The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 02/Ten Sermons of Religion/Sermon 06
VI.
OF THE CULTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS POWERS.
LET US GO ON UNTO PERFECTION. Heb. vi. 1.
The highest product of a nation is its men ; of you and me is our character, the life which we make out of our time. Our reputation is what we come to be thought of, our character what we come to be. In this character the most important element is the religious, for it is to be the guide and director of all the rest, the foundation-element of human excellence.
In general our character is the result of three factors, namely, of our Nature, both that which is human, and which we have as men in common with all mankind, and that which is individual, and which we have as Sarah or George, in distinction from all men; next, of the Educational Forces about us; and, finally, of our own Will, which we exercise, and so determine the use we make of the two other factors; for it is for us to determine whether we will he flat before natural instincts and educational forces, or modify their action upon us.
What is true in general of all culture is true in special of religious education. Religious character is the result of these three factors. I suppose every earnest man, who knows what religion is, desires to become a religious man, to do the most of religious duty, have the most of religious rights, and enjoy the most of religious welfare; to give the most for God, and receive the most from Him. It does not always appear so, yet really is. At the bottom of our hearts we all wish for that. We have been misled by blind guides, who did not always mean to deceive us; we have often gone astray, led off by our instinctive passion in youth, our voluntary calculation in manhood, yet never meaning to deceive ourselves. But there is none of us who does not desire to be a religious man,—at least, I never met one who confessed it, or of whom I thought it true. But of course, they desire it with various degrees of will.
Writers often divide men into two classes, saints and sinners. I like not the division. The best men are bad enough in their own eyes. I hope God is better pleased with men than we are with ourselves, there are so many things in us all which are there against our consent,—evil tenants whom we cannot get rid of as yet. That smoky chimney of an ill-temper is a torment to poor Mr Fiery, which he has not had courage or strength to remove in fifty winters. To "see ourselves as others see us," would often minister to pride and conceit; how many naughty things, actions and emotions too, I know of myself, which no calumniator ever casts in my teeth. Yet take the worst men whom you can find,—men that rob on the highway with open violence, pirates on the sea, the more dangerous thieves who devour widows' houses and plunder the unprotected in a manner thoroughly legal, respectable, and "Christian," men that steal from the poor;—take the tormentors of the Spanish Inquisition, assassins and murderers from New York and Naples, nay, the family of commissioners who in Boston are willing to kidnap their fellow-citizens for ten dollars a head, and bind them and their posterity for the perennial torture of American slavery;—even these men would curl and shudder at the thought of being without consciousness of God in the world; of living without any religion, and dying without any religion. I know some think religion is rather uncomfortable to live by, but the worst of men, as the best, thinks it is a good thing to die with. Men repent of many things on a death-bed; when the storm blows, all the dead bodies are stirred in the bosom of the sea, and no one is then sorry for his efforts to become a religions man. Many a man, who lives in the violation of his personal, domestic, social, national, and general human duties, doubtless contrives to think he is a religious man, and if in the name of Mammon he robs the widow of a pound, he gives a penny to the orphan in the name of God, and thinks he serves each without much offending the other. Thus, kidnappers in these times are "exemplary members’ of "Christian churches" where philanthropy gets roundly rated by the minister from week to week, and call themselves "miserable offenders" with the devoutest air. This is not all sham. The men want to keep on good terms with God, and take this as the cheapest, as well as the most respectable way. Louis the Fifteenth had a private chapel dedicated to the "Blessed Virgin" in the midst of his house of debauchery, where he and his poor victims were said to be "very devout after the Church fashion." Slave-traders and kidnappers take pains to repel all calumny from their "religious" reputation, and do not practise their craft till "divines" assure them it is patriarchal and even "Christian." I mention these things to show that men who are commonly thought eminently atrocious in their conduct and character, yet would not willingly be without religion. I shall take it for granted that all men wish to acquire a religious character.
I take it this is the Idea of a religious character. It is, first, to be faithful to ourselves, to rule body and spirit, each by the natural law thereof; to use, develope, and enjoy all the faculties, each in its just proportions, all in harmonious action, developed to the greatest degree which is possible under our circumstances; to have such an abiding consciousness of God, that you will have the four-fold form of piety, so often dwelt on before, and be inwardly blameless, harmonious, and holy.
It is, next, to be faithful to your fellow-men; to do for them what is right, from right motives and for right ends; to love them as yourself; to be useful to them to the extent of your power; to live in such harmony with them that you shall rejoice in their joys, and all be mutually blessed with the bliss of each other.
It is also to be faithful to God; to know of Him, to have a realizing sense of his Infinite power, wisdom, justice, goodness, and holiness, and so a perfect love of God, a perfect trust in Him, a delight in the Infinite Being of God; to love him intellectually in the love of truth, morally as justice, affectionally as love, and totally as the Infinite God, Father and Mother too of all this world; so to love God that you have no desire to transcend his law or violate your duty to yourself, your brother, or your God; so to love Him that there shall be no fear of God, none for yourself, none for mankind, but a perfect confidence and an absolute love shall take the place of every fear. In short, it is to serve God by the normal use, development, and enjoyment of every faculty of the spirit, every limb of the body, and every mode of power which we possess.
