro equality--or, rather, negro superiority--stanch women's rights men, in a word, reformers in general. They claim to have a pure and universal religion; and though some of them are downright atheists, they profess to be more Christian than Christianity itself, and their aim would seem to be to get rid of all special religion, so as to have only religion in general. They say, in the first article of their constitution:

"This association shall be called the Free Religious
Association--its objects being to promote the interests of
pure religion, to encourage the scientific study of theology,
and to increase fellowship in the spirit; and to this end all
persons interested in these objects are cordially invited to its
membership."

Nothing can be fairer or broader, so far as words go. Ordinary mortals, however, may be puzzled to make out what this religion in general, and no religion in particular, really is; and also to understand how there can be pure religion and scientific theology without God. Our radical friends are not puzzled at all. They have only to call man God, and the scientific study of the physiological and psychological laws of human nature the scientific study of theology, and every difficulty vanishes. Whoever believes in himself believes in God, and whoever can stand poised on himself has in himself the very essence of religion. According to them, the great error of the past has been in supposing that religion consists in the recognition, the love, and the service of a superior power; but the merit of free religion is, that it emancipates mankind from this mother error, discards the notion that they owe obedience to any power above humanity, and teaches that man is subject only to himself. Hence the Emersonian maxim, Obey thyself, which, translated into plain English, is, Live as thou listest.

The aim of the association, the president--whom we remember as a handsome, fair-complexioned, bright-eyed school-boy--tells us in his opening address is Unity. He says:

"Our aim, let it be understood, is _unity_; not division, discord,
conflict--but unity. We are not controversialists. We carry no
sword in our hands. We wear no weapons concealed about our person.
Our one word is peace--the word which is always most heartily
responded to by earnest men. Religion means unity; the very
definition of it signifies the power that binds men together;
that binds all souls to the divine. The communion of saints--that
is the religious phrase; and yet you will pardon me if I say
that religion at present is the one word that means division. As
interpreted by the religious world, it means war and discord.
Subjects are debated on other platforms--social questions,
political questions; they are debated and dismissed. In the
religious world the discussion goes on more persistently, more
bitterly than on any other field; but the issues are always the
same, the venue is never changed, conclusions are never reached,
and we lack the benefit that comes from the reconciliation of
perpetual discussion.

"Religion as organized is organized division. The communion is a
communion-table, the Christ is a symbol of the sects, the unity is
a unity made up of separate departments and families. The ancient
religions of the world still hold their own. Buddhism, Brahminism,
the religion of Zoroaster, the religion of Confucius, Judaism,
fetichism, Sabaism--all stand where they did. All gather in their
population; all have their organized activities, as they ever
had. No one of them has materially changed its front; not one of
them has been disorganized; not one of them has retreated from
the ground that from time immemorial it has occupied. They have
stormed at each other, they have been mortal enemies; but still
they stand where they stood. There is no superstition, however
degrading, that does not exist to-day; and Christian missionaries,
Catholic and Protestant, have gone out with hearts of flame and
tongues of fire, and souls that were all one solid single piece of
consecration, and have dashed themselves in hosts with the utmost
heroism against those ancient lines of faith; and their weapons
have dropped harmless at the foot. Here and there a few hundred,
or a few thousand, or a few tens or hundreds of thousands, may
have shifted from one faith to the other; but the solid substance
of these great religions still endures. The vast aggregates of
millions and tens of millions are unaffected. Christianity holds
its own, and no more. Buddhism and Brahminism hold their own, and
as much. What shall we say to this? Does religion mean unity?
The world cannot be all of one form of religion. Religion is
deeper than all its several forms. One religion cannot dislodge
another; one faith cannot supplant another faith. Put Christianity
in the place of Brahminism and Buddhism, and people would not
be Christians. They might change their name--they would not
change their nature. The inhabitants of countries that have been
under the sway of those great faiths do not become Christian
men by becoming Christian peoples. The Turks in European Turkey
are better men than the Greek Christians in European Turkey.
The religions, as such, must hold their places essentially
undisturbed. Harmony is not possible at present on that ground--on
any sectarian ground.

