The Protestant way of salvation was through "experimental religion."
This meant the appropriation as a personal experience of the truths of human guilt and divine mercy. A man must not only believe but intensely feel that he was wholly guilty before G.o.d and in danger of everlasting d.a.m.nation. He must then have a vivid appreciation that Christ out of pure love had died for him, and that on this ground alone G.o.d offered him pardon and salvation. This offer he must consciously accept, with emotions of profound remorse for his wrong-doing, grat.i.tude for his deliverance, and absolute dependence upon divine grace for help against future sin and for final reception to an endless heaven.
To attain this experience was the aim and goal of the religious man, under all the more strenuous forms of Protestantism. Until it was reached, all good actions, all fair traits of character, were worthless.
Without it there was no escape from the unquenchable fire. If it came as a genuine experience, it was the pa.s.sage from death unto life. But as there was great possibility of self-deception in the matter, the mind was constantly thrown back on self-examination, and in sensitive natures there was often an alternation of terrors and transports.
This experience of saving faith, of experimental religion, must be translated for us into very different language and symbols from those which our ancestors used before we can have any sympathy with it.
Perhaps the truest account of the matter for us is something like this: the Christian theology was a system of myths, which had grown out of facts of human experience. The initial fact was a good man whose love went out to bad men, and woke in them a sense of their own wrong along with a new joy and hope. From this centre the influence spread in widening circles, and was gradually transformed in the expression,--mixed too with earlier notions, with crudities, with sophistications,--until Justice and Love and Punishment and Forgiveness were personified and dramatized and a whole cloud-world of fancy built up. Already in the age of the Reformation the human intellect was sapping the foundations of the structure. But the religious imagination was still intensely susceptible, and when the moral sense was sharply awakened by the reformers both within and without the Catholic church, it fell back on the imagination as its familiar ally, and clothed with new life the ancient forms. The Catholic turned with fresh ardor to ma.s.s and miracle and holy church. The Protestant fell back on a more personal and inward experience; he conceived that in each heart and mind the whole drama from Eden to Calvary and on to the Judgment Day must be realized and appropriated as the working principle of life.
To the mystical, the sentimental, the self-confident, it was a welcome and uplifting exercise. To the timid and self-distrustful it was a terrible ordeal. To the intellectual it was a perpetual challenge to skepticism. Even Bunyan puts as his first and worst temptation, "to question the being of G.o.d and the truth of his gospel." To the prosaic and practical minds it made the whole business of religion a dim and far-away affair.
Experimental religion was the core of Protestantism for more than three centuries. It was blended with other elements in a series of great movements. In Puritanism it united with an ascetic and militant temper, a metaphysical theology, a stern rule of life, and a conception of the nation as under a divine law like that of ancient Israel.
Then came Quakerism, a religion of the quiet, illumined heart, and the peaceful life. Next, Methodism, a wave of aggressive love, seeking to save others where Puritanism had been self-saving, appealing less to the head and more to the heart. Following this, in England, came Evangelicalism, a revival of self-conscious experience, but flowing out now not only as in Methodism into a crusade to save souls, but into labors for criminals, for slaves, for the poor, under such leaders as Howard and Wilberforce and Shaftesbury.
These phases are from English and American history. They might largely be paralleled elsewhere. And along with them, it is to be remembered, went always not only a party imbued with the Catholic or high church idea, but also a moderate party, holding a more broadly and simply religious view.
Perhaps the most effective type of Christianity has been the simple acceptance of the familiar laws of goodness, having in the Bible their express sanction, with a great promise and an awful warning for the future, and the embodiment of holiness, love, and help, in Christ. This has been the religion of a mult.i.tude of faithful souls, manly men and womanly women, who did not concern themselves with any elaborate theology, but went along their daily way, strong in obedience to duty, trustful in a divine guidance, and with serene hope for what may come after death. Their souls have been nurtured on whatever was most vital and most tender in the words of Scripture and the services of the church, and whatever was unintelligible or innutritions they have quietly pa.s.sed by. This is the essential religion of humanity, made definite and vivid by accepted symbols and rules, and made warm by the sense of fellowship with a great company.