I think such is the ideal of a religious character; that there is no one who would not confess a desire to be religious in that sense, for it is to be a perfect man; no one who would not make some sacrifice for this end; most men would make a great one, some would leave father and mother, and lay down their own lives, to secure it.
What are some of the means to this end, to this grace, and this glory? There are four great public educational forces, namely, the industrial, political, literary, and ecclesiastical action of the people, represented by the Business, the State, the Press, and the Church.[1] These have a general influence in the formation of the character, and so a special influence in the formation of the religious character; but as they cannot be trusted for the general work of forming the character, no more can they for this special function. They are less reliable in religion than in any other matter whatever. By these forces the whole community is a teacher of religion to all persons born therein; but it can only teach the mode and degree of religion it has itself learned and possessed, not that which it has not learned and does not possess. Not only can it not teach a religion higher than its own, but it hinders you in your attempt to learn a new and better mode of religion.
For several things we may trust these public educational forces in religion.
They teach you in the general popular fear of God, and a certain outward reverence which comes of that; the popular sacraments of our time,—to give your bodily presence in a meeting-house, perhaps to join a sectarian church, and profess great reverence for the Bible. They will teach you the popular part of your practical duties,—personal, domestic, social, ecclesiastical, and political. But of course they can teach you only the popular part.
They may be relied on to teach the majority of men certain great truths, which are the common property of Christendom, such as the existence of a God, the immortality of the soul, the certainty of a kind of retribution, and the like. Then each sect has certain truths of its own which it will commonly teach. Thus the Catholics will learn to reverence the Roman Church; the Protestants to venerate the Bible; the Calvinists to believe in the Trinity; and the Unitarians in the Oneness of God. All the sects will teach a certain decorum, the observance of Sunday,—to honour the popular virtues, to shun the unpopular vices.
The educational forces tend to produce this effect. You send your boys to the public schools of Boston, they learn the disciplines taught there,—to read, write, and calculate. What is not taught they do not learn. In Saxony the children learn German; Dutch, in Holland. In the same way the majority of men learn the common religion of the community, and profess it practically in their markets, their houses, their halls of legislature, their courts, and their jails. The commercial newspapers, the proceedings of Congress, the speeches of public men,—these are a part of the national profession of faith, and show what is the actual object of worship, and what the practical creed of the nation.
But for any eminence of religion you must look elsewhere; for any excellence of the sentiment, any superiority of the idea, any newness in the form of religion. These educational forces will teach you evanescent principles which seem to suit your present and partial interests, not eternal principles, which really suit your universal and everlasting interests. In Jerusalem these forces might educate a Gamaliel,—never a Jesus.
Charles River flows two miles an hour ; chips and straws on its surface, therefore, if there be no wind, will float with that velocity. But if a man in a boat wishes to go ten miles an hour, he must row eight miles more than the stream will carry him. So we are all in the dull current of the popular religion, and may trust it to drift us as fast as it flows itself; we may rise with its flood, and be stranded and left dry when it ebbs out before some popular wickedness which blows from off the shore. The religious educational forces of a commercial town,—you see in the newspapers what religion they will teach you,—in the streets what men they would make.
These educational forces tend to make average Christians, and their influence is of great value to the community,—like the discipline of a camp. But to be eminent eligious men you must depend on very different helps. Let us look at some of them.
There are religious men who, by the religious genius they were born to, and the religious use they have made thereof, have risen far above the average of Christians. Such men are the first help; and a most important one they are. It is a fortunate thing when such an one stands in a church whither the public current drives in the people, and to the strength of his nature adds the strength of position. But it is not often that such a man stands in a pulpit. The common ecclesiastical training tends to produce dull and ordinary men, with little individual life, little zeal, and only the inspiration of a sect. However, if a man of religious genius, by some human accident, gets into a pulpit, he is in great danger of preaching himself out of it. Still there are such men, a few of them, stationed along the line of the human march; cities set on a hill, which no cloud of obloquy can wholly hide from sight. Nay, they are great beacons on the shore of the world,—light-houses on the headlands of the coast, sending their guidance far out to sea, to warn the mariner of his whereabouts, and welcome him to port and peace. Street-lamps there must be for the thoroughfares of the town, shop-lights also for the grocer and the apothecary j nay, handlights which are made to be carried from room to room and set down anywhere, and numerous they will ever be, each having its own function. This arrangement takes place in the ecclesiastical as well as in municipal affairs, for each sect has its street-lamps and its shop-lights to guide men to its particular huckstery of salvation, and little hand-lights to take into corners where the salesmen and the showmen are all ready with their wares. But the great Faros of Genoa, and Eddystone light-houses of religion, must always be few and far between; the world is not yet rich enough in spirit to afford many of this sort.
Yet even in these men you seldom find the wholeness of religion. One has the sentiments thereof; he will kindle your religious feelings, your reverence, your devotion, your trust, and your love of God.