"Christianity itself is a bundle of religions. There is the vast
Greek Church, with its patriarchs; there is the enormous Catholic
Church, with its pope; here are all the families of the Protestant
Church, with their clergy. They hold the same relative position.
Protestantism does not subdue Romanism; Romanism will never
subdue Protestantism. The Protestant Church and Roman Church have
stood face to face for centuries; and thus they will continue to
stand, as long as the populations have the genius that God gave
them. What is Christendom but an army divided against itself?
What is Protestantism but a mingling of warring sects?--each
sect falling in pieces the moment it becomes organized for work.
Unitarianism does not gain on Orthodoxy; Orthodoxy does not gain
on Unitarianism. Each sect takes up the little portion that
belongs to it, and must rest contented; and all the power of
propagandism, of sectarian zeal, of fire and earnestness, does but
cause the little flame to burn up more brightly for an instant on
the local altar; and, when it dies down, the ashes remain on that
altar still.

"Our word, then, is Unity. But how shall we get it? Not by
becoming Catholics; not by making another order of Protestants;
not by instituting another sect; but by going down below all the
sects--going down to faith. For faith, hope, aspiration, charity,
love, worship, we believe, are inherent, profound, indestructible
elements of human nature." (Pp. 7-9.)

The rhetoric is not bad; but in what does the unity aimed at consist, and how is it to be obtained? Religion, by the speakers who addressed the association, is assumed to be a sentiment, and faith and hope and charity are, we are told, indestructible elements of human nature; then since human nature is one, what unity can the free religionists aspire to that they and all men have not already, or have not always had? Pass over this; whence and by what means is the unity, whatever it consists in, to be obtained? The answer to this question is not very definite, but it would seem the association expect it from below, not from above; for the president says, we are to obtain it only by "going down below all sects--going down to faith." A Catholic would have said, We attain to unity only by rising above all sects, to a faith which is one and universal, and which the sects rend and divide among themselves. But the radicals have outgrown Catholicity, outgrown Christianity, and very properly look for faith and unity from below. But when they get down, down to the lowest deep, will they find them? What faith or unity will they find in the lowest depths of humanity in addition to what all men have always had? If, notwithstanding the unity of nature, sects and divisions prevail, and always have prevailed, how, with nothing above nature or in addition to it, do you expect to get rid of them, and establish practical unity, or to obtain the charity that springs from unity?

The radicals deny that they are destructives, that they have only negations, or that they make war on any existing church, religion, sect, or denomination; they will pardon us, then, if we are unable to conceive what they mean by unity, or what unity, except the physical unity of nature, there is or can be among those who divide on every subject in which they feel any interest. Does the association propose to get rid of diversity by indifference, and of divisions simply by bringing all men to agree to differ? We certainly find only unity in denying among the individuals associated, who agree in nothing except that each one holds himself or herself alone responsible for his or her own personal views and utterances. Some of them would retain the Christian name, and others would reject it. Mr. Francis Ellingwood Abbott argues that it is not honest to hold on to the name after having rejected the thing. By professing to be a Christian a man binds himself to accept Christianity; and whoso accepts Christianity, binds himself to accept the Catholic Church, which embodies and expresses it. We make an extract from his address:

"As I look abroad in the community, I see two extreme types of
religious faith. One is represented in the Roman Church, the
great principle of authority. That church has been, and, I think,
will always be, the grandest and the greatest embodiment of
Christianity in social life. It is worthy of profound respect;
and I, for one, yield it profound respect. It took an infidel,
Auguste Comte, to portray fairly the service done to the world by
the Christian Church--the great Catholic Church--of the middle
ages; and we radicals are false to our principles, if we do not
do homage to every thing that is great and good and serviceable
in its season, even although we think its day of usefulness may
have passed. The fundamental principle of the Roman Church is
authority, pure and simple. The theology of Rome carries that
principle out to the extremest degree. Its hierarchy embodies it
in an institution; and, from beginning to end, from centre to
periphery, the Roman Catholic Church is consistent with itself
in the development of that one idea in spiritual and social and
ecclesiastical life.

