Buddhism has a more profound originality, but it also is afflicted with an inward dualism which will ruin it. From the beginning there have been two Buddhisms: the one an esoteric philosophy for the use of sages convinced by experience of the vanity of all things, suffering from the essential evil of existence and aspiring to Nirvana. It is an unfruitful mysticism because it is Atheistic. The other is popular Buddhism, which sinks and dies into puerile superst.i.tions and into the grossest polytheism. From which we may conclude that Buddhism only becomes universalist when it ceases to be a positive religion, and that where it still remains a religion it is anything but universalist.
With Christianity it is altogether different. The terms "universal religion" and "Christian religion" coincide so exactly that if a form of Christianity is not universalist on any side, on that particular side it ceases to be Christian. In fact there cannot here be either division or esoterism, nor consequently limitation or narrowness. We are here in the absolute freedom of spirit. Christ did not propound the theory of the unity of the human race; but He did something quite different and much better: He gave us the gospel. Between His gospel and the humanitarian philosophy there is all the difference that there is between abstraction and life, between idea and love. All men enter into the kingdom of G.o.d by the same door, and that door cannot be shut by any one; for it is the door of humility, of confidence, of self-renunciation, of the higher righteousness fulfilling itself by fraternal charity. Rank in that kingdom is determined by the measure of devotedness. The greatest is the one that humbles himself the most, and the only way of being master is to serve. In the religion of Jesus there is nothing religious but that which is authentically moral, and nothing moral in human life that is not truly religious. The perfect religion coincides with the absolute morality, and this naturally extends to and is obligatory on all mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed the only G.o.d, or even the G.o.d who is spirit, whose worship could not thenceforth be confined to anything material or particular in time and s.p.a.ce: He showed us the Father who loves all His children with an equal affection, and desires to dwell in the humblest as well as in the highest consciousness. This divine Fatherhood, in proportion as it is realised in our hearts, produces in them human brotherhood. The religious and the human ideals here join, no more to be separated.
Having begun in the animal man, with the grossest form of religion, humanity finds itself completed in the perfect religion.
3. _Progress in Representations of the Divine_
To represent the divine, man has never had any but the resources which are in himself. These representations have varied therefore with the general progress of experience and of thought.... From beginning to end the evolution of religious images and notions is based on the idea of spirit. It is in this idea that the resemblance and the kinship of man to his G.o.d is based; only by this can there be understanding, converse, harmony between them. Primitive religions, doubtless, are neither spiritualist nor materialist; they are animistic. A simple animism gives to men their first conceptions. The child projects the life which animates him; he endows the things around him with a personality similar to his own. For him there is nothing dead or inert; the world is peopled with living beings with which he contends, and talks, and is angry, to which he gives his love and his caresses.
Do not let us smile too much at this simplicity. The latest steps of philosophy are rejoining our earliest thoughts. We are coming to see that in sum we know nothing but ourselves, that our science is but the projection of our consciousness without, and that it is solely on this condition that the world becomes intelligible to us. Man never worships anything purely material, anything that cannot hear and answer him. When he perceives that the object of his worship is inanimate, he thinks his G.o.d has deserted him, and he sets himself to pursue him. He usually finds him and retains him under other names and forms. By faith in ghosts, and by the memory of his dreams, he has learnt to double himself, and to oppose his will to his thought, his interior ego to his body, which he calls his house. He may easily quit this for another. Nothing is more ancient than the idea of the transmigration of souls. But at the same time he doubles the being of his G.o.ds; he distinguishes between the G.o.d and the object in which he habitually resides. This is the period at which _idolatry_ begins. It will only be completed when the spirit-G.o.d has broken the bonds which bind him to its visible prison and its material image; when He shall speak who says that "G.o.d is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." From that moment, mythology transforms itself into theology, and external rites into inward piety.
Necessarily polytheistic in its origins, religion tended nevertheless towards monotheism. The subordination which disciplined the heads of the tribes on earth also ranged the divinities under the authority of a supreme head. Force at first gave this supremacy. Zeus was the king of G.o.ds and men because he was stronger than all of them put together.
This is the natural order of ideas. Force first imposed itself on weakness; then intelligence conquered force; lastly, justice and love, which is the supreme form and flower of righteousness, obtain supremacy over intelligence itself. The highest and the chiefest is no longer the strongest, or the wisest, but the best. In becoming moral, man has moralised his G.o.ds, who, in their turn, becoming models and authorities, have greatly helped to moralise the race.
