The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 02/Ten Sermons of Religion/Sermon 07
VII.
OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A SOURCE OF STRENGTH.
THE LORD IS THE STRENGTH OF MY LIFE. Ps. xxvii. 1.
There are original differences of spiritual strength. I mean of intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious power; these depend on what may be called the natural spiritual constitution of the individual. One man is born with a strong spiritual constitution, another with a weak one! So one will be great, and the other little. It is no shame in this case, no merit in that. Surely it is no more merit to be born to genius than to gold, to mental more than to material strength ; no more merit to be born to moral, affectional, and religious strength than to mere intellectual genius. But it is a great convenience to be born to this large estate of spiritual wealth, a very great advantage to possess the highest form of human power,—eminence of intellect, of conscience, of the affections, of the soul.
There is a primitive intellectual difference amongst men which is ineffaceable from the man's mortal being, as the primary qualities are ineffaceable from the atoms of matter. It will appear in all the life of the man. Even great wickedness will not wholly destroy this primeval loftiness of mind. Few men were ever better born in respect to intellect than Francis Bacon and Thomas Wentworth,—"the great Lord Verulam" and "the great Earl of Strafford: "few men ever gave larger proof of superior intellect, even in its highest forms of development, of general force and manly vigour of mind; few ever used great natural ability, great personal attainments, and great political place, for purposes so selfish, mean, and base. Few ever fell more completely. Yet, spite of that misdirection and abuse, the marks of greatness and strength appear in them both to the very last. Bacon was still "the wisest, bright est," if also "the meanest of mankind." I know a great man may ruin himself; stumbling is as easy for a mam- moth as a mouse, and much more conspicuous ; but even in his fall his greatness will be visible. The ruin of a colossus is gigantic,—its fragments are on a grand scale. You read the size of the ship in the timbers of the wreck, fastened with mighty bolts. The Tuscan bard is true to nature as to poetry in painting his odious potentates magnificently mighty even in hell. Satan fallen seems still "not less than archangel ruined!"
I do not deny this natural and ineffaceable difference between men in reference to their strength of character, their quantity of being. I am not going to say that conscious piety will make a great man out of a little one; that it would give to George the Third the strength of Charlemagne or Napoleon. No training will make the shrub-oak a tree-oak; no agriculture swell a cape to a continent. But I do mean to say, that religion, conscious piety, will increase the actual strength of the great and of the little; that through want of religious culture the possibility of strength is diminished in both the little and the great.
Not only does religion greater the quantity of power, it betters its quality at the same time. So it both enlarges a man's general power for himself or his brother, and enhances the mode of that power, thus giving him a greater power of usefulness and a greater power of welfare, more force to delight, more force to enjoy. This is true of religion taken in its wide sense,—a life in harmony with myself, in concord with my brother, in unity with my God; true of religion in its highest form, the conscious worship of the Infinite God by the normal use of every faculty of the spirit, every limb of the body, and every portion of material or social power.
Without this conscious religious development, it seems to me that no strength or greatness is admirably human; and with it, no smallness of opportunity, no littleness of gift, is contemptible or low. I reverence great powers given or got; but I reverence much more the faithful use of powers either large or little.
Strength of character appears in two general modes of power, accordingly as it is tried by one or other of two tests. It is power to do, or power to bear. One is active, and the other passive, but both are only diverse modes of the same thing. The hard anvil can bear the blows of the hard hammer which smites it, because there is the same solidity in the nether anvil which bears up, as in the upper hammer which bears down. It takes as much solidity to bear the blow as to give it; only one is solidity active, the other merely passive.
Religion increases the general strength and volume of character. The reason is plain: Religion is keeping the natural law of human nature in its threefold mode of action,—in relation to myself, to my brother, and to my God; the coordination of my will with the will of God, with the ideal of my nature. So it is action according to my nature, not against it; it is the agreement of my finite will with the Infinite Will which controls the universe and provides for each portion thereof.