"At the other pole of human thought and experience, I see a
very few persons--indeed, so few that I might, perhaps, almost
count them on the fingers of one hand--who plant themselves
on the principle of liberty alone; who want nothing else; who
stand without dogma, without creed, without priesthood, without
Bible, without Christ, without any thing but the Almighty God
working in their hearts. These two principles of authority and
freedom have thus worked out for themselves, at last, consistent
expression. Here are the two extremes--Romish Christianity and
free religion; and between these two extremes we see a compromise,
Protestant Christianity--the compromise between Catholicism and
free religion. Every compromise is weak, because it contains
conflicting elements. Protestant Christianity is like the image
with head of gold and feet of clay. It cannot stand for ever.
Either Christianity, as embodied in the Roman Church, is right, or
else free religion is right. Have we not learned yet to give up
these combinations of opposites, contraries, and incompatibles?
Has the war taught us nothing? Are we still trying to make some
chimerical mixture, some impossible union of freedom and slavery?
I trust not. For my own part, I stand pledged to liberty, pure
and simple; and I have come to view all compromises alike, and
to cast them utterly away, whether they clothe themselves in the
garments of Geneva, or in the last expression of Dr. Bellows and
the Unitarian Church." (Pp. 32-33.)

Mr. Abbott is not quite exact in his phraseology, and does not state the Catholic principle correctly. The principle on which the church rests, and out of which grow all her doctrines and precepts, is not authority, but the mystery of the Incarnation, or the assumption of human nature by the Word. Nor is he himself quite honest according to his own test of honesty. To be consistent with himself, he must reject not only the term _Christian_, but also the term _religion_, and put the alternative, Either Catholicity or no religion. The word religion--from _religare_--means either intensively to bind more firmly, or iteratively, to bind again, to bind man morally to God as his last end, in addition to his being physically bound to God as his first cause. _Free religion_ is a contradiction in terms, as much so as free bondage. Religion is always a bond, a law that binds.

Ralph Waldo Emerson differs from Mr. Abbott, and would retain the name Christian, though without the reality. We quote a long passage from his not very remarkable speech, out of deference to his rank as one of the originators of the movement:

"We have had, not long since, presented to us by Max Müller a
valuable paragraph from St. Augustine, not at all extraordinary
in itself, but only as coming from that eminent father in the
church, and at that age in which St. Augustine writes: 'That which
is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients,
and never did not exist from the planting of the human race until
Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which
already subsisted, began to be called Christianity.' I believe
that not only Christianity is as old as the creation--not only
every sentiment and precept of Christianity can be paralleled
in other religious writings--but more, that a man of religious
susceptibility, and one at the same time conversant with many
men--say a much travelled man--can find the same idea in
numberless conversations. The religious find religion wherever
they associate. When I find in people narrow religion, I find also
in them narrow reading.

"I object, of course, to the claim of miraculous
dispensation--certainly not to the doctrine of Christianity. This
claim impairs, to my mind, the soundness of him who makes it, and
indisposes us to his communion. This comes the wrong way; it comes
from without, not within. This positive, historical, authoritative
scheme is not consistent with our experience or our expectations.
It is something not in nature, it is contrary to that law of
nature which all wise men recognized, namely, never to require
a larger cause than is necessary to the effect. George Fox, the
Quaker, said that, though he read of Christ and God, he knew them
only from the like spirit in his own soul. We want all the aids to
our moral training. We cannot spare the vision nor the virtue of
the saints; but let it be by pure sympathy, not with any personal
or official claim. If you are childish and exhibit your saint as
a worker of wonders, a thaumaturgist, I am repelled. That claim
takes his teachings out of logic and out of nature, and permits
official and arbitrary senses to be grafted on the teachings. It
is the praise of our New Testament that its teachings go to the
honor and benefit of humanity--that no better lesson has been
taught or incarnated. Let it stand, beautiful and wholesome, with
whatever is most like it in the teaching and practice of men; but
do not attempt to elevate it out of humanity by saying, 'This was
not a man,' for then you confound it with the fables of every
popular religion; and my distrust of the story makes me distrust
the doctrine as soon as it differs from my own belief. Whoever
thinks a story gains by the prodigious, by adding something out
of nature, robs it more than he adds. It is no longer an example,
a model; no longer a heart-stirring hero, but an exhibition, a
wonder, an anomaly, removed out of the range of influence with
thoughtful men." (Pp. 42-44.)

Mr. Emerson cannot be very deeply read in patristic literature, if he is obliged to go to Max Müller for a quotation from St. Augustine, and he proves by his deductions from the language of this great doctor and father that he knows little of the Catholic Church. St. Augustine was a Catholic, and taught that, though times vary, faith does not vary, and that as believed the patriarchs so believe we, only they believed in the Christ who was to come, and we in the Christ who has come; and the church teaches through her doctors that there has been only one revelation, that this was made, in substance, to our first parents in the garden. She teaches us that Christianity is not only as old, but even older than creation; for creation with all it contains was created in reference to Christ the Incarnate Word, and consequently Christianity, founded in the Incarnation, is really the supreme law according to which the universe was created and exists. It precedes all other religions, and the various heathen or pagan religions and mythologies are only traditions, corruptions, perversions, or travesties of it. To the question, "How is the church catholic?" the very child's catechism answers, "Because she subsists in all ages, teaches all nations, and maintains all truth." How otherwise could she be Catholic?

