The Collected Works of Theodore Parker/Volume 02/Ten Sermons of Religion/Sermon 08
VIII.
OF CONSCIOUS RELIGION AS A SOURCE OF JOY.
I WILL GO UNTO GOD, MY EXCEEDING JOY. Ps. xliii. 4.
Joy is not often mentioned in religious books. It is sometimes thought to have no place in religion; at least none here and now. The joy of the religious man is thought to be chiefly in the future. Religion is painted with a sad countenance. Artists sometimes mix joyous colours in their representations thereof, but theologians almost never. With them, religion is gloomy, severe, and grim. This is eminently the case in New England. The Puritans as a class were devoutly religious in their way, but they were sad men; they had many fast-days and few times of rejoicing. Even Sunday, which to the rest of Christendom was an occasion of festivity, was to them a day of grimness and of fearing the Lord ; a weariness to the old men, and an intolerable burden to the children. Look at the pictures of those men, so bony and gaunt and grim; of the women, so austere and unloving in their look. The unjoyous characteristics of Puritanism still cleave to us, and colour our mode of religion at this day, and, spite of ourselves, taint our general philosophy and view of life.
The Catholic Church is less serious, less in earnest with religion, than the Church of the Puritans, — less moral and reliant on God than the Protestant Church in general,—so it seems to me; but even there little room is left for joy. Their richest music is a, Miserere, not an Exultemus or a Te Deum. The joyous chanting of Christmas, of Easter, and of Pentecost is inferior to the sad wail of Palm Sunday and Good Friday. The Stabat Mater and the Dies Iræ are the most characteristic hymns of the Catholic Church. The paintings and statues are chiefly monuments of woe,—saints in their torments, Jesus in his passion; his stations are stations of affliction, and the via sacra of his life is painted as a long via dolorosa: God is represented as a Thunderer, distinguished chiefly by self-esteem and destructiveness.
Take the Christian Church as a whole, from its first day to this, study all expressions of the religious feeling and thought of Christendom, in literature, painting, and music, it is strangely deficient in joy. Religion is unnatural self-denial; morality is symbolized by a celibate monk, eating parched pease and a water-cress ; piety, by a joyless nun. The saints of the Christian Church, Catholic and Protestant, are either stern, heroic men, who went first and foremost on a field of battle, to peril their lives, men whose heroism was of iron,—and they have never been extolled above their merit,—or else weeping men, sentimental, sickly, sad, sorrowful, and afraid. Most preachers would rather send away their audience weeping, than with a resolute, a cheerful, and a joyous heart. Yet nothing is easier to start from a multitude than a tear. Cotton Mather, in his Life of his kinsman, Nathaniel, a pious clergyman who died young, mentions as his crowning merit the fulness of his fastings, the abundant mortifications he needlessly imposed upon himself, his tear-stained face. Smiles are strange phenomena in a church; sadness and tears are therein at home.
Even the less earnest sects of America, calling them- selves "Liberal Christians," whose ship of souls does not lie very deep in the sea of life, seem to think joy is not very nearly related to religion. The piety of a round-faced and joyous man is always a little suspected. The Cross is still the popular symbol of Christianity, and the type of the saint is a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, having no form or comeliness. Sermons of joy you seldom hear; the voice of the pulpit is mainly a whine; its flowers are nightshade, and its psalms a Miserere.
Everybody knows what joy is,—a certain sense of gladness and of pleasure, a contentment and a satisfaction, sometimes noisily breaking into transient surges of rapture, sometimes rolling with the tranquil swell of calm delight. It is a state which comes upon any particular faculty, when that finds its natural gratification. So there may be a partial joy of any one faculty, or a total joy of the whole man, all the faculties normally developed and normally gratified. If religion be the service of God by the normal development, use, and enjoyment of every limb of the body, every faculty of the spirit, and every power acquired over matter or man, then it is plain that religion must always aim at, and under favourable circumstances will achieve, a complete and total joy for all men.
There is no man wholly destitute of some partial and transient joy; for if all the conditions needful to the welfare of each faculty of mind, or to each appetite, were wanting, then, part by part, the man would perish and disappear. On the other hand, no man, I think, has ever had a complete, total, and permanent enjoyment of every part of his nature. That is the ideal to which we tend, but one not capable of complete attainment in a progressive being. For if the ideal of yesterday has become the actual of to-day, to-morrow we are seized with manly disquiet and unrest, and soar up towards another ideal.
We have all more or less of joy, the quantity and quality differing amazingly amongst men. There are as many forms of joy as there are propensities which hunger and thirst after their satisfaction. What a difference in the source whence men derive their customary delight.
Here is a man whose whole joy seems to come from his body; not from its nobler senses, offering him the pleasures of the ear and the eye, but from the lower parts of the flesh, imbruted now to passions which seem base when made to minister the chief delight to man. We could not think highly of one who knew no joy above the pleasure of eating and drinking, or of any other merely animal satisfaction. Such joys cannot raise man far. If one had his chief delight in fine robes, the taste would rather degrade him. Yet these two appetites, for finery in food and finery in dress, have doubtless done their part to civilize mankind. It is surely better for the race to rejoice in all the sumptuous delicacies of art, than to feed precariously on wild acorns which the wind shakes down. The foolish fondness for gay apparel has served a purpose. Nay, so marvellous is the economy of God in his engineering of the world, that no drop of waste water runs over the dam of the universe; and as the atom which now sparkles in the rainbow, the next minute shall feed a fainting rose, so even these sensual desires have helped to uplift mankind from mere subordination to the material world.
There is another man whose chief joy is not merely bodily, but yet resides in his selfish appetites, in his lust of money, or lust of power. I pass by the joy of the miser, of the ambitious politician, of the pirate and the kidnapper. They are so well known amongst us that you can easily estimate their worth.
Now and then we find men whose happiness comes almost wholly from pure and lofty springs, from the high senses of the body or the high faculties of the spirit,—joys of the mind, of the conscience, of the affections, of the soul. Difference of quality is more important than difference in mere bulk; an hour of love is worth an age of lust. We all look with some reverence on such as seek the higher quality of joy.
You are pleased to see birds feeding their wide-mouthed little ones; sheep and oxen intent upon their grassy bread; reapers under a hedge enjoying their mid-day meal, reposing on sheaves of corn new cut. All this is nature; the element of necessity consecrates the meal. Artistic pictures of such scenes are always attractive. But pictures or descriptions of feasts—where the design is not to satisfy a natural want, but where eating and drinking are made a luxurious art, the end of life, and man seems only an appendage to the table—are never wholly pleasing.