Now, to use a thing against its nature, to abuse it, is ultimately to fail of the natural end thereof, and waste the natural means provided for the attainment of the end. A boat is useful to journey with by sea, a chaise to journey with by land; use each for its purpose, you enjoy the means and achieve the end. But put off to sea in your chaise, or put on to land in your boat, you miss the end you lose also the means. This is true of the natural, as of the artificial instruments of man; of his limbs, as of his land-carriages or sea-carriages. Hands are to work with, feet to walk on; the feet would make a poor figure in working, the hands an ill figure in essaying to walk. The same rule holds good in respect to spiritual faculties as in bodily organs. Passion is not designed to rule conscience, but to serve; conscience not to serve passion, but to rule. If passion rule and conscience serve, the end is not reached, you are in a state of general discord with yourself, your brother, and your God; the means also fail and perish; conscience becomes weak, the passion itself dies from the plethora of its indulgence ; the whole man grows less and less till he becomes the smallest thing he is capable of dwindling into. But if conscience rule and passion serve, all goes well; you reach the end—welfare in general, harmony with yourself, concord with your brother, and unity with your God; you keep the means,—conscience and passion are each in position, and at their proper function; the faculties enlarge until they reach their entire measure of possible growth, and the whole man becomes the greatest he is capable of being here and now.
You see this strength of character, which naturally results from religion, not only in its general forms, but in its special modes. Look a moment at the passive power, the power to endure suffering. See the fact in the en- durance of the terrible artificial torments that are used to put down new forms of religion, or extinguish the old. While men believe in the divinity of matter, they try suspected persons by exposure to the elements,—walking over red-hot ploughshares, holding fire in the naked hand, or plunging into water. All new forms of religion must pass through the same ordeal, and run the gauntlet betwixt bishops, priests, inquisitors ; between scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites. See how faithfully the trial has been borne. Men naturally shrink from pain ; the stout man dreads the toothache, he curls at the mention of the rheumatism, and shivers at the idea of an ague; how suddenly he drops a piece of burning paper which would tease his hand for a minute! But let a man have religion wakened in his heart, and be convinced that it is of God, let others attempt to drive it out of him, and how ready is he to bear all that malice can devise or tyranny inflict! The thumb-screws and the racks, the whip, the gallows, and the stake,—the religious man has strength to bear all these; and Cranmer holds his right arm, erring now no more, in the flame, till the hand drops off in the scalding heat. You know the persecutions of Peter and Paul, the martyrdom of Stephen, the trials of early Christians,—Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, Irenseus, and the rest. They all went out to preach the form of religion themselves had practised, and enjoyed in their own souls. What could they offer men as an inducement to conversion? The common argument at this day—respectability, a comfortable life and an honourable death, the praise of men? Could Origen and Cyprian tell the young maiden, "Come to our church, and you will be sure to get a nice husband, as dainty fine as any patrieian in Ephesus or Carthage? Could they promise "a fashionable company in prayer," and a rich wife to the young man who joined their church? It was not exactly so; nay, it was considerably different. They could offer their converts hunger, and nakedness, and peril, and prison, and the sword; ay, and the scorn of relatives and the contemporaneous jeer of a cruel world. But "the word of God grew and prevailed." The nice voluptuary, the dainty woman, too delicate to set foot upon the ground, became converted, and then they could defy the axe of the headsman and the tormentor's rack. Unabashed they stood before wild beasts; ay, they looked in the face of the marshals and commissioners and district judges of those times,—men who perverted law and spit on justice with blasphemous expectoration,—and yet the religious soul did not fear!
In the Catholic Church this is Saint Victorian's Day. Here is the short of his story. He was an African nobleman of Adrumetum, governor of Carthage with the Roman title of Proconsul, the wealthiest man in the province of Africa. He was a Catholic; but Huneric, the king of the Vandals in Africa, was an Arian, and in the year four hundred and eighty began to persecute the Catholics. He commanded Victorian to continue the persecution, offering him great wealth and the highest honours. It was his legal obligation to obey the king. "Tell the king that I trust in Christ," said the Catholic proconsul; "the king may condemn me to the flames, to wild beasts, to any tortures, I shall never renounce the Church." He was put to the most tormenting tortures, and bore them like a man. Others met a similar death with the same steadiness of soul. Even the executioners felt the effect of such heroism of endurance. "Nobody," said they, "embraces our religion now; everybody follows the example of the martyrs."
The Catholic Church tried the same weapons against heretics that had been first found wanting when turned against the early Christians. The tyrant, with the instinct of Pharaoh, seeks to destroy the male children, the masculine intellect, conscience, affections, soul. Then a new race of Pauls and Justins springs up; a new Ignatius, Polycarp, and Victorian start into life. The Church may burn Arnaldo da Brescia, Savonarola, Huss;—what profits it? The religion which the tyrant persecutes makes the victim stronger than the victor ; then it steals into the heart of the people, and as the wind scatters the martyr's ashes far and wide, so the spectacle or the fame of his fidelity spreads abroad the sentiment of that religion which made him strong. The persecuting Nile wafts Moses into the king's court, and the new religion is within the walls.