That "every sentiment [doctrine?] and precept of Christianity can be paralleled in other religious writings" (religions, for Christianity is not a writing) may be true in part, if taken separately and in an unchristian sense; but certainly not as a connected and self-consistent system, in its unity and integrity. But suppose it, what then? It would only prove that all religions have retained more or less of the primitive revelation, which all men held in common before the Gentile apostasy and the dispersion of the race consequent on the attempt to build the Tower of Babel; not that all religions have had a common origin in human nature. What we actually find in pagan religions and mythologies that is like Christianity, is no more than we should expect on the supposition of a primitive revelation held out of unity, and interpreted by pride, folly, and ignorance, the characteristics of every pagan people. But Mr. Emerson is true to the old doctrine which he chanted years ago in _The Dial_:

"Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below--
The canticles of love and woe."

Nothing can roll out of the heart of nature but nature itself; and hence, in order to derive Christianity from within, Mr. Emerson eliminates whatever is supernatural and external and reduces it to simple nature, which every man from the beginning to the end of the world carries within him, and of which he cannot divest himself. He unchristianizes Christianity, makes it an element of human nature, confounds it with the natural laws of the physicists, and then tells us it is as old as creation, which is about as much as telling us man is as old as--man, or nature is as old as--nature. Well may Mr. Emerson be called the Sage of Concord, and be listened to as an oracle.

All the speakers, with three exceptions, seemed anxious to have it understood that the Free Religious Association has some great affirmative truth which is destined to redeem and save the world. Colonel Higginson, the successor of Theodore Parker, tells us with great earnestness:

"If this movement of ours means any thing, it means not a little
petty denial, not a little criticism, not a textual discussion,
not a sum in addition or subtraction, like Bishop Colenso's books,
not a bit of historical analysis, like Strauss or Renan. These
are trivial things; these do not touch people; these do not reach
the universal heart. The universe needs an affirmation, not a
denial; and the religious movement that has not for its centre the
assertion of something, would be condemned already to degenerate
into a sect by the time it had the misfortune to get fairly born."
(P. 58.)

And again:

"Affirmation! There is no affirmation except the belief
in universal natural religion; all else is narrowness and
sectarianism, though it call itself by the grandest name, compared
with that. It impoverishes a man; it keeps his sympathy in one
line of religious communication; it takes all the spiritual life
of the race, and says, 'All of this that was not an effluence
from Jesus you must set aside;' and so it makes you a member in
full standing of some little sect, all of whose ideas, all of
whose thoughts, revolved in the mind of some one narrow-minded
theologian who founded it. It shuts you up there, and you die,
suffocated for want of God's free air outside." (P. 59.)

But the reverend colonel here affirms nothing not affirmed by Christianity, nor any thing more than belongs to all men. Natural religion is simply the natural law, the moral law, prescribed to every man through his reason by the end for which he is created, and is included in the Christian religion as essential to the Christian character. What the free religionist does is not to affirm any thing not universally insisted on by the Catholic Church, but to deny all religion but universal natural religion; that is, he simply denies supernatural revelation, and the supernatural order, or that there is any reality broader than nature or above it. Free religion, as such, is, then, not affirmative, but purely negative; the negation of all religions in so far as they assert the supernatural. The real thought and design of the men and women composing the association is to get rid of every thing in every religion that transcends or professes to transcend nature. They make no direct war on the church or even on the sects, we concede; for they take it for granted that when people are once fully persuaded that nature is all, and that only natural religion is or can be true, all else will gradually die out of itself.