Another has only its ideas; new thoughts about religion, new truths, which he presents to the minds of men. Analytic, he destroys the ancient errors of theological systems; thrashes the creeds of the churches with the stout flail of philosophy, and sifts them as wheat, winnowing with a rough wind, great clouds of chaff blow off before his mighty vans. Synthetic, he takes the old truth which stood the critical thrashing and is now winnowed clean; he joins therewith new truth shot down from God, and welcomed into loving arms; and out of his large storehouse this scribe, well instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, brings forth things new and old, to serve as bread for the living, and seed-corn to generations not born as yet.
A third, with no eminence of feelings commonly called religious,—none of theological ideas,—will have yet an eminence of justice, and teach personal and social morality as no other man. He may turn to a single speciality of morals, and demand temperance, chastity, the reform of penal law, the reconstruction of society, the elevation of woman, and the education of the whole mass of men; or he may turn to general philanthropy, the universality of moral excellence, — it all comes from the same root, and with grateful welcome should be received.
Each of these teachers will do real service to your souls,—quickening the feelings, imparting ideas, and organizing the results of religion in moral acts. I know a great outcry has been made in all the churches against moral reformers, against men who would apply pure religion to common life, in the special or the universal form. You all know what clamour is always raised against a man who would abolish a vice from human society, or establish a new virtue. Every wolf is interested in the wilderness, and hates the axe and the plough of the settler, and would devour his child if he dared. So every nuisance in society has its supporters, whose property is invested therein. Paul found it so at Ephesus, Telemachus at Rome, and Garrison in America. I doubt not the men of Ephesus thought religion good in all matters except the making of silver shrines for Diana; "there it makes men mad." Men cry out against the advance of morality; "Preach us religion; preach us Christianity, Christ and him crucified, and not this infidel matter of ending particular sins, and abounding in special virtues. Preach us the exceeding sinfulness of sin, 'original sin,’ 'which brought death into the world and all our woe;' preach the beauty of holiness and the like of that, and let alone the actual sins of society, of the shop and the church and the State;—be silent about drunkenness and lust, about war, slavery, and the thousand forms of avarice which we rejoice in. Is it not enough, Preacher, that we give you of our purse and our corporeal presence, that we weekly confess ourselves 'miserable offenders,’ with 'no health in us,’ and fast, perhaps, twice in our lives, but you must convict us of being idolaters also; yea, drunkards, gluttons, impure in youth and avaricious in manhood,—once a Voluptuary, and now a Hunker! Go to now, and preach us the blessedness of the righteous, Christ and him crucified!" When money speaks, the Church obeys, and the pulpit preaches for doctrine the commandments of the pews.
But it is these very moral reformers, who, in our time, have done more than all others to promote the feeling of piety which the churches profess so much to covet. The new ground of religion which the churches occupy is always won for them by men whom the churches hated. In the last thirty years these "pestilent moral reformers" of New England, I think, have done more to promote love of God, and faith in Him, than all the other preachers of all the churches. Justice is a part of piety; and such is the instinctive love of wholeness in man, that all attempts to promote justice amongst men lead ultimately to the love of God as God.
In every community you will find a man who thus represents some portion of religion,—often, perhaps, thinking that part is the whole, because it is all that he knows; here and there we find such an one in the pulpit. But now and then there comes a man who unites these three functions of piety into one great glory of religion; is eminent in feelings, ideas, and actions not the less. Each of those partial men may help us much, teaching his doctrine, kindling our feelings, giving example of his deed, and laying out religious work for us, spreading his pattern before society. Each of these may help us to a partial improvement. But when a man comes who unites them all, he will give us a new start, an inspiration which no other man can give; not partial, but total.
There are always some such men in the world ; the seed of the prophets never dies out. It comes up in Israel and in Attica; here a prophet teaching truth as divine inspiration, there a philosopher with his human discovery. So the Herb of Grace springs up in corners where once old houses stood, or wherever the winds have borne the seed; and, cropped by the oxen, and trodden with their feet, it grows ever fresh and ever new. When Scribes and Pharisees become idolaters at Jerusalem, and the sheep without a shepherd
"Look up and are not fed,
But, swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread,"
the spirit of God comes newly down on some carpenter's son at Nazareth, whose lightning terrifies the non-conducting Scribe; the new encounters the perishable old, and all heaven rings with the thunder of the collision. Now and then such a person comes to stand betwixt the living and the dead. "Bury that," quoth he, "it is hope lessly dead, past all resurrection. This must be healed, tended, and made whole." He is a physician to churches sick of sin, as well as with it; burying the dead, he heals also the sick, and quickens the sound into new and healthy life. But the owners of swine that perish must needs cry out at the loss.