You know how the Puritans were treated in England, the Covenanters in Scotland; you know how they bore trial. You have heard of John Graham, commonly called Lord Claverhouse. He lived about two hundred years ago in England and Scotland, one of that brood of monsters which still disgrace mankind, and, as vipers and rattle-snakes, seem born to centralize and incarnate the poison of the world. An original tormentor, if there had never been any cruelty he would have invented it, of his own head. Had he lived in New England in this time, he would doubtless have been a United States commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Bill, perhaps a judge or a marshal; at any rate, a slave-hunter, a kidnapper in some form; and of course he would now be as much honoured in this city as he then was in Edinburgh and London, and perhaps as well paid. Well, Lord Claverhouse had a commission to root out the Covenanters with fire and sword, and went to that work with the zeal of an American kidnapper. By means of his marshals he one day caught a Scotch girl, a Covenanter. She was young, only eighteen;—she was comely to look upon. Her name was Margaret. Graham ordered her to be tied to a stake in the sea at low-water, and left to drown slowly at the advance of the tide. It was done: and his creatures,—there were enough of them in Scotland, as of their descendants here,—his commissioners, his marshals, and his attorneys,—sat down on the shore to watch the end of poor Margaret. It was an end not to be forgotten. In a clear, sweet voice she sung hymns to God till the waves of the sea broke over her head and floated her pious soul to her God and his heaven. Had Scotland been a Catholic country there would have been another Saint Margaret, known as the
"Genius of the shore
In her large recompense, who would he good
To all that wander in that perilous flood."
You all know what strength of endurance religion gave to Bunyan and Fox, and their compeers the Quakers, in Boston as well as England ; to the Mormons in Missouri, and in all quarters of Christendom. Religion made these men formidably strong. The axe of the tormentor was as idle to stay them as the gallows to stop a sunbeam. This power of endurance is general, of all forms of religion. It does not depend on what is Jewish in Judaism, or Christian in Christianity, but on what is religious in religion, what is human in man.
But that is only a spasmodic form of heroism,—the reaction of human nature against unnatural evil. You see religion producing the same strength to endure sufferings which are not arbitrarily imposed by cruel men. The stories of martyrdom only bring out in unusual forms the silent heroism which works unheeded in society every day. The strength is always there; oppression, which makes wise men mad, in making religious men martyrs, only finds and reveals the heroism; it does not make it, more than the stone-cutter makes the marble which he hews into the form his thought requires. The heroism is always there. So there is always enough electricity in the air above this town to blast it to atoms and burn it to cinders. Not a babe could be born without it ; not a snow-drop bloom; yet no one heeds the silent force. Let two different streams of air, one warm, the other cold, meet here, the lightning tells of the reserved power which hung all day above our heads.
I love now and then to look on the strength of endurance which religion gives the most heroic martyrs. Even in these times the example is needed. Though the fagot is only ashes now, and the axe's edge is blunt, there are other forms of martyrdom, bloodless yet not less cruel in motive and effect. But I love best to see this same strength in lovelier forms, enduring the common ills of life,—poverty, sickness, disappointment, the loss of friends, the withering of the fondest hopes of mortal men. One is occasional lightning, thundering and grand, but transient; the other is daily sunshine which makes no noisy stir on any day, but throughout the year is constant, creative, and exceeding beautiful.
Did you never see a young woman with the finest faculties, every hope of mortal success crushed in her heart; see her endure it all, the slow torture which eats away the mortal from the immortal, with a spirit still unruffled,—with a calm cheerfulness and a strong trust in God? We all have seen such things,—the loveliest forms of martyrdom.
Did you never see a young man with large faculties, fitting him to shine among the loftiest stars of this our human heaven, in the name of duty forego his own intellectual culture for the sake of a mother, a sister, or a father dependent upon his toil, and be a drudge when he might else have been a shining light; and by the grace of religion do it so that in all of what he counted drudgery he was kinglier than a king? Did you never see the wife, the daughter, or the son of a drunkard sustained by their religion to bear sorrows to which Nebuchadnezzar's seven- fold-heated furnace were a rose-garden,—bear it and not complain,—grow sweeter in that bitterness? There are many such examples all about us, and holy souls go through that misery of torture clean as sunlight through the pestilential air of a town stricken with plague. So the pagan poets tell a story of the fountain Arethusa, which, for many a league, ran through the salt and bitter sea, all the way from Peloponnesus to Trinacria, and then came up pure, sweet, and sparkling water, far off in Ortygia, spreading greenness and growth in the valley where the anemone and asphodel paid back their beautj^to the stream which gave them life.