Mrs. Lucy Stone agrees in this with the others, and does not disguise her thought. She says:

"We come into the world, I believe, every one of us, with all
that is needful in ourselves, if we will only trust it--all that
is needful to help us on and up to the very highest heights to
which a human being can ever climb; but we have covered it over
by dogma and creed and sectarian theory, and by our own misdeeds,
until these angel voices that are in us cease to be heard; not
totally cease--I do not believe they ever totally cease--but
they become less and less audible to us. But if we learn to heed
their faintest whisper, reverently and obediently, I believe that
there is no path where the soul asks you to go that you may not
safely tread. It may carry you to the burning, fiery furnace,
but you will come out, and the smell of fire even will not be on
your garments. It may compel you into the lion's den, but the
wild beast's mouth will be shut. You may walk where scorpions are
in the way of duty, and you will not be hurt. It is this 'inner
light;' it is not a text, it is not a creed, but it is this in
ourselves which, if trusted, will lead us into all truth.

"I said I did not believe this voice was ever lost in the human
soul. I do not forget that men grow very wicked, and women too,
for that matter; I do not forget that men and women sometimes
appear to us so lost and fallen that it seems as if no power in
themselves, or any human power, could help them up; and yet to
these worst, men and women, in some hallowed moment, is the word
given, 'This is the way: walk ye in it.' And if, at the side of
this man or woman, at that very moment, is some helping hand, some
voice wise enough to counsel, he or she may be started to walk in
that way." (P. 100.)

If Mr. Abbott is the logician of the association, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe is decidedly the wit. In the essay she read to the meeting she, with her keen woman's wit and her hard common sense, shows up in admirable style the ridiculousness and absurdity of the whole movement. She is not herself indeed free from all taint of radicalism, and much she says may be due to her facility in detecting and satirizing the follies and absurdities of her friends rather than those of her foes; but her essay proves that she has a soul, and knows that it has aspirations that go beyond nature, and wants which only a supernatural religion can satisfy. She evidently has glimpses of a truth higher, deeper, broader, than any recognized by any other radical who spoke. She disposes of free religion in a single sentence, "He is not religious who does not recognize the _obligations_ of religion." We have space only for the concluding paragraph of her not very logical, self-consistent, but witty, shrewd, and satirical essay on _Freedom and Restraint in Religion_:

"But, friends, a sudden reaction comes over me. I determine to
profess and practise the new religion. I have learned at the
free religious club that I possess the first requisite for this,
having never studied any theology at all. The ex-divines whom I
have met there have so bewailed the artificial ignorance which
they acquired in their divinity-school training, that I presume
my natural knowledge to be its proper and desired antithesis. I
have read the Bhavadgheeta and Mr. Emerson's poems, the psalms and
gospel of the new faith. To be no Christian is the next important
desideratum; and I believe that I shall find this, as most people
do, easier than not. My first rule will be, 'Brahmins, beware
of intercourse with Pariahs!' The three hundred incarnations of
Vishnu, far more imposing in number than the single excarnation
of which the old theology has made so much, shall be preached
by me both as precept and example. The Confucian moralities,
as illustrated by Californian experience, shall replace the
Decalogue. Mr. Emerson's crowning sentence, that he who commits a
crime hurts himself, will, of course, suffice to convert a whole
society of criminals and reprobates. I will introduce the Joss
into prisons, and give the myth of the Celestial Empire a literal
interpretation. Our railroad and steamboat system will greatly
facilitate the offering of children to the river, with the further
advantage of offering the parents too. The strangling of female
infants will relieve the present excess of female population in
New England, and postpone the pressure of woman suffrage. The
burning of widows alone will save the country no small outlay in
pensions. Lastly, since the Turkish ethics are coming so much into
favor, I should advise a more than Mormon application of them in
our midst. Coöperative housekeeping could then be begun on the
most immediate and harmonious footing. And so we will reconvert
and transreform, and true progress shall consist in regress.

"But, as Archimedes asked to get out of the world in order to move
it, we shall be forced to go outside of Christendom in order to
accomplish this revolution. And if I may believe my friends of the
Free Religious Association, the surest way to do this will be to
keep closely in their midst. For, elsewhere, between steamboats
and missionaries, we cannot be sure of meeting people who shall be
sure of not being Christians.

"Perish the jest, and let the jester perish, if in aught but
saddest earnest she exchanged the serious for the comic mask.
Laughter is sometimes made to convey pathos that lies too deep for
tears. I have but faintly sketched the scene-painting that would
have to be done to-day, if religion could slip back and miss the
sacred and indispensable mediation of Christianity. Take back the
English language beyond the noble building of Shakespeare and
Milton; take back philosophy beyond the labor of the Germans and
the intuition of the Greeks; take back mathematics beyond Laplace
and Newton; take back politics from the enlargement of republican
experience--you will have yet a harder task when you shall carry
religion back to its ante-Christian status and interpretation.