It is very surprising that this evolution in the direction of moral monotheism did not complete itself in the Indo-European family. But the fact is that that family encountered an invincible barrier in the very nature of its primitive mythology. The Greek and Hindu philosophers, no doubt, pushed the notion of G.o.d to that of His spirituality and unity, but they did not succeed in transforming the religion of their race. Their rational criticism had power to dissolve, but not to change. Their monotheism remained always an object of speculation more or less esoteric. When, in the second and third centuries of our era, in compet.i.tion with Christianity, Graeco-Roman polytheism endeavoured to reach a sort of monotheism, it could only return to the most glorious mythus of its infancy, to the worship of the Sun, and raise it to supremacy among the symbols of their faith.
The transition from polytheism to monotheism was only made in Palestine and in the tradition of the Hebrews. There were two reasons for this, both of which bear witness to the divine vocation of that people: its religious predispositions and the powerful action of its prophets, of those men of G.o.d raised up in it from Moses to Christ. The desert is not monotheistic, as M. Renan was pleased at first to say, nor are nomads, shepherds, or freebooters nearer to the only G.o.d than sedentary and agricultural peoples. But, owing to the special turn of mind of the Hebrew family, its primitive polytheism, of which the plural, _elohim_, still reminds us, had an abstract character, and was reduced to a sort of anonymous plurality from which no divine genealogy could spring. All these elementary spirits, these _elohim_ of the air, the earth, the waters, were so similar to each other that the thought of the Semite never succeeded in discerning and discriminating them. They entered into one another, and ended by forming a sort of collective and abstract power, a.n.a.lagous to that which is represented in our language by the word "divinity." Add to this that, by the idea of holiness, Jehovah, the national _elohim_, was equally separated from Nature, and that, gradually divested of all corporeal form, He was predestined to become the G.o.d of conscience, the invisible Creator of all things, the Judge and the rewarder of all human actions.
Neither these original predispositions, however, nor these general causes, account for the marvellous progress of the religion of Israel.
The faith of the prophets is a creation of the moral order; it is the work of individual consciousnesses, of the religious heroes whom the divine Spirit raised up in succession for more than a thousand years.
We shall explain elsewhere this heroic and age-long struggle of the prophets of Jehovah against the customs, the tendencies, and even the temperament of their people. Suffice it here to indicate the constant direction of their efforts, the precision and the fixedness of their ideal, the power of the common inspiration that animated them, the vigorous and vivacious feeling in each one of them that makes their work divine and carries them beyond their individual thoughts and hopes. Like us they laboured on an infinitely vaster plane than they conceived.
But their conception of a divine ideal of righteousness still left G.o.d outside the consciousness. The image of His sanct.i.ty awakened in their souls the sense of sin and raised a tragic conflict between the human will enslaved by evil and the essentially inflexible law of G.o.d. G.o.d and man were found to be more profoundly separated by this moral ant.i.thesis of righteousness and sin than they had before been by the ant.i.thesis of strength and feebleness. How was this hostility to cease? A supreme revelation is about to respond to this cry of distress. G.o.d will become internal to the consciousness; He will manifest Himself, in man himself, as the principle of justification and salvation. He who was called _El, Allah_, the Mighty G.o.d, in patriarchal days,--He who from the times of Moses had been named _Jehovah_, the living G.o.d, the vigilant guardian of the Covenant,--will reveal Himself as the Father in the filial consciousness of Jesus Christ. The revelation of love comes to crown the revelation of force and righteousness. G.o.d desires to dwell in human souls. The Heavenly Father lives within the Son of Man, and the dogma of the G.o.d-Man, interpreted by the piety of each Christian, not by the subtle metaphysics of the doctors and the schools, becomes the central and distinguishing dogma of Christianity. Do not spoil its religious meaning, leave the mystery intact, see what is wrapped up in it: the sin of man effaced, the ancient conflicts ended, harmony restored, the whole moral and spiritual life enrooted in the eternal life of G.o.d, the Divine Life shed abroad in the heart of man. Try to comprehend this consummation of the religious unity of the Divine and the human sought for, cried for, in the dim desire of consciousness, and you will also comprehend that, at this point of view, as at all the others, the precedent religious evolution found its _raison d"etre_ and its final aim in the soul and in the work of Christ. The orphaned human soul and the distant unknown G.o.d are re-united and embraced in filial love, to be no more divided or estranged.