Such are daily examples of the fortitude and strength to suffer which religion gives. When we look carelessly on men in their work or their play, busy in the streets or thoughtful in a church, we think little of the amount of religion there is in these human hearts ; but when you need it in times of great trial, then it comes up in the broad streets and little lanes of life. Disappointment is a bitter root, and sorrow is a bitter flower, and suffering is a bitter fruit, but the religious soul makes medicine thereof, and is strengthened even by the poisons of life. So out of a brewer's dregs and a distiller's waste in a city have I seen the bee suck sweetest honey for present joy, and lay it up for winter's use. Yea, the strong man in the fable, while hungering, found honey in the lion's bones he once had slain; got delight from the destroyer, and meat out of the eater's mouth. Why is it that the religious man has this power to suffer and endure? Religion is the normal mode of life for man, and when he uses his faculties according to their natural law, they act harmoniously, and all grow strong. Besides this, the religious man has a confidence in his God; he knows there is the Infinite One, who has foreseen all and provided for all,—provided a recompense for all the unavoidable suffering of his children here. If you know that it is a part of the purpose of the Infinite Father that you must suffer to accomplish your own development, or the development of mankind, yet understand that the suffering must needs be a good for you, then you will not fear. "The flesh may quiver as the pincers tear," but you quiver not; the will is firm, and firm is the unconquerable trust. "Be still, flesh, and burn!" says the martyr to the molecules of dust that form his chariot of time, and the three holy children of the Hebrew tale sing psalms in their fiery furnace, a Fourth with them; and Stephen in his stoning thinks that he sees his God, and to Paul in his prison there comes a great cheering light; yes, to Bunyan, and Fox, and Latimer, and John Rogers, in their torments; to the poor maiden stifled by the slowly strangling sea; to her whose crystal urn of love is shattered at her feet; to the young man who sees the college of his dream fade off into a barn; and the mother, wife, or child, who sees the father of the family bloat, deform, and uglify himself into the drunkard, and, falling into the grave, crush underneath his lumbering weight all of their mortal hopes. Religion gives them all a strength to suffer, and be blessed by the trials they endure. There are times when nothing outward is left but suffering. Then it is a great thing to have the stomach for it, the faith in God which disenchants the soul of pain. Did not Jesus, in the Gospel, have his agony and his bloody sweat,—the last act of that great tragedy? did not religion come, an angel, to strengthen him, and all alone, deserted, forsaken, he could say, "I am not alone, for the Father is with me"?
"The darts of anguish fix not where the seat
Of suffering hath been thoroughly fortified
By acquiescence in the "Will supreme,
For time and for eternity, by Faith,
Faith absolute in God, including Hope.
And the defence that lies in boundless love
Of His perfection ; with habitual dread
Of aught unworthily conceived, endured
Impatiently, ill done or left undone,
To the dishonour of His holy Name.
Soul of our souls and safeguard of the world!
Sustain, Thou only canst, the sick of heart;
Restore their languid spirits, and recall
Their lost affections unto Thee and Thine.
"Come labour, when the worn-out frame requires
Perpetual sabbath; come disease and want,
And sad exclusion through decay of sense;
But leave me unabated trust in Thee;—
And let Thy favour to the end of life
Sustain me with ability to seek
llepose and hope among eternal things,
Father of earth and heaven! and I am rich,
And will possess my portion in content."