"Lastly, and to sum up. The freedom of religion is the
satisfaction of obeying the innermost and highest impulses
of the human soul, to the disregard of all secondary powers
and considerations. I find this freedom inseparable from the
constraint which obliges the man toward this highest effort, as
the laws of the tidal flow force the wave to high-water mark.
Our human dignity consists in the assertion of this freedom, the
acknowledgment of this obligation. Intellectual freedom is found
in study and the progress of thought, which is ever substituting
enlarged and improved for rude and narrow processes. But the
liberal heart precedes the liberal mind, and conditions it. To be
careless as to authority and rash in conclusions, is not to be
free; to be strict in logic and scrupulous in derivation, is not
to be unfree. Let me end my discursive remarks with one phrase
from a dear, melancholy, Calvinistic poet, who passed his life in
damning himself and blessing others, repenting of a thousand sins
he was never able to commit:

'He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.'"
(Pp. 53-57.)

A stranger, who gave his name as Gustave Watson, made a brief, modest, sensible speech, which fully refuted the radical pretensions. He told them that he had listened in vain to hear pronounced the great affirmative truth the speakers professed to have. An evangelical minister, a Rev. Jesse H. Jones, took up the defence of Christianity, but was too ignorant of the Christian faith, and too far gone himself in radicalism, to be able to effect much. He took up the weakest line of defence possible, and labored chiefly to show the novelty of Christianity against St. Augustine, and its identity, under one of its aspects, with carnal Judaism or modern socialism. An orthodox Jew sent an essay and a liberal Jew spoke. A professor of spiritism made a speech, and several radicals spoke whose speeches we are obliged to pass over, though as good as those we have noticed.

We have refrained as far as possible from ridiculing the proceedings of the association, which is no association at all, since it is founded on the principle of free individualism; for we wish to treat all men and women with the respect due to ourselves, if not to themselves. The chief actors in the movement we have formerly known, and some of them intimately. We have no doubt of their sincerity and earnestness; but we must be permitted to say that we have found nothing new or striking in their speeches, and we cannot remember the time when we were not perfectly familiar with all their doctrines and pretensions. Their views and aims were set forth in the New England metropolis nearly forty years ago, if with less mental refinement and polish, with an originality and freshness, a force and energy, which they can hardly hope to rival. They were embodied in 1836, and attempted to be realized in the Society for Christian Union and Progress, which its founder abandoned because he would not suffer it to grow into a sect, because he saw his movement was leading no whither, and could accomplish nothing for the glory of God or the good of mankind here or hereafter, and because, through the grace and mercy of God, he became convinced of the truth and sanctity of the Catholic Church against which the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century rebelled. He may not now be very proud of these radicals, but they are, to a great extent, the product of a movement of which he and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the earliest and principal leaders in Boston.

We readily acknowledge that the pretensions of these radical men and women are very great, but they show no great intellectual ability, and are painfully narrow and superficial. The ministers and ex-ministers who figured on the occasion exhibited neither depth nor breadth of view, neither strength nor energy of mind. They proved themselves passable rhetoricians, but deplorably ignorant of the past and the present, of the religions they believed themselves to have outgrown, and especially of human nature and the wants of the human soul. They appeared to know only their own theories projected from themselves, and which are as frail and as attenuated as any spider's web ever rendered visible by the morning dew. They pretend to have studied, mastered, and exhausted all the past systems, religions, and mythologies; they pride themselves on the universality of their knowledge, and their having lost all bigotry, intolerance, or severity toward any sect or denomination. They speak even patronizingly of the church, and are quite ready to concede that she was good and useful to humanity in her day, in barbarous times, and in the infancy of the race; but humanity, having attained its majority, has outgrown her, and demands now a more manly and robust, a purer and broader and a more living and life-giving religion--a religion, in a word, more Christian than Christianity, more Catholic than Catholicity. Ignorant or worse than ignorant of the lowest elements of Catholic teaching, they fancy they have outgrown it, as the adult man has outgrown the garments of his childhood. Their self-conceit is sublime. Why, they are not large enough to wear the fig-leaf aprons fabricated by the reformers of the sixteenth century with which to cover their nakedness. The tallest and stoutest among them is a dwarf by the side of a Luther or a Calvin, or even of the stern old Puritan founders of New England; nay, they cannot bear an intellectual comparison even with the originators of New England Unitarianism.