4. _The History of Prayer_
The living expression of the relations of man to his G.o.d, prayer is the very soul of religion. It brings to G.o.d the miseries of man, and brings back to man the communion and the help of G.o.d. Nothing better reveals the worth and moral dignity of a religion than the kind of prayer it puts into the lips of its adherents. Now, progress is more apparent here than anywhere else. The savage beats his fetish when it is not complacent enough. The Christian in his greatest distresses repeats the prayer of Jesus in the Garden: "Father, not my will, but Thine be done!" What a long road man has travelled between these two extreme points of religion!
At the outset, prayer would seem to have had nothing religious in it except the vague trust which men placed in its efficiency. It was almost everywhere conceived and practised as a sort of constraint put by the worshipper on the will that he wished to master. There were mysterious syllables, which, p.r.o.nounced correctly, would produce an irresistible effect. To the voice were added rites and ceremonies, _i.e._ gestures menacing or wheedling, whose object was to move the G.o.d and bind his will to that of man. Primitive stories and legends are full of this idea. Out of it sprang magic, sorcery, necromancy.
With the supernatural beings around him man does as with other neighbours. He seeks to induce them to help him, and that by the self-same means. There is very little respect in these primary relations. Ruse, violence, seduction by bribes or threats,--these are the forms of that strange supplication. It is human selfishness addressing itself navely to the selfishness of the G.o.ds. Regular contracts are made between these two egoisms, each of which arms itself against the other with the _Do ut des_. The G.o.d who fails in his promise deserves to be chastised, and privations, and even blows, do not fail to follow and punish his felony.
Sacrifice at first was merely a form of prayer. Man never approaches his superior or his master with empty hands. To secure his favour or appease his wrath he brings the offerings he believes to be the most agreeable. The G.o.ds, like mortals, _e.g._, have need of nourishment.
For them, therefore, are reserved the first-fruits of the human repast; libations, presents of honey and fine flour, the most luscious fruits, the most delicious viands. What difficulty man has had in believing in the goodness of his G.o.ds! He saw the effects of their anger in the evils which befell him, and if good fortune came to him he felt obliged to offer a sacrifice to turn aside the jealousy of higher powers. Was a G.o.d supposed to have been offended? They trembled for years beneath the strokes of his wrath; they offered in expiatory sacrifices all possible equivalents; they invented penances, humiliations, tortures, without being sure that the divine vengeance ever was appeased. These are universal religious phenomena.
The religious is so different from the moral sense that, at the outset, it exists by itself, and expresses itself in the most selfish and ferocious manner. How many crimes have been committed in the name of religion! with what baseness and sordidness has it not been sincerely connected! But here also we must note the new revelation made in the souls of prophets and of sages in order to raise the religion of naturalism to morality. Confucius, Buddha, the prophets of Israel, the philosophers of Greece, came simultaneously to feel that the true relation of man to G.o.d must be a moral relation, that righteousness is the only link which binds earth to heaven, that sacred words, rites, interested offerings, outward compensations, can do nothing, and mean nothing, the moment the religious man rises above the law of Nature and enters upon the higher life of the spirit. If G.o.d be righteous, there is only one means henceforth of putting one"s self into harmony and peace with Him--to become like Him. Thus religion and morality were destined to approach each other and to penetrate each other more and more, until the perfect religion should be recognised by this sign: the highest piety under the form of the ideal morality. At bottom, Christianity has no other principle, and it is for this reason more than for any other that it is not only the highest form of religion, but the universal and final religion. "The absolute religion" and "the absolute moral life" are identical terms. The ancient dualism is surmounted in the unity of Christian consciousness. It is not surprising, therefore, that prayer should, in its turn, be transformed, and that, having at first been the most violently interested act of life, it should come in the end to be a pure act of trust and self-abandonment, of disinterestedness the most religious and complete.
Is there need of many words for a child to make its father understand?
It is the heathen, says Jesus, who make many prayers. The Father knows your needs before you ask Him. It is a mark of unbelief to be anxious about food and raiment and the future. The essential thing is not to multiply pet.i.tions, but to live near Him and feel Him ever near. Is He not Almighty and all-good? Does He not love you better than you love yourselves? Does He not make all things work together for the good of His children? If trials come, or dangers threaten, what ought we to do? Submit to G.o.d, as Jesus did. What is such prayer as His but the defeat of egoism and the perfect liberation of the individual spirit in the feeling of its plenary union with G.o.d?
Such was the prayer of Jesus. It did not consist in an outward flow of words, but in a constant, silent state of soul which made Him say in turning towards His Father: "I know that Thou hearest me always."