Recurring to the successive phases of religious thought, the next development of Protestantism, while in a sense world-wide, may be most clearly seen in America. By Jonathan Edwards there was begun the application of a rationalizing process to the theology of Calvin and to experimental religion. In Edwards almost the only result was a more lurid and tremendous affirmation of the old dogma and the old requirement. But the New England mind, speculative, practical, and intense, worked rapidly on. In Channing and his a.s.sociates came the renunciation of Depravity, Atonement, and the Trinity. In the next generation, Unitarianism expressed itself through Theodore Parker as simple theism. A little later than the Unitarian movement, the old Orthodoxy itself became transformed into a new Orthodoxy. The foremost interpreters of the transformation were Bushnell and Beecher; Bushnell translating the Atonement into terms of purely natural goodness,--not as a transaction, but an expression; and Beecher finding in Christ simply the truth that Love is sovereign of the universe. To Bushnell and Beecher the historical Christ remained in a unique sense an incarnation of G.o.d. By later voices of the new Orthodoxy--for example, Phillips Brooks--he is spoken of rather as the one actual instance of perfect humanity, and in this sense a manifestation of G.o.d and the spiritual leader of mankind.
But for three centuries men have been studying the facts of existence from an entirely different side from that whence the church takes its outlook. They have been finding out all kinds of curious facts, totally unconnected with any supernatural sphere. First, they made such discoveries as that the world is not flat, but round; not stationary, but doubly revolving. And so they went on. The stars, the plants, the animals, the human body, yielded all manner of curious knowledge. New powers came into men"s hands through this knowledge; new avenues to happiness were opened. Facts wove themselves together in wider and wider combinations. Orderly procedure was found where there had seemed such confusion as only capricious spirits could occasion. It is learned, too, that even as the individual man has grown up from babyhood, so the race of man has grown up from the beast. The globe itself has grown from a simple origin into infinite diversity and complexity. There has been a universal, orderly growth,--what we name "Evolution." And it is learned that all mental phenomena, so far as we can explore them, stand in some close relation to a physical basis in the brain, and to a train of physical antecedents.
And now the men who have come up by the path of this knowledge stand face to face with the men who have been climbing in the path whose signboards are such as "Duty," "Worship," "Aspiration;" and the question arises, Do our paths lie henceforth together, or do they separate, and is the one party losing its travel?
Perhaps the best example of the union of the two pursuits in one man is given by Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin worked out, through a very genuine, homely, and personal experience, the conviction that _moral perfection_ is the only true aim.
He reached this conviction while still a young man, and in the main tenor of his life he was faithful to it. He made no vaunt of his religion, founded no sect, gave his words and deeds chiefly to practical affairs; and perhaps few guessed, until at the close of his life he told his own story with consummate charm, that the secret motive and mainspring of his life had been the same that animates the saints and saviors,--the thirst for moral perfection. The motive and method had been hidden, but the result had long been clear to the eyes of the whole world. Franklin"s character was reverenced alike in the court of France and the farmhouses of Pennsylvania and New England. To the Old World he seemed the heroic and coming man of the New World, side by side with Washington. The Virginian embodied the highest traditional virtues of the race, self-mastery, patience, magnanimity, devotion to the common good; the Pennsylvanian, if less called on for the heroic forms of antique virtue, added to its substance new traits of wisdom, progress, and happiness,--signs of a better age to be.
Moral perfection was Franklin"s secret and ruling principle. But his life was conspicuously engaged in the fields of science and of statesmanship. He was a leader in exploring the material world, skillful to trace its secrets, fertile to apply them to human use. He was a pioneer and founder of the new nation, projecting its union before others had desired or dreamed of it; sharing in its first hazardous fortunes; winning by his personal weight and wisdom the foreign alliance which turned the scale of victory; laying with the other master shipwrights the keel and ribs of the new Const.i.tution. Moral perfection for himself, and, as the outcome to the world, not a new church or a theology or a missionary enterprise, but a winning of the forces of nature to the service of man, and a shaping of the social organism for the benefit of all. That is the originality of Franklin,--that he carries the old moral purpose into the new fields of science and of social ordering. His desire for moral perfection and his confidence that the universe is ordered rightly are not dependent on any visionary scheme of heaven and h.e.l.l; they rest not on any doubtful argument; they bring sanction from no transport mixed of soul and sense. He walks firm on the solid earth. He has found for himself that goodness is the only thing that satisfies.
That this is an ordered universe comes home to him with every step of his study of actuality. What need of a supernatural religion to a man who finds religion in his own nature and in the nature of the world?
Such confidence and such purpose are as old as Socrates. But come, now, let us go where Socrates did not go; let us put the ideas of Jesus and Paul to some further application; let us use our freedom from pope and tyrant for some solid good! And so he goes on, cheerfully and delightedly, to question the thunder-cloud and make acquaintance with its wild steeds,--presently some one will put them in harness. He is always inventing. Now it is a stove, now it is a fire-brigade,--a public library,--a post-office,--a Federal Union! And be his invention smaller or greater, he takes out no patent, but tenders it freely into the common stock.