See this same strength in another form,—the power to do. Religion not only gives the feminine capacity to suffer, but the masculine capability to do. The religious man can do more than another without religion, who is his equal in other respects; because he masters and concentrates his faculties, making them work in harmony with each other, in concord with mankind, in unity with God; and because he knows there is a God who works with him, and so arranges the forces of the universe, that every wrong shall be righted, and the ultimate well-being of each be made sure of for ever. Besides, he has a higher inspiration and loftier motive, which strengthen, refine, and ennoble him. Adam Clarke tells us how much more of mere intellectual labour he could perform after his conversion than before. Ignatius Loyola makes the same confession. They each attribute it to the technical peculiarity of their sectarianism, to Methodism or Catholicism, to Christianity; but the fact is universal, and applies to religion under all forms. It is easily explained by the greater harmony of the faculties, and by the higher motive which animates the man, the more certain trust which inspires him. An earnest youth in love with an earnest maid,—his love returned,—gets more power of character from the ardour of her affection and the strength of his passion; and when the soul of man rises up in its great act of love to become one with God, you need not marvel if the man is strong. "I can do all things," says Paul, "through Christ who strengthened me." Buddhists and Hebrews and Mohammedans say the same of their religion.
Then religion helps a man to two positive things,—first, to a desire of the right; next, to a progressive knowledge and practice of the right. Justice is always power; whoso has that commands the world. A fool in the right way, says the proverb, can beat a wise man in the wrong. The civilized man has an advantage over the savage, in his knowledge of Nature. He can make the forces of the universe toil for him: the wind drives his ship; the water turns his mill, spins, and weaves for him; lightning runs his errands; steam carries the new lord of Nature over land or ocean without rest. He that knows justice, and does it, has the same advantage over all that do it not. He sets his mill on the rock, and the river of God for ever turns his wheels.
The practice of the right in the common affairs of life is called Honesty. An honest man is one who knows, loves, and does right because it is right. Is there anything but this total integrity which I call religion, that can be trusted to keep a man honest in small things and great things, in things private and things public? I know nothing else with this power. True it is said, "Honesty is the best policy;" and as all men love the best policy, they will be honest for that reason. But to follow the best policy is a very different thing from being honest; the love of justice and the love of personal profit or pleasure are quite different. But is honesty the best policy? Policy is means to achieve a special end. If the end you seek be the common object of desire,—if it be material pleasure in your period of passion, or material profit in your period of ambition,—if you seek for money, for ease, honour, power over men, and their approbation,—then honesty is not the best policy; is means from it, not to it. Honesty of thought and speech is the worst policy for a minister's clerical reputation. Charity impairs an estate; unpopular excellence is the ruin of a man's respectability. It is good policy to lie in the popular way; to steal after the respectable fashion. The hard creditor is surest of his debt; the cruel landlord does not lose his rent ; the severe master is uniformly served the best; who gives little and with a grudge finds often the most of obvious gratitude. He that destroys the perishing is more honoured in Christendom than he who comes to save the lost. The slave-hunter is a popular Christian in the American Church, and gets his pay in money and ecclesiastical reputation. The honesty of Jesus brought him to the bar of Herod and Pilate; their best policy nailed him to the cross. Was it good policy in Paul to turn Christian? His honesty brought him to weariness and painfulness, to cold and nakedness, to stripes and imprisonment, to a hateful reputation on the earth. Honesty the best policy for personal selfishness! Ask the "Holy Alliance." Honesty is the means to self-respect, to growth in manly qualities, to high human welfare,— a means to the kingdom of heaven. When men claim that honesty is the best policy, is it this which they mean?
I will not say a man cannot be honest without a distinct consciousness of his relation to God ; but I must say, that consciousness of God is a great help to honesty in the business of a shop, or the business of a nation; and without religion, unconscious if no more, it seems to me honesty is not possible.
By reminding me of my relation to the universe, religion helps counteract the tendency to selfishness. Self-love is natural and indispensable; it keeps the man whole,—is the centripetal power, representing the natural cohesion of all the faculties. Without that, the man would drop to pieces, as it were, and be dissolved in the mass of men, as a lump of clay in the ocean. Selfishness is the abnormal excess of this self-love. It takes various forms. In the period of passion, it commonly shows itself as intemperate love of sensual pleasure; in the period of ambition, as intemperate love of money, of power, rank, or renown. There are as many modes of selfishness as there are propensities which may go to excess. Self-love belongs to the natural harmony of the faculties, and is a means of strength. Selfishness comes from the tyranny of some one appetite, which subordinates the other faculties of man, and is a cause of weakness, a disqualification for my duties to myself, to my brother, and my God. Now the effort to become religious, working in you a love of man and of God, a desire of harmony with yourself, of concord with man and unity with Him, diminishes selfishness, developes your instinctive self-love into conscious self-respect, into faithfulness to yourself, and so enlarges continually the little ring of your character, and makes you strong to bear the crosses and do the duties of daily life.