Yet such a man is not understood in his own generation. A man with a single eminent faculty is soon seen through and comprehended. This man is good for nothing but practice; that, only for thought. One is a sentimentalist; another, a traveller. But when a genius comes eminent in many and most heterogeneous faculties, men do not see through nor comprehend him in a short time. If he has in himself all the excellence of all the men in the metropolis,—why, it will take many a great city to comprehend him. The young maiden in the story, for the first time hearing her clerical lover preach, wondered that those lips could pray as sweetly as they kissed, but could not comprehend the twofold sacrament, the mystery of this double function of a single mouth. Anybody can see that corn grows in this field, and kale in that; the roughest clown knows this, but it takes a great many wise men to describe the botany of a whole continent. So is it ever. Here is a religious man,—writing on purely internal emotions of piety, of love of God, of faith in Him, of rest for the soul, the foretaste of heaven. He penetrates the deeps of religious joy, its peace enters his soul, his morning prayer is a psalm deeper than David's, with a beauty more various than the poetic wreath which the shepherd-king gathered from the hill- sides of Jordan or the gardens of Mount Zion. Straightway men say: "This man is a sentimentalist; he is a mystic, all contemplation, all feeling,—poetical, dreamy,—his light is moon-shine." But ere long our sentimentalist writes of philosophy, and his keen eye sees mines of wisdom not quarried heretofore, and he brings a power of unsunned gold to light. Other men say: "O, this man is nothing but a philosopher, a mere thinker, a mighty head, but with no more heart than Chimborazo or Thomas Hobbes." Yet presently some great sin breaks out, and rolls its desolating flood over the land, uprooting field and town, and our philosopher goes out to resist the ruin. He denounces the evil, attacks the institution which thus de ceives men. Straightway men call out: "Iconoclast! Boanerges! John Knox! destroyer!" and the like. Alas me ! men do not know that the same sun gathers the dews which water the forget-me-not, drooping at noonday, and drives through the sky the irresistible storm that shatters the forest in its thunderous march, and piles the ruins of a mountain in an Alpine avalanche. The same soul which thundered its forked lightning on Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, poured out poetic parables from his golden urn, spreading forth the sunshine of the beatitudes upon friend and foe, and, half in heaven, breathed language wholly thence,—"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
It is a great thing once in our days to meet with a man of religious genius largely developed into lovely life. He stirs the feelings infinite within us, and we go off quite other than we came. He has not put his soul into our bosom; he has done better,—has waked our soul in our own bosom. Men may go leagues long to listen to such a man, and come back well paid. He gives us seeds of future life for our little garden. So the husbandman journeys far to get a new root or a new seed, to fill his ground with beauty or his home with bread. After we
have listened to the life of such a man, the world does not seem so low, nor man so mean; heaven looks nearer, yet higher too; humanity is more rich; if wrong appear yet more shameful, the wrongdoer is not so hopeless. After that I can endure trouble ; my constant cross is not so heavy; the unwonted is less difficult to bear. Tears are not so scalding to an eye which has looked through them into the serene face of a great-souled man. Men seem friendlier, and God is exceeding dear. The magistrates of Jerusalem marvelled at the conduct of Peter and John, heedful of the higher law of God, spite of bonds and imprisonment and politicians; but they "took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus," and the marvel had its explanation. What a dull, stupid thing is a candle! Touch it with fire, and then look! We are all of us capable of being lit when some Prometheus comes down with the spark of God in his right hand. The word of Jesus touched the dull fishermen of Galilee, and they flamed into martyrs and apostles. It is a great thing to meet such a man once in your life- time, to be cheered and comforted in your sad wayfaring, and filled with new vigour and new faith in the Father of all. After that we thank God, and take courage and fare on our happier way. So a company of pilgrims journeying in the wilderness, dry, foot-sore, and hot, the water all spent in their goat- skins, their camels weary and sick, come to a grove of twelve palm-trees, and an unexpected spring of pure water swells up in the desert. Straightway their weariness is all forgot, their limping camels have be- come whole once more. Staying their thirst, they fill their bottles also with the cool refreshment, rest in the shadow from the noonday's heat, and then with freshened life, the soreness gone from every bone, pursue their noiseless and their happy march. Even so, says the Old Testament story, God sent his angel down in the wilderness to feed Elias with the bread of heaven, and in the strength thereof the prophet went his forty days, nor hungered not. I suppose some of us have had this experience, and in our time of bewilderment, of scorching desolation, and of sor- row, have come upon our well of water and twelve palm- trees in the sand, and so have marched all joyful through the wilderness. Elias left all the angels of God for you and me, — the friendlier for his acquaintance.
There is a continual need of men of this stamp. We live in the midst of religious machinery. Many mechanics at piety, often only apprentices and slow to learn, are turning the various ecclesiastical mills, and the creak of the motion is thought "the voice of God." You put into the hopper a crowd of persons, young and old, and soon they are ground out into the common run of Christians, sacked up, and stored away for safe-keeping in the appropriate bins of the great ecclesiastical establishment, and labelled with their party names. You look about in what is dryly called "the religious world." What a mass of machinery is there, of dead timber, not green trees! what a jar and discord of iron clattering upon iron! Action is of machinery, not of life, and it is green new life that you want. So men grow dull in their churches. What a weariness is an ordinary meeting on one of the fifty-two ordinary Sundays of the year ! What a dreary thing is an ordinary sermon of an ordinary minister ! He does not wish to preach it; the audience does not wish to hear it. So he makes a feint of preaching, they a feint of hearing him preach. But he preaches not; they hear not. He is dull as the cushion he beats, they as the cushions they cover. A body of men met in a church for nothing, and about nothing, and to hear nobody, is to me a ghastly spectacle. Did you ever see cattle in a cold day in the country crowd together in an enclosure, the ground frozen under their feet, and no hay spread upon it,—huddling together for warmth, hungry, but inactive, because penned up, and waiting with the heavy, slumberous patience of oxen till some man should come and shake down to them a truss of clean bright hay, still redolent of clover and honeysuckle? That is a cheerful sight; and when the farmer comes and hews their winter food out of the stack, what life is in these slumberous oxen! their venerable eyes are full of light, because they see their food. Ah me ! how many a herd of men is stall-hungered in the churches, not getting even the hay of religion, only a little chaff swept off from old thrashing-floors whence the corn which great men beat out of its husk was long since gathered up to feed and bless mankind! Churches are built of stone. I have often thought pulpits should be cushioned with husks.