You feel a little ashamed of the quality of such delight. Even the marvellous pencil of Paul of Verona here fails to please. But a picture of men finding a joy in the higher senses, still more in thought, iu the common, every-day duties of life, in works of benevolence or justice, in the delight of love, in contemplation, or in prayer,—this can touch us all. We like the quality of such delight, and love to look on men in such a mood of joy. I need only refer to the most admired paintings of the great masters, Dutch or Italian, and to the poetry which chronicles the mortal modes of high delight. The spiritual element must subordinate the material, in order to make the sensual joy welcome to a nice eye. In the Saint Cecilia of Raphael, in Titian's Marriage at Cana, in Leonardo's Last Supper, it is the preponderance of spiritual over sensuous emotion that charms the eye. So is it in all poetry, from the feeding of the five thousand to the sweet story of Lorenzo and Jessica, and the moonlight scene of their love whereby "heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold."
The joy of a New England miser, gloating over extortions which even the law would cough at, the delight of a tyrant clutching at power, of a Boston kidnapper griping some trembling slave, or counting out the price of blood which a wicked government bribes him withal,—that would hardly be acceptable even here and to-day,[1] though painted with the most angelic power and skill. It would be a painted satire, not a pictured praise; the portrait of a devil's joy can be no man's delight.
Everybody knows the joy of the senses. The higher faculties have a corresponding joy. As there is a scale of faculties ascending from the sense of touch and taste, the first developed and most widely spread in the world of living things, up to affection, rejoicing to delight, and to the religious emotions which consciously connect us with the Infinite God; so there is a corresponding scale of joys, delight rising above delight, from the baby fed by his mother's breast to the most experienced man, enlarged by science and by art, filled with a tranquil trust in the infinite protection of the all-bounteous God. The higher the faculty, the more transcendent is its joy.
The partial and transient joy of any faculty comes from the fractional and brief fulfilment of the conditions of its nature; the complete and permanent joy of the whole man comes from a total and continuous supply of the conditions of the entire nature of man.
Now, for this complete and lasting joy, these conditions must be thus fulfilled for me as an individual, for my family, for my neighbourhood, for the nation, and for the world, else my joy is not complete; for though I can in thought for a moment abstract myself from the family, society, nation, and from all mankind, it is but for a moment. Practically I am bound up with all the world; an integer indeed, but a fraction of mankind. I cannot enjoy my daily bread because of the hunger of the men I fain would feed. I am not wholly and long delighted with a book relating some new wonder of science, or offering me some jewelled diadem of literary art, because, I think straightway of the thousand brother men in this town to whom even the old wonders of science and the ancient diadems of literary art are all unknown. The morsel that I eat alone is not sweet, because the fatherless has not eaten it with me. Yet we all desire this complete joy; we are not content without it; I feel it belongs to me, to all men, as individuals and as fractions of society. When mankind comes of age, he must enter on this estate. The very desire thereof shows it is a part of the Divine plan of the world, for each natural desire has the means to satisfy it put somewhere in the universe, and there is a mutual attraction between the two, which at last must meet. Natural desire is the prophecy of satisfaction.
Look over the bountiful distribution of joy in the world. It abounds in the lower walks of creation. The young fish, you shall even now find on the shallow beaches of some sheltered Atlantic bay, how happy they are! Voiceless, dwelling in the cold unsocial element of water, moving with the flapping of the sea, and never still amid the ocean waves' immeasurable laugh,—how delighted are these little children of God! Their life seems one continuous holiday, the shoal waters a play-ground. Their food is plenteous as the water itself. Society is abundant, and of the most unimpeachable respectability. They have their little child's games which last all day. No one is hungry, ill-mannered, ill-dressed, dyspeptic, love-lorn, or melancholy. They fear no hell. These cold, white-fleshed, and bloodless little atomies seem ever full of joy as they can hold; wise without study, learned enough with no book or school, and well cared for amid their own neglect. They recollect no past, they provide for no future, the great God of the ocean their only memory or forethought. These little, short-lived minnows are to me a sermon eloquent; they are a psalm to God, above the loftiest hymnings of Theban Pindar, or of the Hebrew king.
On the land, see the joy of the insects just now coming into life. The new-born butterfly, who begins his summer life to-day, how joyous he is in his claret-coloured robe, so daintily set off with a silver edge! No Pharisee, enlarging the borders of his garments, getting greetings in the markets and the uppermost seat at feasts, and called of men "Kabbi," is ever so brimful of glee as our little silver-bordered fly. He has a low seat in the universe, for he is only a butterfly ; but to him it is good as the upper-most; and in the sunny, sheltered spots in the woods, with brown leaves about him, and the promise of violets and five-fingers by and by, the great sun gently greets him, and the dear God continually says to this son of a worm, "Come up higher!"
The adventurous birds that have just come to visit us, how delighted they are, and of a bright morning how they tell their joy! each robin and blackbird waking, not with a dry mouth and a parched tongue, but with a bosom full of morning psalms to gladden the day with "their sweet jargoning." What a cheap luxury they pick up in the fields; and in a clear sunrise and a warm sky find a delight which makes the pomp of Nebuchadnezzar seem ridiculous!
Even the reptiles, the cold snake, the bunchy and calumniated toad, the frog, now newly awakened from his hybernating sleep, have a joy in their existence which is complete and seems perfect. How that long symbol of "the old enemy" basks delighted in the sun! In the idle days which in childhood I once had, I have seen, as I thought, the gospel of God's love written in the life of this reptile, for whom Christians have such a mythological hatred, but whom the good God blesses with a new, shining skin every year,—written more clearly than even Nazarene Jesus could tell the tale. No wonder! it was the dear God who wrote His gospel in that scroll. How joyously the frogs welcome in the spring, which knocks at the icy door of their dwelling, and rouses them to new life! What delight have they in their thin, piping notes at this time, and in the hoarse thunders wherewith they will shake the bog in weeks to come; in their wooing and their marriage song!
The young of all animals are full of delight. God baptizes his new-born children of the air, the land, the sea, with joy; admits them to full communion in his great church, where He that taketh thought for oxen suffers no sparrow to fall to the ground without his fatherly love. A new lamb, or calf, or colt, just opening its eyes on the old world, is happy as fabled Adam in his Eden. With what sportings, and friskings, and frolickings do all young animals celebrate their Advent and Epiphany in the world of time! As they grow older, they have a wider and a wiser joy,—the delight of the passions and the affections, to apply the language of men to the consciousness of the cattle. It takes the form, not of rude leapings, but of quiet cheerfulness. The matronly cow, ruminating beside her playful and hornless little one, is a type of quiet joy and entire satisfaction,—all her nature clothed in well-befitting happiness.
Even animals that we think austere and sad, — the lonely hawk, the solitary jay, who loves New England winters, and the innumerable shellfish, — have their personal and domestic joy, well known to their intimate acquaintances. The toad whom we vilify as ugly, and even call venomous, malicious, and spiteful, is a kind neighbour, and seems as contented as the day is long. So is it with the spider, who is not the malignant kidnapper that he is thought, but has a little, harmless world of joy. A stream of welfare flows from end to end of their little life,—not very broad, not very deep, but wide and deep enough to bathe their every limb, and bring contentment and satisfaction to each want. Did not the same God who pours out the light from yonder golden sun, and holds all the stars in his leash of love, make and watch over the smallest of these creatures? Nay, He who leaves not forsaken Jesus alone never deserts the spider and the toad.