Take the Reverend Colonel Higginson, a man of good blood and rich natural gifts, one who, if he had been trained in a Christian school, and had had his mind elevated and expanded by the study of Christian dogmata, could hardly have failed to be one of the great men, if not the greatest man of his age. He has naturally true nobility of soul, rare intellectual power, and genius of a high order; yet he is so blinded, and so dwarfed in mind by his radicalism, that he can seriously say, "There is no affirmation except the belief in universal natural religion; all else is narrowness and sectarianism." He has, then, no views broader than nature, no aspirations that rise higher than nature, and labors under the delusion that men, reduced to nature alone, would really be elevated and ennobled. He has never learned that nature is not self-sufficing--is dependent; that it has both its origin and end as well as its medium in the supernatural, and could not act or subsist a moment without it--a truth which the Catholic child has learned before a dozen years old, and which is a simple commonplace with the Christian; so much so, that he rarely thinks it necessary to assert it, far less to prove it.

This utterance of the reverend colonel is accepted by all the radicals. None of them get above second causes; for them all God and nature appear to be identical and indistinguishable; and this appears to be their grand and all-reconciling doctrine. Hence the religion which they propose has no higher origin than man, and no higher end than the natural development and well-being of man, individual and social, in this earthly life. It is the religion of humanity, not the religion of God, and man, not God, is obeyed and worshipped in it; yet it seems never to occur to these wise men and women that nature either separated from or identified with God vanishes into nothing, and their religion with it. But is a religion that is simply evolved from humanity, that has no element above the human, and is necessarily restricted to man in this life, and that contemplates neither fore nor after, higher, deeper, and more universal than Christianity which asserts for us the nature and essence of God, teaches us the origin and end of all things, the real relations of man to his Maker and to universal nature through all the degrees and stages of his existence? No; it is your naturism that is "narrowness and sectarianism."

Radicalism has heard of the mystery of the Incarnation, and interprets it to mean not the union of two for ever distinct natures, the divine and human, in one divine person, but one divine nature in all human persons. Hence, while the person is human, circumscribed, and transitory, nature in all men is divine, is God himself, permanent, universal, infinite, immortal. This is what the Christian mystery, according to them, really means, though the ignorant, narrow-minded, and blundering apostles never knew it, never understood its profound significance. The church took the narrow and shallow view of the apostles; and hence our radicals have outgrown the church, and instead of looking back or without, above or beyond themselves, they look only within, down into their own divine nature, whence emanates the universe, and in which is all virtue, all good, all truth, all force, all reality. The aim of all moral and religious discipline must be to get rid of all personal distinction, all circumscription, and to sink all individuality in the divine nature, which is the real man, the "one man," the "over-soul" of which Mr. Emerson in his silvery tones formerly discoursed so eloquently and captivated so many charming Boston girls, who understood him by sympathy with their hearts, not their heads, though what he said seemed little better than transcendental nonsense to the elder, graver, and less susceptible of both sexes. Impersonal nature is divine; hence the less of persons we are the more divine we are, and the more we act from the promptings of impersonal nature the more god-like our acts. Hence instinct, which is impersonal, is a safer guide than reason, which is personal; the logic of the heart is preferable to the logic of the head, and fools and madmen superior to the wise and the sane. Hence, are fools and madmen profoundly reverenced by Turks and Arabs.

But impersonal nature is one and identical in all men, and identical, too, with the divine nature. There are no distinct, specific, or individual natures; there is only one nature in all men and things; for all individuality, all difference or distinction, is in the personality. Hence when you get rid of personality, which, after all, has no real subsistence, and sink back into impersonal nature, you attain at once to absolute unity, always and ever present under all the diversity of beliefs, views, or persons. Men and women are mere bubbles floating on the face of the ocean, and nothing distinguishes them from the ocean underlying them but their bubbleosity. Destroy that, and they are the ocean itself. Get rid of personality, sink back into impersonal nature, and all men and women become one, and identical in the one universal nature. Vulgar radicals and reformers seek to reform society by laboring to ameliorate the condition of men and women as persons, and are less profitably employed than the boy blowing soap-bubbles; for the reality is in the ocean on the face of which the bubble floats, not in the bubbleosity. The true radicals, who radicalize in satin slippers and kid gloves, seek not to ameliorate the bubbleosity which is unreal, an unveracity, a mere apparition, a sense-show, but to ameliorate man and society by sinking it, and all differences with it, in universal impersonal nature.