The prophets introducing this age are Carlyle and Emerson. Carlyle sees the disease--he convinces of sin. Emerson sees the solution. Carlyle reflects in his own troubled nature the disorder he portrays. He is physically unsound; his dyspepsia exaggerates to him the evils of the world. Emerson"s disciplined and n.o.ble character mirrors the present and eternal order, and forecasts its triumph.
Carlyle and Emerson give two different phases of life as experienced.
Carlyle gives the experience of good and evil,--the tremendous sanctions of right against wrong, wisdom against folly. He is not triumphant, but he is not hopeless. "Work, and despair not" is to him "the marching music of the Teutonic race." Emerson, from the height of personal victory, sees all as harmonious. One shows the struggle up the mountain path, the other the view from the summit.
Carlyle"s gospel is summed up in "_Work_, and despair not." "Work" was his own addition to Goethe"s line. "Do the duty that lies nearest thee;"
action, as the escape from the puzzles of the intellect and the griefs of the heart, is his special message.
Emerson is a precursor of the day when "No man shall say to his neighbors, Know ye the Lord, for all shall know him, from the least unto the greatest." He is the first of the prophets to rise above anxiety as to the success of his mission. He lives his life, says his word, sheds his light--concerned to be faithful, but wholly unanxious as to personal success.
As the tribes of ancient Israel stood arrayed, the one half on Mount Ebal, the other on Mount Gerizim,--the one to p.r.o.nounce the blessing, the other to utter the curse,--so Emerson is like an embodied promise and Carlyle a perpetual warning. In Emerson we see the hero triumphant and serene. Carlyle shows him at close grips with the devil. "Pain, danger, difficulty, steady slaving toil, shall in no wise be shirked by any brightest mortal that will approve himself loyal to his mission in this world; nay, precisely the higher he is the deeper will be the disagreeableness, and the detestability to flesh and blood, of the tasks laid on him; and the heavier, too, and more tragic, his penalties if he neglect them."
The background for Emerson is the life of early New England. The secret of New England"s greatness was the combination from the first of the profoundest interest in man"s spiritual destiny with the closest grip on homely facts.
In Calvinism, and in Christianity, the universe was at eternal war within itself; this was man"s projection upon the world of his own moral conflict. Emerson sees the universe as a harmony. Many influences have contributed to this idea; it becomes distinct and vivid in a man whose own life is a moral harmony. Himself truly a cosmos, he recognizes the answering tokens of the greater cosmos.
The religious sentiment had become so inwoven with inst.i.tutions, creeds, usages, conventionalisms,--each man believing because his neighbors do, or his father did,--that it was necessary to take a new observation.
What says the heart of man at its highest? For this Emerson is singled out; for him an ancestry is trained through generations; he is drawn apart from the church, set aside from government and all inst.i.tutional work; practical functions are denied him; he is made an eye,--an organ of pure vision.
To him G.o.d is not afar off but in himself. The heart in its own purity, tenderness, and strength recognizes the Divine Presence. "The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it."
The order of physical nature is the symbol and the instrument of a moral order. The beauty and sublimity of nature are the manifestation through sense of the Divine Reality.
So high a revelation can come at first only to souls which in their greatness are isolated, as the highest mountain peaks stand alone in the earliest sunbeams. It is for a later time to fit such truth to all the conditions of human life, to fully a.s.similate it with older lessons, to weave it into the warp and woof of society.
It is Emerson, child of the Puritan and disciple of the new knowledge, in whom joy is most abiding--its roots are in faithful living, brave and high thinking, the spirit of love, oneness with nature and humanity.
Emerson dwells in an ideal yet real world. He cannot give the pa.s.sword that will certainly admit; inheritance and temperament must contribute to that. But he sees that one principle is the rightful sovereign in his inner world and in the universe,--allegiance to highest known law. It is a sublimation of the idea familiar to the religious mind, but he gives it a new and larger interpretation; for, in place of the written Word, beyond the social and civic obligation, greater than the accepted moralities, superseding the ecclesiastical virtues, wider than the overworked altruism of Christianity, is the complete ideal of Man, from his roughest force to his finest perception.
Talk about duty had become wearisome. "Thou shalt not preach!" says Emerson. So he discourses as the observer of man and nature, and bids men to look at realities.