Confidence increases with renunciation. Admirable progress of religion! Sublime reversal of roles! At the beginning the ambition of the pious man was to bend the Divine will to his own; at the end his peace, his happiness, is to subordinate his wishes and desires to the will of a Father who knows how to be gracious, righteous, perfect!
There is another aspect of this progress. In all religions there is a double gamut of feeling: the one, which rules in primitive religions, and whose dominant note is fear and sadness; the other, which prevails in the end, in which the dominant note is confidence and joy. It is a natural effect of the progressive victory of the religious consciousness gradually surmounting the contradictions in the midst of which it is born and developed. At the outset, man, alone and defenceless, finds no fewer enemies in heaven than on earth. He feels as if surrounded by hostile and mysterious powers before which he cringes in fear, awaiting their decisions with respect to him. But everything changes when there rises within his soul the luminous dawn of the moral revelation of G.o.d. With the darkness, vanish all the frightful phantoms of the night. In the G.o.d whom he adores he sees his own interior law glorified and become henceforth the supreme law of things. That law of righteousness is, at bottom, a law of love.
Nothing can trouble me any more except the sense of my own failure--that is, of my own sin, which alone can separate me from the very principle of righteousness and life. But, see, justice manifests itself as justifying grace! G.o.d gives it as He gives life to those who thirst for it. Reconciliation is complete. The orphan has found his Father; the Father, His child. The sinner, trembling, begins his prayer, prostrated; he ends it upright, with the confidence and freedom of a child that feels itself at home within the Father"s house. The Gospel bids us to rejoice; it makes of joy an obligation, while distrust and sadness are the marks of selfishness and unbelief.
5. _Conclusion_
Such has been the course of religion through the centuries of human history, and amid the complex and confused development of particular faiths. The progress has not been on a straight line and by successive additions, as in the scientific sphere. Religious evolution is more like the evolution of art, in which the experience of the past is only fruitful when translated by a higher inspiration and a mightier creative force. There are periods of recrudescence of the religious sentiment in which the pa.s.sions of a past that seemed to have been abolished are revived. These are the times of superst.i.tion. There are also periods of religious inertia, when the soul seems to empty itself of its eternal content, and divert itself into a frivolous activity and a superficial wisdom. These are the ages of incredulity. Lastly, there are epochs of crisis and confusion, in which mingle religious traditions the most diverse, and currents of thought the most contrary.
We must pa.s.s over all these accidents and vicissitudes. In the religious evolution of humanity there is a sequence, an order, a progress which, in spite of all interruptions and reactions, manifest themselves as soon as we rise high enough to embrace it in its vast entirety.
A few years ago there a.s.sembled in Chicago what the Americans called the Parliament of Religions. The official representatives of all the princ.i.p.al religions of the new world and the old met together under a common feeling of religious brotherhood. They did not discuss the value of their rites or dogmas; their object was to approach each other, to edify each other, and, for the first time in the world"s history, to present the spectacle of a universal religious communion.
When it came to the point, three things became clear: first, the common name under which they were able to call upon G.o.d--the Father; secondly, the Lord"s Prayer was adopted and recited by all; thirdly, Christ Himself, apart from all theological definition, was unanimously recognised and venerated as the Master and Initiator of the higher religious life.
In my own consciousness, this practical demonstration is completed. I can hardly help being religious; but if I am seriously to be religious I can only be so under the Christian form. I can hardly help praying; but if I desire to pray, if moral anguish or intellectual doubt constrain me to seek some form of prayer that I can use in all sincerity, I never find but these words: "Our Father which art in heaven." Lastly, I may disdain the inner life of the soul, and divert myself from it by the distractions of science, art, and social life; but if, wearied by the world of pleasure or of toil, I wish to find my soul again and live a deeper life, I can accept no other guide and master than Jesus Christ, because, in Him alone, optimism is without frivolity, and seriousness without despair.
BOOK SECOND
CHRISTIANITY
CHAPTER I
HEBRAISM, OR THE ORIGINS OF THE GOSPEL
To understand Christianity we should need to see clearly and in one view the link which connects it with the religious evolution of mankind, the living originality by which it is distinguished, the succession and the character of the forms it has a.s.sumed. Such are the three points which we shall take up in turn. We must begin with its origins.