Yet what amelioration is possible except personal? If you get rid of men and women as persons, you annihilate them in every sense in which they are distinguishable from the one universal nature; and suppose you to succeed in doing it, your reform, your amelioration would be the annihilation of man and society; for you can have neither without men and women as individuals--that is, as persons. To reform or ameliorate them in their impersonal nature is both impossible and unnecessary; for in their impersonal nature they are identical with universal nature, and universal nature is God, infinite, immutable, immortal, incapable of being augmented or diminished. Nothing can be done for or against impersonal nature. We see, then, nothing that these refined and accomplished radicals can propose as the object of their labors but the making of all men and women, as far as possible, talk and act like fools and madmen. This would seem to be their grand discovery, and the proof of their having outgrown the church.

But we should be ourselves the fool and madman if we attempted to reason with them. They discard logic, reject reason, and count the understanding as one of the poorest of our faculties; as mean, narrow, personal. Reason and understanding are personal; and all truth, all knowledge, all wisdom, all that is real is impersonal. Is not the impersonality of God, that is, of nature, a primary article of their creed? How, then, reason with them or expect them to listen to the voice of reason? Reason is too strait for them, and they have outgrown it, as they have outgrown the church! They do not even pretend to be logically consistent with themselves. No one holds himself bound by his own utterances, any more than he does by the utterances of another. They are free religionists, and scorn to be bound even by the truth.

But suppose they wish to retain men and women--or women and men, for with them woman is the superior--as persons, how do they expect by restricting, as they do, their knowledge to this life, and making their happiness consist in the goods of this world alone, to effect their individual amelioration? Socialism secures always its own defeat. The happiness of this life is attainable only by living for another. Restricted to this life and this world, man has play for only his animal instincts, propensities, and powers. There is no object on which his higher or peculiarly human affections and faculties can be exerted, and his moral, religious, rational nature must stagnate and rot, or render him unspeakably miserable by his hungering and thirsting after a spiritual good which he has not, and which is nowhere to be had. The happiness of this life comes from living for a supernatural end, the true end of man, in obedience to the law it prescribes. When we make this life or this world our end, or assume, with Mr. Emerson, that we have it within, in our own impersonal nature, we deny the very condition of either individual or social happiness, take falsehood for truth; and no good ever does or can come from falsehood.

It will be observed by our readers, from the extracts we have made, that the radicals not only confine their views to humanity and to this life, but proceed on the assumption of the sufficiency of man's nature for itself. They appear to have, with the exception of Mrs. Howe, no sense of the need of any supernatural help. They have no sense of the incompleteness and insufficiency of nature, as they have no compassion for its weakness. They never stumble, never fall, never sin, are never baffled, are never in need of assistance. It is not so with ordinary mortals. We find nature insufficient for us, our own strength inadequate; and, voyaging over the stormy ocean of life, we are often wrecked, and compelled to cry out in agony of soul, "Lord, save or we perish." Whosoever has received any religious instruction knows that it is not in ourselves but in God that we live and move and have our being, and that not without supernatural assistance can we attain true beatitude.

In conclusion, we may say, these radical men and women set forth nothing not familiar to us before the late Theodore Parker was an unfledged student of the Divinity School, Cambridge, and even before most of them were born. We know their views and aims better than they themselves know them, and we have lived long enough to learn that they are narrow and superficial, false and vain. We have in the church the freedom we sighed for but found not, and which is not to be found, in radicalism. God is more than man, more than nature, and never faileth; Christ the God-man, at once perfect God and perfect man, two distinct natures in one divine person, is the way, the truth, and the life; and out of him there is no salvation, no true life, no beatitude. We do not expect these radicals to believe us; they are worshippers of man and nature, and joined to their idols. Esteeming themselves wise, they become fools; ever learning, they are never able to come to the knowledge of the truth, any more than the child is able to grasp the rainbow.

FOOTNOTE:

[37] _Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting of the Free Religious Association, held in Boston May 27th and 28th, 1869._ Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1869. 8vo, pp. 122.

MEMENTO MORI.

"Come and see how a Christian can die."--_Addison to his
step-son._