Of all melancholy social sights that one sees, few are so sad as a body of men got together to convert mankind to sectarianism by ecclesiastical machinery,—men dead as timber, cut down, dead and dry! Out of wire, muslin, thread, starch, gum, and sundry chemicals, French milliners make by dozens what they call roses, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, and the like. Scentless and seedless abortions are they, and no more. What a difference between the flower the lover gathers by the brook-side for his maiden's breast, and the thing which the milliner makes with her scissors; between the forget-me-not of the meadow and the forget-me-not of the shop! Such an odds is there betwixt religious men and Christians manufactured in a mill.
In the factories of England you find men busy all their life in making each the twenty-sixth part of a watch. They can do nothing else, and become almost as much machines as the grindstone which sharpens their drill, or the rammage which carries their file. Much of our ecclesiastical machinery tends to make men into mere fixtures in a mill. So there must be a continual accession of new religious life from without into the churches to keep Christians living. Men of religious genius it is who bring it in. Without them "religion" in cities would become mere traditional theology, and "life in God" would be sitting in a meeting-house, and the baptism in water from an aqueduct taken for the communion of the Holy Ghost. Blessed be God that there are such men not smothered in the surplice of the priest, but still alive in God, and God alive in them!
In old towns all the water that fills the wells is dead water,—dead and dirty too; the rinsings of the streets, the soakings of stables, the slop of markets, the wash and offscouring of the town ; even the filterings of the graveyard settle therein, and the child is fed with its grandsire's bones. Men would perish if left alone, dying of their drink. So, far off in the hills, above the level of the town, they seek some mountain lake, and furnish a pathway that its crystal beauty may come to town. There the living water leaps up in public fountains, it washes the streets, it satisfies the blameless cattle, it runs into every house to cleanse and purify and bless, and men are glad as the Hebrews when Moses smote the fabled rock. So comes religious genius unto men: some mountain of a man stands up tall, and all winter long takes the snows of heaven on his shoulders, all summer through he receives the cold rain into his bosom; both become springs of living water at his feet. Then the proprietors of fetid wells and subterranean tanks, which they call " Bethesda," though often troubled by other than angels, and whence they retail their "salvation" a pennyworth at a time, — they cry out with sneer and scoff and scorn against our new-born saint. "Shall Christ come out of Galilee?" quoth they. "Art thou greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? Who are you?" Thus the man of forms has ever his calumny against the man of God.
Religious teachers there will ever be,—a few organizers, many an administrator of organizations ; but inventors in religion are always few. These are the greatest external helps to the manhood of religion. All great teaching is the teacher's inspiration; this is truer in religion than in aught besides, for here all is life, and nothing a trick of mechanism. Let us take all the good that we can gain from the rare men of religious genius, but never submit and make even them our lords; teachers ever, let them never be masters.
Then there are religious books, such as waken the soul by their direct action,—stirring us to piety, stirring us to morality,—books in which men of great religious growth have garnered up the experience of their life. Some of them are total,—for all religion; some partial,—for the several specialities thereof. These books are sacks of corn carried from land to land, to be sown, and bear manifold their golden fruit. There are not many such in the world. There are few masterpieces of poetry in all the earth; a boy's school-bag would hold them all, from Greece and Rome, Italy, Germany, England. The masterpieces of piety in literature are the rarest of all. In a mineralogist's cabinet what bushels there are of quartz, mica, hornblende, slate, and coal ; and common minerals by heaps; reptiles and fishes done in stone ; only here and there an emerald; and diamonds are exceeding rare. So is it with gems of holy thought. Some psalms are there from the Bible, though seldom a whole one that is true to the soul of man,—now and then an oracle from a Hebrew prophet, full of faith in God, a warrior of piety,—which keep their place in the cabinet of religion, though two or three thousand years have passed by since their authors ceased to be mortal. But the most quickening of all religious literature is still found in the first three Gospels of the New Testament,—in those dear beatitudes, in occasional flowers of religion,—parable and speech. The beatitudes will outlast the pyramids. Yet the New Testament and its choicest texts must be read with the caution of a free-born man. Even in the words of Jesus of Nazareth much is merely Hebrew,—marked with the limitations of the nation and the man.