His imitators were beguiled into a theoretical exposition of the universe. A sense of thinness and unreality accompanies much of their talk, because it is not, like Emerson"s, in constant touch with active duty and fresh observation.
His ideal includes worship, but to this he brings above all the quality of sincerity. He will not observe a sacrament which has lost its significance to him. He will not use language of a personal G.o.d which is not natural to him, nor affirm a certainty as to immortality when his conviction is not always clear. But he has the profoundest sense and the simplest expression of that reality which we call "the presence of G.o.d in man." In him it is not involved with miracle or metaphysic; it is a personal experience, the source of humility, energy, and peace. "I recognize the distinction of the outer and inner self; the double consciousness that within this erring, pa.s.sionate, mortal self sits a supreme, calm, immortal mind, whose powers I do not know, but it is stronger than I; it is wiser than I; it never approved me in any wrong; I seek counsel of it in my doubts; I repair to it in my dangers; I pray to it in my undertakings. It seems to me the face which the Creator uncovers to his child."
Emerson represents thought in its highest form--perception, vision. The world interpreted by such vision supplies motive, support, and rapture.
He is essentially and above all a poet, and to whoever can follow him he opens a celestial world in which the homeliest earthly fact is irradiated by indwelling divinity.
Emerson"s escape from evil is by rising to such a height of contemplation that evil is seen as only an element of good. He sits like an astronomer, viewing the procession of the worlds in their sublime harmony. For most men, the jar and dust of daily life largely shut out that glorious view. They catch hope and strength from the voice of the seer upon his heights. But they need other help; they need some one by their side; they need the love of a stronger brother, who takes their hand. This men found in Jesus the friend of sinners, who went about doing good; they idealized it as Christ--a divinity who took upon him the form of a servant. The higher stooping to the lower is still the world"s salvation.
In teaching, Emerson generalized for all men from his own experience. He said, "Be yourself! Follow the law of your own nature. Trust the all-moving Spirit. Be above convention and rule, above vulgarities and insipidities. Give way to the G.o.d within you!"
Literally obeyed, it was insufficient advice for most men, for it ignored what Emerson"s modesty forbade him to recognize,--the vast difference between his own nature and bent and that of most men. When ordinary men and women tried to imitate him the result was sometimes a lamentable failure. But _he_ was genuine and lofty always. He failed in no homely duty. The great trial and discipline to him was the alternation in himself of the commonplace with the high. In individuals he was forever disappointed, always looking for heroes, saints, and saviors, and seldom finding them. His own work bore little visible fruit; his own teaching fell for a long time on scornful ears. This perpetual disappointment he took with perpetual constancy, always serene under disappointment, gracious to the dull, indifferent to fame, careless of his own obscurity.
The typical man of letters has his own besetting sins,--neglect of homely duties, self-consciousness, vanity,--from all of which Emerson was free.
The faults we allege against his philosophy--its scanty recognition of sin and sorrow--were the natural incidents of his character and work.
They do not debase, though they sometimes limit, his influence for good; his is always the speech of an angel; it strengthens, uplifts, gladdens us. There are other angels to whom we must listen,--others, perhaps, who speak more nearly the speech of our own experience,--but his music always chords with theirs.
In Emerson, a soul inheriting centuries of Catholic and Puritan training, until obedience was its instinct and purity its native atmosphere,--a soul endowed with genius,--spread its wings and flew with the suddenness and joy of a young bird"s first flight. He saw good everywhere, beauty everywhere, and was glad with the gladness of a seer and savior. He is one of those of whom he speaks, as belonging to a better world which is yet to come, and who touch us with a sense of a heaven on which we are just beginning to enter.
Though he professes an idealist philosophy, and that way of thinking can be traced in all his writings, he never makes of it a creed or dogma.
His children are welcome to worship in the church which has lost its attraction for him. The skeptic may freely question immortality,--nay, Emerson himself sometimes feels uncertainty. The personal G.o.d, and man"s personal immortality, which the idealist is wont to affirm as definite certainties, Emerson will not explicitly avow or define. Universal good, beauty, order,--these he sees, feels, is sure of. What form belongs to them, let each imagine as best he can. So free, so generous, so simply true is he that not only men of an idealist way of thinking, but all strong and high souls own impulse from him,--the scientist, the positivist, the churchman.
His distinctive note is not self-abnegation, but it is the note which with that makes a perfect harmony. Joy in G.o.d and self-sacrificing love are the two wings of the angelic life. Long have the preachers taught self-sacrifice,--now let one child of G.o.d sing the joy of G.o.d!