Wait a few weeks and go into the fields, of a warm day, at morning, noon, or night, and all creation is a-hum with happiness, the young and old, the reptile, insect, beast, and fowls of heaven, rejoice in their brave delight. All about us is full of joy, fuller than we notice. Take a handful of water from the rotting timbers of a wharf; little polyps are therein, medusae and the like, with few senses, few faculties; but they all swim in a tide of joy, and it seems as if the world was made for them alone; for them the tide ebbs and flows, for them the winter goes, the summer comes, and the universe subsists for them alone.
Some men tell us that, at the other extreme of the scale, those vast bodies, the suns and satellites, have also a consciousness and a delight ; that " in reason's ear they all rejoice." But that is poetry. Not in reason's, but fancy's ear do they rejoice. The rest is fact, plain prose.
All animate creatures in their natural condition have, it is true, their woes ; but they are brief in time, little in quantity, and soon forgot. When you look microscopically and telescopically at the natural suffering in the world of animals, you find it is just enough to tie the girdle, and hold the little creature together, and keep him from violating his own individual being; or else to unite the tribe and keep them from violating their social being. So it seems only the girdle of the individual of the flock, and no more an evil, when thus looked at, than the bruises we get in our essays to walk. Suffering marks the outer limit of the narrow margin of oscillation left for the caprice of the individual animal or man,—the pain a warning to mark the bound.
A similar joy appears in young children well born and well nurtured. But the human power of error, though still not greater in proportion to our greater nature, is so much more, and man so little subordinate to his instincts, that we have wandered far from the true road of material happiness. So the new-born child comes trailing the errors of his ancestry behind him at his birth. Still, the healthy child, wisely cared for, though tethered with such a brittle chain of being, is no exception to the general rule of joy. He
"Is a dew-drop which the morn brings forth,
Not formed to undergo unkindly shocks,
Or to be trailed along the soiling earth;—
A gem that glitters while it lives,
And no forewarning gives,
But at the touch of wrong, without a strife,
Slips in a moment out of life."
In the world of adult men there is much less of this joy; it is not a great river that with mighty stream runs round and round the world of human consciousness, all ignorant of ebb. Our faces are care- stricken, not many joyous; most of them look as if they had met and felt the peltings of the storm, and only hoped for the rainbow. The songs of the people are mostly sad; only the savage in tropic climes—subordinate to nature, there a gentle mistress—is blithe and gay as the monkeys and the parrots in his native grove of Africa ; and there his joy is only jollity, the joy of saucy flesh.
There are two chief causes for this lack of joy with men. This is one:—
I. We have not yet fulfilled the necessary material conditions thereof. The individual has not kept the natural law, and hence has some schism in the flesh from his intemperance or want; some schism in the spirit from lack of harmony within; or there is some schism between him and the world of matter, he is not in unison with things around; he has a miserable body, that goes stooping and feeble, must be waited for and waited on, and, like the rulers of the Gentiles, exercises authority over him; or he lacks development of spiritual powers ; or else is poor, and needs material supplies.
Or if the special individual is right in all these things, and so might have his personal joy, the mass of men in your neighbourhood, your nation, or the world, are deficient in all these, in body, mind, and estate, and with your individual joy there comes a social grief, and so the worm in the bud robs your blossom of half its fragrant bloom, and hinders all its fruit. Man is social not less than personal; sympathy is national, even human, reaching out to the ends of the earth; and if the hungry cry of those who have reaped down the world's harvest smite your ear, why, your bread turns sour, and is bread of affliction. The rich scholar, with abundant time, in his well-stored library, has the less joy in his own books while he remembers there are nobler souls that starve for the crumbs which fall from his table, or drudge at some ungrateful toil not meant for them. The healthy doctor, well fed and nicely clad, cannot so steel his heart against the ignorance, and want, and pain, he daily sees, that his health, and table, and science, and rosy girls, shall give him the same delight which would come thereof in a world free from such society of suffering.
"The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath, kept watch o'er man's mortality."
Now the pain which comes from this source, this lack of mind, body, and estate, on the part of the special individual, or of the race, is all legitimate and merciful; I would not have it less. There is never too much suffering of this sort in the world, only enough to teach mankind to live in harmony with Nature, in concord with each other, in unity with God. Here, as in the animals, this pain is but the girdle round the loins of you or me to keep the individual whole; or about the waist of mankind, to keep us all united in one brotherhood. Here, as there, suffering marks the limit of our margin of oscillation, warns against trespass, and says, "Pause and forbear."
Yet we are all seeking for this joy. Each man needs it; knows he needs it, yet needs it deeper than he knows. So is it with mankind: the common heart by which we live cries to God for satisfaction of our every need, and for our natural joy. The need thereof stirs the self-love of men to toil, the sight of pain quickens the nobler man to rouse his sluggish brother to end it all. The sad experience of the world shows this,—that man must find his joy, not in subordinating himself to matter, or to the instincts of the flesh, as the beasts find theirs, or of the weak to the strong, but in subordinating matter to mind, instinct to conscious reason, and then coordinating all men into one family of religious love.
II. Here is the other cause. Much of this lack of joy comes from false notions of religion,—false ideas of God, of man, and of the relation between the two. We are bid to think it wicked to be joyous. In the common opinion of churches a religious man must be a sad man, his tears become his meat. Men who in our day are eminent "leaders of the churches" are not joyous men; their faces are grim and austere, not marked with manly delight. Some men are sad at sight of the want, the pain, and the misdirection of men. It was unavoidable that Jesus of Nazareth should ofttimes be "exceeding sorrowful." He must indeed weep over Jerusalem. The Apostles, hunted from city to city, might be excused for sadness. For centuries the Christian Church had reason to be a sad Church. Persecution made our New England fathers stern and sour men, and their form of religion caught a stain from their history. I see why this is so, and blame no man for it. It was once unavoidable. But now it is a great mistake to renounce the natural joy of life; above all, to renounce it in the name of God. No doubt it takes the whole human race to represent in history the whole of Human Nature; but if the "Church," that is theological men, make a mock at joy, then the "world" will go to excess in the opposite extreme. Men in whom the religious and moral powers are not developed in proportion with the intellectual, the æsthetic, or the physical appetites, will try to possess this joy, and without religion. But nothing is long fruitful of delight when divorced from the consciousness of God; nothing thrives that is at enmity with God. Such joy is poor, heartless, and unsatisfying. Men in churches set up a Magdalen, a nun, a monk, a hermit, or a priest, as a representative of religion. Men out of churches want joy; they will flee off where they can find it, and leave religion behind them. Yet joy without religion is but a poor, wandering Hagar, her little water spent, her bread all gone, and no angel to marshal the way to the well where she shall drink and feed her fainting child, and say, Thou, God, seest me! There is little joy in the ecclesiastical consciousness of religion. Writers and preachers of Christianity commonly dwell on the dark side of human nature. They tell us of our weakness, not of our ability to be and to do. They mourn and scold over human folly, human sin, human depravity, often leaving untold the noble deeds of man and his nobler powers. "Man is a worm," say they.