Other religious books there are precious to the heart of man. Some of the works of Augustine, of Thomas a Kempis, of Fenelon, of Jeremy Taylor, of John Bunyan, of William Law, have proved exceeding dear to pious men throughout the Christian world. In a much narrower circle of readers, Buckminster, Charming, and Ware have comforted the souls of men. Herbert and Watts have here and there a "gem of purest ray serene," and now and then a flower blooms into beauty in the desert air of liturgies, breviaries, and collections of hymns. The religious influence of Wordsworth's poetry has been truly great. With no large poetic genius, often hemmed in by the narrowness of his traditionary creed and the puerile littleness of men about him, he had yet an exceeding love of God, which ran over into love of men, and beautified his every day; and many a poor girl, many a sad boy, has been cheered and lifted up in soul and sense by the brave piety in his sonnets and in his lyric sweeps of lofty song. A writer of our own time, with large genius and unfaltering piety, adorning a little village of New Eng- land with his fragrant life, has sent a great religious influence to many a house in field and town, and youths and maids rejoice in his electric touch. I will leave it to posterity to name his name,—the most original, as well as religious, of American writers.
But the great vice of what is called "religious literature" is this. It is the Work of narrow-minded men, sectarians, and often bigots, who cannot see beyond their own little partisan chapel; men who know little of anything, less of man, and least of all of real religion. What criticism do such men make on noble men? The criticism of an oyster on a thrush; nay, sometimes, of a toad "ugly and venomous," with no "jewel in its head," upon a nightingale. Literature of that character is a curse. In the name of God it misleads common men from religion, and it makes powerful men hate religion itself; at least hate its name. It bows weak men down till they tremble and fear all their mortal life. I lack words to express my detestation of this trash,—concocted of sectarian cant and superstitious fear. I tremble when I think of the darkness it spreads over human life, of the disease which it inoculates mankind withal, and the craven dread it writes out upon the face of its worshippers. Look at the history of the Athanasian Creed and the Westminster Catechism. They have done more, it seems to me, to retard the religious development of Christendom, than all the ribald works of confessed infidels, from Lucian, the king of scoffers, down to our own days. The American Tract Society, with the best intentions in the world, it seems to me is doing more damage to the nation than all the sellers of intoxicating drink and all the prostitutes in the land!
Some books on religious matters are the work of able men, men well disciplined, but yet contaminated with false views of God, of man, and of the relation between the two; with false views of life, of death, and of the next, eternal world. Such men were Baxter and Edwards and many more,—Protestant and Catholic, Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, and Mahometan. All these books should be read with caution and distrust. Still a wise man, with a religious spirit, in the religious literature of the world, from Confucius to Emerson, may find much to help his growth.
After the attainment of manlier years in piety, other works, not intentionally religious, will help a man greatly. Books of science, which show the thought of God writ in the world of matter; books of history, which reveal the same mind in the development of the human race, slow, but as constant and as normal as the growth of a cedar or the disclosing of an egg ; Newton and Laplace, Descartes and Kant, indirectly, through their science, stir devout souls to deeper devotion. A thoughtful man dissolves the matter of the universe, leaving only its forces; dissolves away the phenomena of human history, leaving only immortal spirit; he studies the law, the mode of action, of these forces, and this spirit, which make up the material and the human world; and I see not how he can fail to be filled with reverence, with trust, with boundless love of the Infinite God who devised these laws of matter and of mind, and thereby bears up this marvellous universe of things and men. Science also has its New Testament. The beatitudes of philosophy are profoundly touching; in the exact laws of matter and of mind the great Author of the world continually says, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
The study of Nature is another great help to the cultivation of religion. Familiarity with the grass and the trees teaches us deeper lessons of love and trust than we can glean from the writings of Fenelon and Augustine. What lessons did Socrates, Jesus, and Luther, learn from the great Bible of God, ever open before mankind ! It is only indirectly that He speaks in the sight of a city,—the brick garden with dioecious fops for flowers. But in the country all is full of God, and the eternal flowers of heaven seem to shed sweet influence on the perishable blossoms of the earth. Nature is full of religious lessons to a thoughtful man. The great sermon of Jesus was preached on a mountain, which preached to him as he to the people, and his figures of speech were first natural figures of fact. But the religious use to be made of natural objects would require a sermon of itself.
The great reliance for religious growth must not be on anything external; not on the great and living souls whom God sends, rarely, to the earth, to water the dry ground with their eloquence, and warm it with their human love; nor must it be on the choicest gems of religious thought, wherein saints and sages have garnered up their life and left it for us. We cannot rely on the beauty or the power of outward Nature to charm our wandering soul to obedience and trust in God. These things may jostle us by the elbow when we read, warn us of wandering, or of sloth, and open the gate, but we must rely on ourselves for entering in. By the aid of others and our own action we must form the ideal of a religious man, of what we ought to be and do, under our peculiar circumstances. To form this personal ideal, and fit ourselves thereto, requires an act of great earnestness on our part. It is not a thing to be done in an idle hour. It demands the greatest activity of the mightiest mode of mind. But what a difference there is between men in earnestness of character! Do you understand the "religion" of a frivolous man? With him it is all a trifle; the fashion of his religion is of less concern than the fashion of his hat or of the latchet of his shoes. He asks not for truth, for justice, for love,—asks not for God, cares not. The great sacrament of religious life is to him less valuable than a flask of Ehenish wine broke on a jester's head. The specific levity of these men appears in their relation to religion. The fool hath said in his heart, "There is no God." Quoth the fop in his waistcoat, "What if there be none? What is that to me? Let us dance and be silly!" Did you ever see a frivolous man and maid in love,—so they called it? I have: it was like putting on a new garment of uncertain fit; and the giving and the taking of what was called a "heart" was like buying a quantity of poison weed to turn to empty smoke. They were "fearfully and wonderfully made for each other." So have I seen a silly man give a bad coin to a beggar in the streets.