Much of a man's ability consists in his- power to concentrate his energies for a purpose; in power to deny some private selfish lust—of material pleasure or profit—for the sake of public love. I know of naught but religion that can be trusted to promote this power of self-denial, which is indispensable to a manly man. There can be no great general power without this; no strong character that lies deep in the sea, and holds oh its way through sunshine and through storm, and unabashed by tempests, comes safe to port. I suppose you all know men and women, who now are not capable of any large self-denial,—the babies of mere selfish instinct. It is painful to look on such, domineered over by their propensities. Compared to noble-hearted men and women, they are as the mushroom and the toadstool to the oak, under whose shade the fungus springs up in a rainy night to blacken and perish in a day. Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the loftiest kind thereof comes only of a religious stock,—from consciousness of obligation and dependence upon God.
In youth the seductions of passion lead us easily astray; in manhood there are the more dangerous seductions of ambition, when lust of pleasure gives way to lust of profit; and in old age the man is often the victim of the propensities he delicately nursed in earlier life, and dwindles down into the dotage of a hunker or a libertine. It is easy to yield now to this, and then to that, but both mislead us to our partial and general loss, to weakness of power and poverty of achievement, to shipwreck of this great argosy of mortal life. How many do you see slain by lust of pleasure! How many more by lust of power,—pecuniary, social, or political power! Religious self-denial would have kept them strong and beautiful and safe.
Religion gives a man courage. I do not mean the courage which comes of tough muscles and rigid nerves, — of a stomach which never surrenders. That also is a good thing, the hardihood of the flesh ; let me do it no injustice. But I mean the higher, moral courage, which can look danger and death in the face unawed and undismayed; the courage that can encounter loss of ease, of wealth, of friends, of your own good name; the courage that can face a world full of howling and of scorn,—ay, of loathing and of hate; can see all these with a smile, and, suffering it all, can still toil on, conscious of the result, yet fearless still. I do not mean the courage that hates, that smites, that kills, but the calm courage that loves and heals and blesses such as smite and hate ' and kill; the courage that dares resist evil, popular, powerful, anointed evil, yet does it with good, and knows it shall thereby overcome. That is not a common quality. I think it never comes without religion. It belongs to all great forms of religious excellence; it is not specifically Hebrew or Christian, but generically human and of religion under all forms.
Without this courage a man looks little and mean, especially a man otherwise great,—with great intellect and great culture, and occupying a great place. You see all about you how little such men are worth; too cowardly to brave a temporary defeat, they are swiftly brought to permanent ruin. Look over the long array of brilliant names in American, English, universal history, and see what lofty men, born to a large estate of intellect, and disciplined to manifold and brilliant mental power, for lack of courage to be true amid the false, and upright amid the grovelling, have laid their proud foreheads in the dust, and mean men have triumphed over the mighty ! Did you never read here in your Old Testament, here in your New Testament, here in your Apocrypha, how religion gave men, yea, and women too, this courage, and said to them, "Be strong and very courageous; turn not to the right hand, neither to the left,"—and made heroes out of Jeremiah and Elias?
Did you never read of the strength of courage, the courage of conscience, which religion gave to the "unlearned and ignorant men," who, from peasants that trembled before a Hebrew Kabbi's copious beard, became apostles to stand before the wrath of kings and not quake, to found churches by their prayers, and to feed them with their blood ? You know, we all know, what courage conscious religion gave to our fathers. Their corporal courage grew more firmly knit, as men learned by bitter blows who crossed swords with them on the battle-field; but their moral courage grew giant high. You know how they dwelt here, amid what suffering, yet with what patience; how they toiled to build up these houses, these churches, and the institutions of the State.