They do the same with God. They paint him as a king, not as a father; and as a king who rules by low and selfish means, for low and selfish ends, from low and selfish motives, and with a most melancholy result of his ruling. According to the common opinion of the Christian churches, God's is the most unsuccessful despotism that has ever been set agoing, leading to the eternal ruin of the immense majority of his subjects, as the result of the absolute selfishness of the theological deity. In the theology called Christian the most conspicuous characteristics of God are great force, great self-esteem, and immense destructiveness. He is painted as cruel, revengeful, and without mercy,—the grimmest of the gods. The heathen devils all glower at us through the mask of the theological God. The Mexicans worshipped an idea of God, to which they sacrificed hundreds of captives and criminals. Christian divines tell us of a God that will not kill, but torment in hell the greater portion of his children, and will feed fat his "glory" with the damnation of mankind, the everlasting sacrifice of each ruined soul! If men think that man is a worm, and God has lifted the heavenly heel to give him a squelch which shall last for ever, the relation between God and man is certainly not pleasant for us to think of.
God is thought a hard creditor, man a poor debtor; "religion" is the sum he is to pay ; so he puts that down grudgingly, and with the stingiest fist. Or else God is painted as a grim and awful judge, man a poor, trembling culprit, shivering before his own conscience, and slinking down for fear of the vengeance of the awful judge, hell gaping underneath his feet. Does any one doubt, this? Let him read the Book of Revelation, or the writings of John Calvin, of Baxter, or Edwards, or even of Jeremy Taylor. The theological God is mainly a great devil, and as the theological devil hates "believers," whom he seeks to devour, so the theological God hates "unbelievers," and seeks successfully to devour them, gnawed upon eternally in hell. In general, theological books represent God as terrible. They make religion a melancholy sort of thing, unnatural to man, which he would escape from if he dared, or if he could. It is seldom spoken of as a thing good in itself, but valuable to promote order on the earth, and help men to get "saved" and obtain a share of eternal happiness. It is not a joy, but a burthen, which some men are to be well and eternally paid for bearing in the heat of the mortal day. Yes, to the majority of men it is represented as of no use at all in their present or future condition; for if a man has not Christianity enough to purchase a share in heaven, his religion is a useless load,—only a torment on earth, and of no value at all in the next life! What is the use of religion to men in eternal torment? So, by the showing of the most respectable theologians, religion can bring no joy, save to the " elect," who are but a poor fraction of mankind, and commonly exhibit very little of it here.
The general tone of writings called religious is sad and melancholy. Religion adorns her brow with yellow leaves smitten by the frost, not with rosebuds and violets. The leading men in the more serious churches are earnest persons, self-denying, but grim, unlovely, joyless men. Look through the ecclesiastical literature of the Christian world,—it is chiefly of this sad complexion. The branches of the theological tree are rough and thorny, not well laden with leaves, and of blossoms it has few that are attractive. It was natural enough that the Christians, when persecuted and trodden down, should weep and wail in their literature. In the first three centuries they do so:—in every period of persecution. The dark shades of the New England forest lowered over New England theology, and Want and War knit their ugly brows in the meeting-houses of the day. But the same thing continued, and it lasts still. Now it is the habit of Christendom, though sometimes it seems only a trick.
In what is called Christian literature nothing surprises you more than the absence of joy. There is much of the terror of religion, little of its delights. Look over the list of sermons of South, Edwards, Chalmers, Hopkins, Emmons, even of Jeremy Taylor, and you find few sermons on the joys of religion. The same is true of Massillon, of Bourdaloue, and Bossuet. The popular ecclesiastical notion of religion is not to be represented as a wife and mother, cheerful, contented, and happy in her work, but as a reluctant nun, abstracted, idle, tearful, and with a profound melancholy; not the melancholy which comes from seeing actual evils we know not how to cure,—the sadness of one strong to wish and will, but feeble to achieve;—no, the more incurable sadness which comes from a distrust of Nature and of God, and from the habit of worrying about the soul,—the melancholy of fear; not the melancholy which looks sadly on misery and crime, which wept out its "Jerusalem! Jerusalem!" but the sadness which whines in a corner, and chews its own lips from sheer distrust.
The writers who dwell on the joys of religion too often have very inadequate ideas thereof. For they all, from Augustine to Chalmers, start with the idea that God is imperfect, and not wholly to be trusted. Accordingly they seek and obtain but a very one-sided development of their nature, thinking they must sacrifice so much of it; and hence have not that strength of religious character, nor that wholeness thereof, which is necessary to complete manly joy in religion.
Such being the case, fear of God predominates over love of Him; trust of God is only special under such and such circumstances, not universal under all circumstances; and religious joy is thin, and poor, and cold.
You find mention of religious joy in some of the great Christian writers, especially among the mystics, in Tauler and Kempis, Scougal, Fenelon, William Law, and Jacob Behme, not to mention others. Even Bunyan has his delectable mountains, and though in the other world, the light therefrom shines serene and joyous along the paths of mortal life. But in most, if not in all, of these writers, religious joy is deemed an artificial privilege, reserved by God's decree for only a few, purchased by unnatural modes of life, and miraculously bestowed. Even in great-hearted Martin Luther, one of the most joyous of men, it is not a right which belongs to human nature, and comes naturally from the normal action of the faculties of man; it is the result of "divine grace," not of human nature. Thus this religious joy of the churches is often hampered and restricted, and the man must be belittled before he is capable thereof. In the ecclesiastical saint there is always something sneaking; some manly quality is left out, or driven out, some unmanly quality forced in. I believe this has been so in all ages of Christianity, and in all Christian sects at this day. Study the character and history of the saints of the Catholic and Protestant churches. Look at their mode of life, their sources and forms of joy. You see it is so. They must turn Human Nature out of doors before the Divine Nature can come in. So the heavenly bridegroom, adorned for his wife, comes to a house swept and garnished indeed, but cheerless, empty, and cold, only theological furniture left in, the bride herself swept out. Look at the marbles of antiquity,—at the face of pagan Plato, of Aristotle, " the master of such as know,"—or at the faces of modern philosophers, and compare them with the actual or ideal countenance of Christian saints,—with Saint Francis, with Saint Thomas, with Ignatius Loyola, with the ideal Magdalens and Madonnas of art, or with the dark, sad, and woe-stained faces of the leading clergy of the predominant sects,—and you see at once the absence of natural delight.