I know there are those whose practical religion is only decency. They have no experience of religion but the hiring of a seat in a church where pew and pulpit both invite to sleep,—whose only sacrifice is their pew-tax; their single sacrament but bodily presence in a church. There are meeting-houses full of such men, which ecclesiastical upholsterers have furnished with pulpit, and pew, and priest, objects of pity to men with human hearts!
When an earnest young man offers a woman his heart and his life and his love, asking her for her heart and her life and her love, it is no easy hour to man or maid. The thought of it takes the rose out of the young cheek, gives a new lustre to the eye which has a deeper and mysterious look, and a terrible throbbing to the heart. For so much depends upon a word that forms or else misshapes so much in life, and soul and sense are clamouring for their right. The past comes up to help create the future, and all creation is new before the lover's eye, and all
" The floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
So is it in some great hour when an earnest man holds communion with himself, seeking to give and take with God, and asks, "What ought I in my life to be and do?" Depend upon it, only to the vulgarest of men is it a common hour. I will not say that every earnest man has his one enamoured hour of betrothing himself to religion. Some have this sudden experience, and give themselves to piety as they espouse a bride found when not looked for, and welcomed with a great swelling of the heart and prophetic bloomings of the yearning soul. Others go hand in hand therewith as brother and sister, through all their early days in amiable amity which sin has never broke and sel dom jarred; and so the wedlock of religion is as the ac- quaintance which began in babyhood, was friendship next at home and school, and slowly under tranquil skies grew up and blossomed out at last to love. This is the common way,—an ascent without a sudden leap. If bred as reli- gious children, you grow up religious men. But under the easiest of discipline, I think, every earnest man has his time of trial and of questioning, when he asks himself, "Shall I serve the soul by a life of piety ; or shall I only serve the flesh, listing in the popular armada of worldliness to do battle in that leprous host ? u That, I say, is a time of trial.
Let us suppose some earnest man forms the true ideal of religion,—of his duty to himself, his brother, and his God. He is next to observe and attend to himself, making his prayer a practice, and his ideal dream an actual day of life. Here he is to watch and scan himself, to see what causes help, and what hinder him in his religious growth. We have different dispositions, all of us; what tempts one, is nothing to another man; every heart knows only its own bitterness, not also that of another. Let me know my weak points and my strong ones ; forewarned, I shall be then forearmed. This man in the period of passion is led off by the lusts of the body; that in the period of calculation is brought into yet greater peril by his ambition,—his love of riches, place, and the respect of men. The Devil rings a dollar in one man's ear; he dreams of money every day. Some sensual lust catches another, as flies with poisoned sweet. To speak mythologically, the Devil has different baits to lure his diverse prey. Love of applause strips this man of his conscience, his affection, and his self-respect, of his regard for God, and drives him naked through a dirty world. Let a man know in what guise the tempter comes, and when, and he will not suffer his honour to be broken through. For this purpose, in the earlier period of life, or later when placed in positions of new peril, it is well to ask at the close of every day, "What have I done that is wrong, — what have I said, or thought, or felt ? What that is right ? " It is well thus to orient yourself before your Idea and your God, and see if there be any evil thing in you. This is needful until the man has gained complete possession of every limb of his body and of each faculty of his spirit, and can use them each after its own law in his particular position. Then he will do right with as little trouble as he walks about his daily work. His life will sanctify itself.
Do you know how artists make their great pictures? First, they form the idea. It is a work of sweat and watching. The man assembles all the shapes of beauty and of power which he has ever seen, or thought, or fancied, or felt. They flash along before his quickened eye, wildered and wandering now. New forms of beauty spring into life at the bidding of his imagination, — so flowers at touch of spring. Ere long he has his idea, composite, gathered from many a form of partial beauty, and yet one; a new creation never seen before. Thus in his seething mind Phidias smelts the several beauty of five hundred Spartan maids into his one Pallas-Athena, born of his head this time, a grand eclecticism of loveliness. So Michael devised his awful form of God creating in the Vatican; and Raphael his dear Cecilia, sweetest of pictured saints,—so fair, she drew the angels down to see her sing, and ears were turned to eyes. Now the artist has formed his idea. But that is not all. Next, he must make the idea that is in his mind a picture in the eyes of men; his personal fiction must become a popular fact. So he toils over this new work for many a weary day, and week, and month, and year, with penitential brush oft painting out what once amiss he painted in,—for even art has its error, the painter's sin, and so its remorse; the artist is made wiser by his own defeat. At last his work stands there complete,—the holy queen of art. Genius is the father, of a heavenly line ; but the mortal mother, that is Industry.
Now as an artist, like Phidias, Angelo, or Raphael, must hold a great act of imagination to form his idea, and then industriously toil, often wiping out in remorse what he drew in passion or in ignorance; so the man who would be religious must hold his creative act of prayer, to set the great example to himself, and then industriously toil to make it daily life, shaping his actual, not from the chance of circumstance, but from the ideal purpose of his soul.