With this honesty, this self-denial, there comes a total energy of character which nothing else can give. You see what strength religion gives; what energy and continual persistence in their cause it gave to men like the Apostles, like the martyrs and great saint sof the Christian Church, of the Hebrew, the Mohammedan, and the Pagan Church. You may see this energy in a rough form in the soldiers of the English revolution, in the "Ironsides" of Crom- well; in the stern and unflinching endurance of the Puritans of either England, the Old or the New, who both did and suffered what is possible to mortal flesh only when it is sustained by a religious faith. But you see it in forms far more beautiful, as represented by the missionaries who carry the glad tidings of their faith to other lands, and endure the sorrows of persecution with the long-suffering and loving-kindness we worship in the good Cod. This is not peculiar to Christianity. The Buddhists had their missionaries hundreds of years before Jesus of Nazareth first saw the light. They seem to have been the first that ever went abroad, not to conquer, but convert ; not to get power, or wealth, or even wisdom, but to carry the power of the mind, the riches of conscience and the affections, and the wisdom of the soul; and in them you find the total energy which religious conviction gives to manly character in its hour of peril. But why go abroad to look for this? Our own streets exhibit the same thing in the form of the philanthropist. The Sister of Charity treads the miserable alleys of Naples and of Rome; the Catholic Visitor of the Poor winds along in the sloughs and slums of St Giles's parish in Protestant London, despised and hated by the well-endowed clergy, whose church aisles are never trodden save by wealthy feet; and in the mire of the street, in the reeking squalidness of the cellars, where misery burrows with crime, he labours for their bodies and their souls. In our own Boston do I not know feeble- bodied and delicate women, who with their feet write out the gospel of loving-kindness and tender mercy on the mud or the snow of the kennels of this city,—women of wise intellect and nice culture, who, like that great philanthropist, come to seek and to save that which was lost!
Look at the reformers of America at this day;—some of them men of large abilities, of commensurate culture, of easy estate, once respected, flattered, and courted too by their associates, but now despised for their justice and their charity, hated for the eminent affection which makes them look after the welfare of the criminal, the drunkard, the pauper, the outcast, and the slave, and feared for the power with which they assert the rights of man against the wrongs which avarice inflicts. See the total energy which marks these men, whose life is a long profession of religion,—their creed writ all over the land, and their history a slow martyrdom,—and you may see the vigour which comes of religious conviction. These are the nobler forms of energy. The soldier destroys, at best defends, while the philanthropist creates.
Last of all these forms of strength, religion gives the power of self-reliance; reliance on your mind for truth, on your conscience for justice, on your heart for love, on your soul for faith, and through all these reliance on the Infinite God. Then you will keep the integrity of your own nature spite of the mightiest men, spite of a multitude of millions, spite of States and churches and traditions, and a worldly world filled with covetousness and priestcraft. You will say to them all, "Stand by, and let alone; I must be true to myself, and thereby true to my God."
I think nothing but religion can give any man this strength to do and to suffer; that without this, the men of greatest gift and greatest attainment too, do not live out half the glory of their days, nor reach half their stature. Look over the list of the world's great failures, and see why Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon came each to such an untimely and vulgar end! Had they added reli gion to their attainments and their conquests, what empires of welfare would they not hold in fee, and give us to enjoy! Without it, the greatest man is a failure. With it, the smallest is a triumph. He adds to his character; he enjoys his strength; he delights while he rejoices, growing to more vigorous manliness; and when the fragrant petals of the spirit burst asunder and crowd off this outer husk of the body, and bloom into glorious humanity, what a strong and flame-like flower shall blossom there for everlasting life.
There are various forms of strength. Wealth is power; office is power; beauty is power; knowledge is power. Religion too is power. This is the power of powers, for it concentrates, moves, and directs aright the force of money, of office, of beauty, and of knowledge. Do men understand this? They often act and live as if they knew it not. Look at our "strong men," not only mighty by position in office or on money, but mighty by nature. In what are they strong? In a knowledge of the passions and prejudices of men; of the interests and expedients and honours of the day; in a knowledge of men's selfishness and their willingness to sin ; in experienced skill to use the means for certain selfish, low, and ignoble ends, organizing a contrivance against mankind; in power of speech and act to make the better seem the worse, and wrong assume the guise of right. It is in this that our "great men" are chiefly great. They are weak in a knowledge of what in man is noble, even when he errs; they know nothing of justice; they care little for love. They know the animal that is in us, not the human, far less the godlike. Mighty in cunning, they are weak in knowledge of the true, the just, the good, the holy, and the ever beautiful. They look up at the mountains and mock at God. So they are impotent to know the expedient of eternity, what profits now and profits for ever and ever. Blame them not too much; the educational forces of society breed up such men, as college lads all learn to cipher and to scan.