Religion is often separated from common life. So a sharp distinction is made between the "flesh" and the "spirit." The flesh is all sinful, all that belongs to it thought poor, and mean, and low ; to taste the joys of piety, the senses must be fettered and put in jail, and then, where theology has made a solitude, it proclaims peace. On the one side is the "world," on the other " religion ; u and there is a great gulf fixed between the two, which neither Dives, nor Lazarus, nor yet Abraham, can pass over. Here all the delight is in "things temporal;" there the delight is only in "things eternal." Worldly men have their delight in the things of this world, and no more; heavenly men, only in the joys of the next life; and they who have the worst time here shall have the best hereafter. Religion is thought out of place at a ball, at a theatre, at any amusement; dancing is thought more than half a sin. Religion loves funerals, is seldom at a wedding,—only to sadden the scene,—for woman is bid to be ashamed of natural human love, and man of being loved. "We are conceived in sin," quoth theology; "the 'God-man' was born with no human father."
It seems commonly thought that the joys of religion are inconsistent with active daily life. Men who have written thereof are chiefly ascetic and romantic persons of retired lives, of shy habits; they prefer thought to work, passive contemplation to active meditation, and dreamy sentimentalism to all other and manlier joys. The natural result of this is ecstasy, not the normal activity of the whole man, but irregular, extravagant, and insane action of a few noble powers. Hence those writings are not wholesome; the air they exhale is close and unhealthy, for such pietism is the sickness of the soul, not its soundness and its health.
I believe what I say will apply to almost the whole class of writers on sentimental religion,—to the mystical writers of the Brahminic, Buddhistic, Christian, and Mahometan sects. He must be a whole man who writes a sound book on a theme so deep as the religious joys of man,—his delight in Nature, in man, and in God. But the false ideas of the popular theory corrupt the faculties of noble and great men. So, in the writings of Law and Fenelon, of Taylor and Henry More, you find this unhealthiness pervading what they do and say. There is much you sympathize in, but much also which offends a nice taste, and revolts the reason, the affections, and all the high faculties of a sound man. You may see the excess of this unhealthiness in the works of St Bridget or of St Theresa, in Molinos and Swedenborg, even in Taylor, in Fenelon, and Augustine; in the dreams and fancied revelations of monks and nuns, when nature clamoured for her rights, or in the sermons and prayers of ascetic clergymen, whom a false idea of God and religion has driven to depravity of body and sickness of the soul.
We may see the effects of this false idea on the conduct and character of active men in a Methodist camp-meeting ; or in a form yet more painful, in the pinched faces, and narrow, unnatural foreheads of men and women early caught and imprisoned in some of the popular forms of fear of God. I have sometimes shuddered to hear such men talk of their joy of religion,—a joy unnatural and shameful, which delighted in the contemplation of torment as the portion of mankind.
Read the Life of St Hugh, an Archbishop of Lyons. See in what his joys of religion consisted. If any one spoke of news in his presence, he checked them, saying, "This life is all given us for weeping and penance, not for idle discourses." It was his "constant prayer that God would extinguish in his heart all attachment to creatures, that His pure love might reign in all his affections." "His love of heavenly things made all temporal affairs seem burdensome and tedious." "Women he would never look in the face, so that he knew not the features of his own mother." He continually recited the Psalter and the Lord's Prayer; the latter on one occasion "three hundred times in a single night!"
In saying all this, I do not wish to blame men. I would rather write an apology for the religious errors of Pagans or Christians, than a satire thereon. I only mention the fact. It is not a strange one, for we find analogous errors in the history of every department of human affairs. What dreams of astrologers and alchemists came before the cool, sober thought of chemists and astronomers! The mistakes in religion are not greater in proportion to the strength of the religious faculty and the greatness of the interest at stake, than the mistakes in agriculture or politics. The theology of Boston is not much worse than its "law and order" just now; and they who, in pulpits, administer the popular theology, are not much more mistaken than they who, in courts and jails, administer the public law. But in religion these mistaken notions have been so common, that the very name of religious joy is associated with superstition, bigotry, extravagance, madness. You attend a meeting "for conference and prayer," and you come away a little disgusted, with more pity than sympathy for the earnest men who have so mistaken the nature of God, of man, and of the relation between the two; who have so erred as to the beginning of religion, its processes, and its result. You pass thence to a meeting of philosophical men met for science, or philanthropic men met for benevolence, and what a change! Both are equally earnest; but in the one all is hot, unnatural, restricted, and presided over by fear ; in the other all is cool, all is free, and there is no fear.
In consequence of this abuse, men often slight the sentiment of religion, and deny the real and sober joy which it naturally affords. This is a great loss, for, setting aside the extravagance, the claim to miraculous communion with God, putting aside all ecstasy, as only the insanity of religious action, it is true that, in its widest sense and in its highest form, religion is a source of the deepest and noblest joys of man. Let us put away the childish things and look at the real joys of manly religion itself.
A true form of religion does not interfere with any natural delight of man. True religion is normal life, not of one faculty alone, but of all in due coordination. The human consciousness of the Infinite God will show itself, not merely in belief, or prayer and thanksgiving, but by the legitimate action of every limb of the body and every faculty of the spirit. Then all the legitimate appetites have their place. Do you want the natural gratification of the body? Keligion bids you seek it in the natural and legitimate way, not in a manner unnatural and against the body's law. It counts the body sacred, as well as the soul, and knows that a holy spirit demands a holy flesh. Thus it enhances even the delights of the body, by keeping every sense in its place. The actual commandments of God written on every fibre of human flesh, are not less authoritative than the Ten which Jehovah is said to have written on stone at Sinai.
Do you seek the active business of life ? This religion will bid you pursue your calling, hand- craft or head- craft, and buy and sell and get gain, the Golden Rule your standard measure, and all your daily work a sacrament whereby you communicate with man and God. Do you want riches, honour, fame, the applause of men? This religion tells you to subordinate the low aim to the high; to keep self-love in its natural channel; to preserve the integrity of your own spirit; and then, if you will and can, to get riches, power, honour, fame, and the applause of men, by honestly earning them all, so that you shall be the manlier, and mankind the richer, for all that you do and enjoy. Then the approbation of your own soul and the sense of concord with men and of unity with God, will add a certain wholeness to your delight in the work of your hands.
Do you desire the joys of the intellect working in any or all its manifold forms of action ? The world is all before you where to choose, and Providence your guide. The law of God says, u Of every tree of the field shalt thou eat. Nothing that is natural shall harm thee. Put forth thy hand and try. Be not afraid that Truth or Search shall ever offend God, or harm the soul of man." Does a new truth threaten an old church ? It will build up ten new ones in its stead. No man ever loved truth too much, or had too much of it, or was too diligent in the search therefor. To use the reason for reasonable things is a part of religion itself. Thus consciousness of God well developed in man gives greater joy to the natural delights of the intellect itself, which it helps to tranquillize and render strong.
You need the exercise of the moral faculties. This religion will bid you trust your own conscience, never to fear to ask thereof for the everlasting right, and be faithful thereto. Justice will not hurt you, nor offend God; and if your justice pull down the old kingdom, with its statutes of selfishness and laws of sin and death, it will build up a new and better state in its stead, the Commonwealth of Righteousness, where the eternal laws of God are reenacted into the codes of men, laws of love and life. No man ever loved justice too much,—his own rights, or the rights of men,—or was too faithful to his own conscience. Loyalty to that is fealty to God; and the consciousness of Him enhances the moral delight of moral men, as the intellectual joy of scientific and thoughtful men.