There is never a complete break in the chain of history. Every phenomenon arises in its place and at its time. It has its antecedents, which prepare it and _condition_ it. However new Christianity may have been, it is no exception to the rule. It springs from the tradition of Israel by an evident affiliation. The old theology did not dissimulate this kinship of origin; it rather exaggerated it. The Christian Church made the Bible of the Jews the first part of its own. The writings of the prophets were placed in the sacred volume before those of the apostles, as if to intimate that the one could not be understood without the other. _Novum Testamentum in Vetere latet; Vetus in Novo patet_. At bottom, this old adage of the schoolmen is true. It is an excellent rule of biblical exegesis to trace the primary Christian ideas to their Hebraic root, and to regard as foreign and advent.i.tious those which are not attached to it. If there is nothing essential in the New Testament the germ of which is not to be found in the Old, there is nothing truly fruitful in the Old which has not pa.s.sed into the New. Such is the historical sequence and connection that we must respect and follow. The study of the religion of Israel is the natural introduction to the study of Christianity.
The only point to be considered here is how the one was preparatory to the other.[1]
[1] Two non-essential sections have here been omitted, one on _The Sacred History_, the other on _The Nation_.--Trans.
1. _Prophetism_
The miracle of the history of Israel is Prophetism. In this is to be found the incomparable force by which the religious evolution we may trace in its annals was effected.
But first let me explain what I understand by this word evolution, and let me eliminate from it the fatalistic sense too often given to it.
If by evolution you mean a necessary and unconscious process, a mechanical and continuous movement, which, without either effort or danger, causes light to spring out of darkness, good from evil, and raises a people or a race from a lower to a higher form of life, you incur the reproach of confounding the laws of the moral world with those of the physical order; you will be condemned to falsify history in general and to understand nothing of the history of Israel in particular. In the moral and religious progress which const.i.tutes the singular originality of that history, there is nothing facile, nothing that can be logically deduced from the natural predispositions of the nation. No doubt the prophets were the children of the nation and intimately connected with it; but the inspiration which breathes in them, raises them and animates them, is something entirely different from the ethnic genius of their race. The contrast is so great that it amounts to contradiction. The race, in Israel, as in Moab, or among the Edomites or Philistines, had its interpreters and prophets. But these were not the prophets of conscience. They flatter the people; they do not elevate them. They are found to be false prophets. The others, the witnesses for the righteous, holy G.o.d, only brought Hebraism to the consciousness of its religious vocation by a saecular and painful struggle against hereditary idolatry and immorality. This was not a collective evolution, but an essentially individualist reform; it was a moral creation continually interrupted and compromised; it was a work of faith and will. Each prophet enters into the conflict and utters his cry of battle and reform as if he were alone, responsible only to the G.o.d who has sent him, and yet all of them succeed each other and pursue the same design, because they are all obedient to the same identic inspiration. They fight against all; against the mult.i.tude that cannot break away from custom and from prejudice; against the priests who have always from the beginning made of the priesthood a _metier_ and of oracles a merchandise; against kings whose vanity, whose crimes, and whose exactions they denounce; against the great and rich oppressors of the weak and poor. They speak in the name of Jehovah, because Jehovah speaks in their consciousness.
That is the origin of the prophetic spirit. It is a divine ferment which, perpetuating itself, becoming clearer, stronger, from generation to generation, gradually raises and trans.m.u.tes the heavy ma.s.s of primitive Semitism. No, this is not the work of time and Nature, unless you see G.o.d at work in time, and, beneath this word Nature, by the side of realised and manifested forces you perceive the hidden and immeasurable virtualities which ferment in it and carry it beyond itself into the higher life of liberty and love. In the apparition of these prophets, in the energy of their faith, in the boldness of their words, there is a positive revelation of a new world, the revelation of a religious ideal which, after divesting itself, in the gospel of Christ, of every national element, will naturally become the faith and consolation of humanity.
The education of the people of G.o.d had been a long and laborious work; besides the preaching of the prophets, it had needed repeated catastrophes in which the nationality of Israel had perished, as if the spirit could not free itself save by the annihilation of the matter that had from the outset grossly closed it in. When in the age of Cyrus we see the poor remnants of Benjamin and Judah return from Babylon, they are no longer a people; they are already almost a Church.
The religious Law is now fixed. It enshrines the life, the ideas, the ethics and the ritual, the minute practices and precautions, which will for ever separate the Jew from all the other nations, and maintain him in a state of legal purity and high morality in the midst of universal corruption. It is the beginning of Pharisaism. In it the spirit of prophetic piety deteriorates, hardens, freezes. Nevertheless, when we think of the progress that had been accomplished, when we think of the distance that separates this rigid monotheism and this rigorous law from the old hard, cruel, sometimes impure Semitic cults, the prophets"
work in Israel will appear to us in its immense proportions and immortal worth.
2. _The Dawn of the Gospel_