In the long run of the ages see how the religious man distances the unreligious. The memory of him who seeks to inaugurate cunning into the state for his own behoof, is ere long gibbeted before the world, and his lie is cast
out with scorn and hate; and the treason of the traitor to mankind is remembered only with a curse; while the wisdom of the wise, the justice of the upright, the love of the affectionate, and the piety of holy-hearted men, incarnated in the institutions of the State, live, and will for ever live, long after "Rome and America have gone to the ground. Tyrants have a short breath, their fame a sudden ending; and the power of the ungodly, like the lamp of the wicked, shall soon be put out; their counsel is carried, but it is carried headlong. He that seeks only the praise of men gets that but for a day; while the religious man, who seeks only to be faithful to himself and his God, and represent on earth the absolute true and just, all heedless of the applause of men, lives, and will for ever live, in the admiration of mankind, and in "the pure eyes and perfect witness of all-judging Jove." Champollion painfully deciphers the names of the Egyptian kings who built the pyramids and swayed millions of men. For three thousand years that lettered Muse, the sculptured stone, in silence kept the secret of their name. But the fugitive slave, a bondsman of that king, with religion in his heart, has writ his power on all the continents, and dotted the name of Moses on every green or snow-clad isle of either sea. That name shall still endure when the last stones of the last pyramid become gas and exhale to heaven. The peasant of Galilee has embosomed his own name in the religion of mankind, and the world will keep it for ever. Foolish men! building your temple of fame on the expedients of to-day, and of selfishness and cunning and eloquent falsehood! That shall stand,—will it? On the frozen bosom of a northern lake go, build your palace of ice. Colonnade and capital, how they glitter in the light when the northern dawn is red about the pole, or the colder moon looks on your house of frost! "This will endure. Why carve out the granite, and painfully build upon the rock?" Ah me! at the touch of March, the ice-temple and its ice-foundation take the leap of Niagara; and in April the skiff of the fisherman finds no vestige of all that pomp and pride. But the temple of granite,—where is that? Ask Moses, ask Jesus, ask mankind, what power it is that lasts from age to age, when selfish ambition melts in the stream of time. Well, we are all here for a great work, not merely to grow up and eat and drink, to have estates called after us and children born in our name. We are all here to be men; to do the most of human duty possible for us, and so to have the most of human right and enjoy the most of human welfare. Religion is a good thing in itself; it is the betrothed bride of the spirit of man, to be loved for her own sweet sake ; not a servant, to be taken for use alone. But it is the means to this end,—to strength of character, enlarging the little and greatening the great.
You and I shall have enough to suffer, most of us; enough to do. We shall have our travail, our temptation, perhaps our agony, but our triumph too.
O smooth-faced youths and maids! your cheek and brow yet innocent of stain, do you believe you shall pass through life and suffer naught? Trial will come on you;—you shall have your agony and bloody sweat. Seek in the beginning for the strength which religion brings you, and you shall indeed be strong, powerful to suffer, and mighty also to do. I will not say your efforts will keep you from every error, every sin. When a boy, I might have thought so; as a man, I know better, by observation and my own experience too. Sin is an experiment that fails ; a stumble, not upright walking. Expect such mishaps, errors of the mind, errors of the conscience, errors of the affections, errors of the soul. What pine tree never lost a limb? The best mathematician now and then misses a figure, must rub out his work and start anew. The greatest poet must often mend a line, and will write faulty verses in the heat of song. Milton has many a scraggy line, and even good Homer sometimes nods. What defects are there in the proud works of Raphael and Angelo! Is there no failure in Mozart? In such a mighty work as this of life, such a complication of forces within, of circumstances without, such imperfect guidance as the world can furnish in this work, I should expect to miss the way sometimes, and with painful feet, and heart stung by self-reproach, or grief, or shame, retread the way shamefaced and sad. The field that is ploughed all over by Remorse, driving his team that breathe fire, yields not a faint harvest to the great Reaper's hand. Trust in God will do two things. It will keep you from many an error; nobody knows how great a gain this is, till lie has tried. Then it will help you after you have wandered from the way. Fallen, you will not despair, but rise the wiser and the stronger for the fall. Do you look for strength to your brave young hearts, and streams of life to issue thence? Here you shall find it, and with freshened life pass on your way. Religion is the Moses to smite the rock in the wilderness.
bearded men, and women that have kept and hoarded much in your experienced hearts! you also seek for power to bear your crosses and to do your work. Religion will be the strength of your life,—you may do all things through this. When the last act of the mortal drama draws towards a close, you will look joyfully to the end, not with fear, but with a triumphant joy.
There are two great things which make up the obvious part of life,—to do, to suffer. Behind both as cause, and before each as result, is one thing greater,—to be. Religion is true Being, normal life in yourself, in Nature, in men, and in God.