Do you seek the joy of the affections which cling to finite objects of attraction, to wife and child, brother and sister, parent and friend? Religion will tell you it is impossible to love these too much; that it is impossible to be too affectionate, or to be too wise or too just. No man can be too faithful to bis own heart, nor have, in general, too much love. Love of the "creature" is part of the service we owe the Creator; one of the forms of love to God. Conscious piety will enhance the delight of mortal affections, and will greaten and beautify every form of love,—connubial, parental, and filial, friendly and philanthropic love.
Nay, all these—the love of truth and beauty, of justice and right, of men—are but parts of the great integral piety, the love of God, the Author of Truth, of Justice, and of Love. The normal delight in God's world, the animal joy in material things, the intellectual in truth and beauty, the moral in justice and right, the affectional delight in the persons of men, the satisfactions of labour of hand or head or heart,—all these are a part of our large delight in God, for religion is not one thing and life another, but the two are one. The normal and conscious worship of the Infinite God will enlarge every faculty, enhancing its quantity and quality of delight.
Let me dwell yet longer on this affectional delight. Last Sunday I spoke of the Increase of Power which comes of the religious use of the faculties. One form thereof I purposely passed by and left for this hour,—the ability to love other men. Religion, by producing harmony with yourself, concord with men, and unity with God, prevents the excess of self-love, enlarges the power of unselfish affection, increases the quantity of love, and so the man has a greater delight in the welfare of other men. I will not say that this religion increases the powers of instinctive affection, except indirectly and in general, as it enlarges the man's whole quantity of being, and refines its quality. Yet much of the power of affection is not instinctive, but the result of conscious and voluntary action. It is not mere instinct which drives me unconsciously and bound to love a friend; I do it consciously, freely, because it suits the whole of me, not merely one impulsive part. The consciousness of my connection with God, of my obligation to God, of his Providence watching over all,—this, and the effort to keep every law He has written in my constitution, enlarges my capability to love men.
I pass by connubial love, wherein affection and passion blend each its several bloom, and there are still two other forms of conscious love. One is friendship, the other philanthropy.
In friendship I love a man for his good and mine too. There is action on both sides; I take delight in him, but only on condition that he takes delight in me. I ask much of my friend, not only gratitude and justice, but forbear- ance and patience towards me;—yes, sacrifice of himself. I do this not selfishly, not wilfully. I love my friend for his character and his conduct, for what he is to me and I am to him. My friendship is limited, and does not reach out so far as justice, which has the range of the world. Who can claim friendship of any one ? The New England kidnapper has a right to the philanthropy even of his victim; but he seems to have a right to the friendship only of pirates and men that would assassinate the liberty of mankind. But no man is wholly wicked and self-aban- doned, and so has forfeited all claim to the friendship of the noblest ; and such is the blessed wealth of the human heart, that it continually runs over with mercy for the merciless, and love for the unlovely.
In philanthropy I love a man for his sake, not at all for mine. I take the delight of justice and of charity in him, but do not ask him to take any delight in me. I ask nothing of him, not even gratitude, nor justice; perhaps expect neither. I love him because he is a man, and without regard to his character and conduct; and would feed and clothe and warm and bless the murderer, or even the Boston kidnapper. Philanthropy makes its sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends its rain on the just and on the unjust. Its circle is measured by its power, not its will. It is not personal, limited in its application to Robert or Marion, but universal as justice, reaching to all, it joins the wayfaring Samaritan to his national enemy who had fallen among thieves.
Now I wish to say that religion enlarges a man's power of friendship and of philanthropy, and consequently enhances the delight of both. Look a moment at the joy of each.
The joy of friendship is a deep and beautiful delight. Here you receive as well as give, get not only from yourself, as your unconsciousness becomes conscious, and the seed you planted for the bread of another becomes- a perfect flower for your own eye and bosom; but you receive from another self. This is one of the dearest joys; it is the mutuality of affection, your delight in another's person, and his delight in you; it is a reciprocity of persons. There are those we love not with instinctive passion, as man and wife; nor with instinctive affection, as parent and child; nor with the love of philanthropy; but with emotions of another class, with friendly love. It is delightful to do kind deeds for such, and receive kind deeds from them. Not that you need or they need the gift; but both the giving. You need to give to them, they to give to you. Their very presence is a still and silent joy. After long intimacy of this sort, you scarce need speech to communicate sympathy; the fellow-feeling has a language and tells its own tale. In loving a friend I have all the joy of self-love without its limitation. I find my life extending into another being, his into me. So I multiply my existence. If I love one man in this way, and he love me, I have doubled my delight; if I love two, it is yet further enlarged. So I live in each friend I add to myself; his joys are mine and mine are his; there is a solidarity of affection between us, and his material delights give permanent happiness to me. As a man enlarges his industrial power by material instruments, the wind and the river joined to him by skilful thought, so he enlarges his means of happiness by each friend his affection joins to him. A man with a forty-friend power would be a millionnaire at the treasury of love.
The joy of philanthropy is a high delight, worth all the exaltations of St Hugh, and the ecstasies of St Bridget and St Theresa. Compare it with the rapture which Jona- than Edwards anticipates for the " elect n in heaven, looking down upon the damned, and seeing their misery, and making "heaven ring with the praises of God's justice towards the wicked, and his grace towards the saints!" Such is the odds betwixt the religion of nature and the theology of the Christian Church.
There is a great satisfaction in doing good to others,—to men that you never saw, nor will see,— who will never hear of you, but not the less be blessed by your bounty,—even in doing good to the unthankful and the unmerciful. You have helped a poor woman in Boston out of the want and wretchedness her drunken husband has brought on her, and filled her house withal; you have delivered a slave out of the claw of the kidnapper, the "barbarous and heathen kidnapper in Benguela," or the "Christian and honourable kidnapper in Boston," commissioned, and paid for the function; you have taken some child out of the peril of the streets, found him a home, and helped him grow up to be a self-respectful and useful man;—suppose the poor woman shall never know the name of her benefactor, nor the slave of his deliverer, nor the child of his saviour,—that you get no gratitude from the persons, no justice from the public; you are thought a fool for your charity, and a culprit for your justice, the government seeking to hang you; still the philanthropy has filled your bosom with violets and lilies, and you run over with the delight thereof. You would be ashamed to receive gratitude, or ask justice. "Father, forgive them!" was the appropriate benediction of one of the great masters of philanthropy. Do you look for reciprocal affection?
"I have heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning."