There is no great growth in manly piety without fire to conceive, and then painstaking to reproduce the idea,—without the act of prayer, the act of industry. The act of prayer,—that is the one great vital means of religious growth; the resolute desire and the unconquerable will to be the image of a perfect man; the comparison of your actual day with your ideal dream; the rising forth, borne up on mighty pens, to fly towards the far heaven of religious joy. Fast as you learn a truth, moral, affectional, or religious, apply the special truth to daily life, and you increase your piety. So the best school for religion is the daily work of common life, with its daily discipline of personal, domestic, and social duties,—the daily work in field or shop, market or house, "the charities that soothe and heal and bless."
Nothing great is ever done without industry. Sloth sinks the idle boy to stupid ignorance, and vain to him are schools, and books, and all the appliances of the instructor's art. It is industry in religion which makes the man a saint. What zeal is there for money,—what diligence in learning to be a lawyer, a fiddler, or a smith! The same industry to be also religious men,—what noble images of God it would make us! ay, what blessed men! Even in the special qualities of fiddler, lawyer, smith, we should be more; for general manhood is the stuff we make into tradesmen of each special craft, and the gold which was fine in the ingot is fine also in the medal and the coin.
You have seen a skilful gardener about his work. He saves the slips of his pear-trees, prunings from his currant-bush; he watches for the sunny hours in spring to air his passion-flower and orange-tree. How nicely he shields his dahlias from the wind, his melons from the frost! Patiently he hoards cuttings from a rose-bush, and the stone of a peach; choice fruit in another's orchard next year is grafted on his crabbed stock, which in three years rejoices in alien flowers and apples not its own. Are we not gardeners, all of us, to fill our time with greener life, with fragrant beauty, and rich, timely fruit ? There are bright, cheery morning hours good for putting in the seed; moments of sunnier delight, when some success not looked for, the finding of a friend, husband, or wife, the advent of a child, mellows the hours. Then nurse the tender plant of piety ; one day its bloom will adorn your gloomy hour, and be a brightness in many a winter day which now you reck not of.
There are days of sadness when it rains sorrow on you,—when you mourn the loss of friends, their sad defeat in mortal life, or worse still, the failure of yourself, your wanderings from the way of life, or prostrate fall therein. Use, then, man, these hours for penitence, if need be, and vigorous resolve. Water the choicest, tender plants; one day the little seedling you have planted with your tears shall be a broad tree, and under its arms you will screen your head from the windy storm and the tempest;—yes, find for your bones a quiet grave at last.
Do you commit a sin, an intentional violation of the law of God, you may make even that help you in your religious growth. He who never hungered knows not the worth of bread; who never suffered, nor sorrowed, nor went desolate and alone, knows not the full value of human sympathy and human love. I have sometimes thought that a man who had never sinned nor broke the integrity of his consciousness, nor, by wandering, disturbed the continuity of his march towards perfection,—that he could not know the power of religion to fortify the soul. But there are no such men. We learn to walk by stumbling at the first; and spiritual experience is also bought by errors of the soul. Penitence is but the cry of the child hurt in his fall. Shame on us that we affect the pain so oft, and only learn to whine an unnatural contrition! Sure I am that the grief of a soul self-wounded, the sting of self-reproach, the torment of remorse for errors of passion, for sins of calculation, may quicken any man in his course to manhood, till he runs and is not weary. The mariner learns wisdom from each miscarriage of his ship, and fronts the seas anew to triumph over wind and wave.
Some of you are young men and maidens. You look forward to be husbands and wives, to be fathers and mothers, some day. Some of you seek to be rich, some honoured. Is it not well to seek to have for yourself a noble, manly character, to be religious men and women, with a liberal development of mind and conscience, heart and soul? You will meet with losses, trials, disappointments, in your business, in your friends and families, and in yourselves ; many a joy will also smile on you. You may use the sunny sky and its falling weather alike to help your religious growth. Your time, young men, what life and manhood you may make of that.
Some of you are old men, your heads white with manifold experience, and life is writ in storied hieroglyphics on cheek and brow. Venerable faces! I hope I learn from you. I hardly dare essay to teach men before whom time has unrolled his lengthened scroll, men far before me in experience of life. But let me ask you, if, while you have been doing your work,—have been gathering riches, and tasting the joys of time,—been son, husband, father, friend,—you have also greatened, deepened, heightened your manly character, and gained the greatest riches,—the wealth of a religious soul, incorruptible and undefiled, the joys that cannot fade away?
For old or young there is no real and lasting human blessedness without this. It is the sole sufficient and assured defence against the sorrows of the world, the disappointments and the griefs of life, the pains of unrequited righteousness and hopes that went astray. It is a never-failing fountain of delight.
"There are briers besetting every path,
That call for patient care;
There is a cross in every lot,
And an earnest need for prayer;
But the lowly heart that trusts in Thee
Is happy everywhere."
- ↑ See Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, by Theodore Parker, Boston, 1852, Vol. I. p. 407, et seq., where these educational forces are dwelt on at length.