The good Samaritan, leaving his "neighbour" who had fallen among thieves well cared for at the inn, jogs home on his mule with a heart that kings might envy; but when he comes again, if the man, healed by his nursing, offers thanks,—"Nay," says the Samaritan, "nay, now, be still and say nothing about it. It is all nothing ; only human nature. I could not help it. You would do the same!" Such a man feeds his affection by such deeds of love, till he has the heart of God in his bosom, and a whole paradise of delight. Meantime the Priest and the Levite have hastened to the temple, and offered their sacrifice, tithed their mint, their anise, and their cumin, made broad their phylacteries and enlarged the borders of their garments, and dropped with brassy ring their shekels in the temple chest, shoving aside the poor widow with her two mites, which make a farthing; now they stand before the seven golden candlesticks and pray, "Father, I thank Thee that I am not like other men, who trust in good works and the light of nature; I give tithes of all that I possess. I thank Thee that I am one of Thine Elect, and shall have glory when this Samaritan goeth down to the pit."
I once knew a little boy in the country, whose father gave him a half-dime to help the sufferers at a fire in New Brunswick; the young lad dropped his mite into the box at church,—it was his earliest alms,—with a deep delight which sweetened his consciousness for weeks to come with the thought of the good that his five cents would do. What were all sweetmeats and dainties to this? Our little boy's mother had told him that the good God loved actions such as these, Himself dropping the sun and moon into the alms-box of the world; and the grave, sober father, who had earned the silver with serious sweat, his broadaxe ringing in the tough oak of New England, brushed a tear out of his eye at seeing the son's delight in helping men whom none of the family had ever seen.
Philanthropy begins small, and helps itself along, some- times by love of sheep and oxen, and dogs and swine. Did not the great Jesus ride into the holy city " on the foal of an ass"? By and by our philanthropist goes out to widest circles, makes great sacrifice of comfort, of money, of reputation; his philanthropic power continually grows, and an inundation of delight fills up his mighty soul. The shillings which a poor girl pays for missionaries to Burmah and Guinea are shillings which bring more delight than all the gewgaws they could buy.
I have seen a man buy baskets of cherries in a foreign town, and throw them by handfuls to the little boys and girls in the streets wholly unknown to him. He doubtless got more joy from that, than if he had had the appetite of a miser, and stomach enough to eat up all the cherries in the valley of the Rhine. Men of wealth, who use money for philanthropy, to feed the poor, to build hospitals and asylums, schools and colleges, get more joy from this use thereof, than if they had the pecuniary swallow and stomach of a gigantic miser, and themselves eat up the schools and colleges, the hospitals and asylums, which others built. They who build widows' houses, not they who devour them, have the most joy thereof.
The man who devotes the larger wealth of the mind, reason, understanding, imagination, with all the treasures of culture and the graceful dignity of eloquence, to serve some noble cause, despised as yet, and sacrifices not money alone, but reputation, and takes shame as outward recompense for truth and justice and love,—think you that he has less delight than the worldly man well gifted, cultivated well, whose mind lies a prostitute to the opinion of the mob, and is tricked off with the ornaments of shame, and in office shines "the first of bartered jades?" Look about you in Boston, and answer, ye that know! Go to the men who sacrifice their intellect, their conscience, their affections, for place and a name, ask them what they have got in exchange for their soul ? and then go to such as have left all for God and his law, and ask them of their reward.
Now religion enlarges this capacity for both friendship and philanthropy, and so the quantity of joy which comes thereof, the happiness of the affections.
This religion has delights peculiar to the religious faculty, the happiness of the Soul. I love the Infinite God as the ideal of all perfection,—beauty to the imagination, truth to the reason, justice to the conscience, the perfect person to the affections, the Infinite and Self-faithful God to the soul. With this there vanishes away all fear of God, all fear of ultimate evil for anything that is. If this escape from fear of God were all, that alone were a great thing. How men hate fear! From the dreadful God of the popular theology, and its odious immortality, they flee to annihilation; and atheism itself seems a relief. But this religion which grows out of the idea of the Infinite God casts out all fear and the torment thereof. I am content to be afraid of some men, stronger and wickeder than I; I know they can hurt me; I know they wish it; I know they will. To them my truth is "error of the carnal reason;" my justice is "violation of the law" of men; my love, philanthropic or friendly, is "levying war;" my religion is "infidelity,"— "sin against the Holy Ghost." I fear these men ; they turn their swine into my garden to root up and tread down every little herb of grace, or plant that flowers for present or for future joy. These men may hang me, or assassinate me in the street. I will try to keep out of their wicked way. If they will hurt me, I must bear it as best I can. But the fear of such men will not disturb me much. Their power is only for a time. "Thus far, but no further," quote Death to the tyrant; and I am free.
But to fear God whom I cannot escape, whom death cannot defend me from, that would indeed be most dreadful. Irreligion is the fear of God. It takes two forms. In atheism, the form of denial, you fear without naming the object of horror, perhaps calling it Chance or Fate; in superstition, the form of affirmation, you fear Him by name, believe and tremble. Superstition and atheism are fellow-trunks from the same root of bitterness. I would as soon worship in the wigwam of Odin and Thor, as in the temple of Fear called by a Hebrew or a Christian name.
With a knowledge of the Infinite God, and with a fair development of the religious faculties, you cease to fear, you love. As nocturnal darkness, or the gray mist of morn, is chased away before the rising sun, so dread and horror flee off before the footsteps of love. Instead of fear, a sense of complete and absolute trust in God comes in, gives you repose and peace, filling you with tranquillity and dear delight in God. Then I know not what a day shall bring forth; some knave may strip me of my house and home, an accident—my own or another's fault—deprive me of the respect of men, and death leave me destitute of every finite friend, the objects of instinctive or of voluntary love all scattered from before my eyes; some hireling of the government, for ten pieces of silver, may send me off a slave for all my mortal life ; decay of sense may perplex me, wisdom shut out an eye and ear; and disease may rack my frame. Still I am not afraid. I know what eternity will be. I appeal from man to God. Forsaken, I am not alone; uncomforted, not comfortless. I fold my arms and smile at the ruin which time has made, the peace of God all radiant in my soul.
Let me look full in the face the evil which I meet in the personal tragedies of private life, in the social evils which darkly variegate this and all other great towns; let me see monstrous political sin, dooming one man to a throne because he has trod thousands down to wretchedness and dirt; nay, let me see such things as happen now in Boston. I know no sadder sight on all this globe of lands: for to-day a brother-man is held in a dungeon by the avarice of this city, which seeks to make him a slave, and he out of his jail sends round a petition to the clergymen of Boston, asking their prayers for his unalienable rights,—a prayer which they will refuse, for those "churches of Christ" are this day a "den of thieves," shambles for the sale of human flesh.[2], Let me look on all these things, still I am not dismayed. I know, I feel, I am sure of this, that the Infinite God has known it all, provided for it all; that as He is all-powerful, all-wise, all-just, all-loving, and all-holy too, no absolute evil shall ever come to any child of his, erring or sinned against. I will do all for the right: then, if I fail, the result abides with God ; it is His to care for and not mine. Thus am I powerful to bear, as powerful to do. I know of no calamity, irresistible, sudden, seemingly total, but religion can abundantly defend the head and heart against its harm. So I can be calm. Defeated and unable to rise I will "lie low in the hand of the Father," smiling with the delight of most triumphant trust.
"These surface troubles come and go
Like rufflings of the sea;
The deeper depth is out of reach
To all, my God, but Thee."
With this tranquillity of trust there comes a still, a peculiar, and silent joy in God. You feel your delight in Him, and His in you. The man is not beside himself, he is self-possessed and cool. There is no ecstasy, no fancied "being swallowed up in God;" but there is a lasting inward sweetness and abiding joy. It will not come out in raptures; it will not pray all night, making much ado for nothing done; but it will fill the whole man with beatitudes, with delight in the Infinite God. There will be a calm and habitual peace, a light around the mortal brow, but a light which passes from glory to glory till it changes into perfect fulness of delicious joy. God gives to the loving in their sorrow or their sleep.
Let us undervalue no partial satisfaction which may be had without the consciousness of God. If it be legitimate and natural to man, let it have its place and its joy. Beli gion is not everything. But yet the happiness of this inner human world, the delight of loving God and abso- lutely trusting Him, is plainly the dearest of all delights. I love the world of sense, its beauty to the eye and ear; the natural luxury of taste and touch. It is indeed a glorious world,—the stars of earth, that gem the ground with dewy loveliness, the flowers of heaven, whose amaranthine bloom attracts alike the admiring gaze of clown or sage, and draws the lover's eye while the same spirit is blooming also in his and in another's heart. I love the world of science,—the deeper loveliness which the mind beholds in each eternal star, or the rathe violet of this April day. What a more wondrous wonder is the uniform force of Nature, whose constant modes of operation are all exact as mathematical law, and whence the great minds of Kepler, Newton, and Laplace, gather the flowers of nature's art, and bind them up in handfuls for our lesser wits! I rejoice in the world of men, in the all- conquering toil which subordinates matter unto man, making the river, ocean, winds, to serve mankind; which bridles the lightning and rides it through the sky, and sails the stormiest seas unharmed. I rejoice in the statutes which reenact the eternal laws of God, and administer justice betwixt man and man. I delight in human love in all its forms, instinctive or voluntary, in friendship and philanthropy; the mutuality of persons is a dear and sacred joy to me. But the delight in God is yet more,—dearer than each of these; one we like not much to name. Add to it all these several delights, which get each a charm from this consciousness of God, and you taste and see the real happiness of religion.
Religion without joy,—it is no religion. Superstition, the fear of God, might well be sad. The devotees thereof seek their delight in violating the functions of the body and the spirit. In the theological garden the Tree of Life bears fruit indeed, a few fair apples, but out of reach, which no man can gather till death lift us on his shoulders, and then they are not apples for a mortal mouth. You turn off from the literature of this superstition, and look on sunny Nature, on the minnow in the sea, on the robin in the field, on the frog, the snake, the spider, and the toad, and smile at sight of their gladness in the world, and wish to share it yourself. You turn to the literature which makes a mock at all religion. You find enough of it in Greece and Rome at the decay of paganism, enough still in brilliant France at the dissolution of Christian mythology, in the last century and in this. There also is an attempt at joy, but the attempt is vain, and the little life of men is full of wine and uproar and scarlet women, is poor, unsatisfactory, and short, rounded with bitterness at the last. The chief tree in that garden blossoms bright enough, but it bears only apples of Sodom for a body without a soul, a here with no hereafter, in a world without a God. In such a place the brilliance of genius is only lightning, not light. In such company you almost long for the iron age of theology and the hard literature of the "divines," lean and old and sour, but yet teaching us of a Will above the poor caprice of men, of a Mind beyond this perishing intellect, of an Arm which made men tremble indeed, but also upheld the world. At least there is Duty in that grim creation, and self-denial for the sake of God.
Things should not be so. Sensuality is not adequate delight for men who look to immortality. Religion is not at enmity with joy. No: it is irreligion,—atheistic now and now superstitious. There is no tyranny in God. Man is not a worm, the world a vale of tears. Tears enough there are, and long will be, — the morning mist of the human day. We can wipe off some of them, can rend a little the cloud of ignorance, and want, and crime, and let in the gladdening light of life. Nay, grief and sorrow are the world's medicine, salutary as such, and not excessive for the ill they come to cure. But if we are to make them our daily food, and call that angels' bread, surely it is a mistake which the world of matter cries out upon, and human nature itself forbids.
The development of religion in man is the condition of the highest happiness. Temperance, the piety of the body, prepares that for the corporeal joys, the humble in their place, the highest also in their own ; wisdom, the piety of mind, justice, the piety of conscience, and love, the piety of the affections,—the love of God with all our varied faculties,—these furnish us the complete spiritual joy which is the birthright of each man. It is the function of religion to minister this happiness, which comes of self- denial for the sake of God.
The joy of religion must be proportionate to the purity of the feeling, the completeness of the idea, and the perfection of the act. When all are as they should be, what a joy is there for man! No disappointment will have lasting power over you, no sorrow destroy your peace of soul. Even the remembrance of sins past by will be assuaged by the experience you thereby have, and by the new life which has grown over them. The sorrows of the world will not seem as death-pangs, but the birth-pains of new and holier life. The sins of mankind, the dreadful wars, the tyrannies of the strong over the weak, or of the many over the few, will be seen to be only the stumbling of this last child of God learning to walk, to use his limbs and possess himself of the world which waits to be mastered by man's wisdom, ruled by man's justice, directed by man's love, as part of the great human worship of the Infinite God. The Past, the Present, and the Future will appear working together for you and all mankind,—all made from the perfect motive of God, for a perfect end and as a perfect means. You will know that the providence of the Great Author of us all is so complete and universal, that every wrong that man has suffered which he could not escape, every sorrow he has borne that could not be resisted nor passed by, every duty we have done, had a purpose to serve in the infinite housekeeping of the universe, and is warrant for so much eternal blessedness in the world to come. You look on the base and wicked men who seem as worms in the mire of civilization, often delighting to bite and devour one another, and you remark that these also are children of God; that he loves each of them, and will suffer no ancient Judas, nor modern kidnapper of men, to perish; that there is no child of perdition in all the family of God, but He will lead home his sinner and his saint, and such as are sick with the leprosy of their wickedness, "the murrain of beasts," bowed down and not able to lift themselves up, He will carry in his arms!
The joys of the flesh are finite, and soon run through. Objects of passion are the dolls wherewith we learn to use our higher faculties, and through all our life the joy of religion, the delight in God, becomes more and more. All that ancient saints ever had thereof, the peace which the world could not give, the rest unto the soul, which Jesus spoke of,—all these are for you and me, here and now and to-day, if we will. Our own souls hunger for it, God offers it to us all. "Come and take," says the Father of the world.
"While Thou, my God, art my Help and Defender,
No cares can o'erwhelm me, no terrors appal;
The wiles and the snares of this world will but render
More lively my hope in my God and my All.
And when Thou demandest the life Thou hast given,
With joy will I answer Thy merciful call ;
And quit Thee on earth, but to find Thee in heaven,
My Portion for ever, my God, and my All."