The experience was constantly repeated in the early church. It was the most striking of all those genuine "miracles"--the wonders of spiritual creation and growth--which were the wealth of the Christian society.
At the most dark and depressing hour of that society; when in gaining dominion it had lowered its purity, and before the barbarian invasion the whole social fabric shook,--that same miracle of a divine love, realized as a saving and transforming force, was wrought in the great personality of Augustine, and inspired through him anew the life of the church.
The intellectual vestment of this experience--the form under which the crude thought of these men gave it body and substance--was the Incarnation and the Atonement. Those doctrines have lasted through all changes, even until this day, because of the pearl of truth cased in their rough sh.e.l.ls.
When now we try to express that truth in its simplicity--finding always a great difficulty in putting in articulate words the deep things of the spirit--we say that the man who sees and sorrows for and seeks to escape from his wrong deed or habit may come into the consciousness that he will escape,--may feel with a profound a.s.surance that he is upborne by some power of good which will save him and bless him. He is recoverable; he is lovable; he is loved, and shall be saved. And the way in which that consciousness is awakened is oftenest by the contact of some soul which the sinner reverences as better than himself, which knows his guilt and loves him in spite of it, and declares to him that he shall live and recover. The minister of forgiveness may be a mother or a wife; it may be the sincere priest speaking to the sincere penitent; it may be Christ or Madonna; it may be the unnamed Power whose token is the sunset, or the rainbow, or the voice within the heart.
The especial limitation of Christianity at its birth was the expectation of the speedy ending of the existing order. Hence an indifference to such subjects, belonging to permanent human society, as industry, government, knowledge, the control of the forces of nature.
As to all these, the limitations of Christianity hindered its progress; as to each, the natural and secular world exercised an influence unconfessed or striven against; as to each, the perception was reached that it must be recognized by religion, until in our day the _Here_ and _Now_ takes the foreground in place of the _Hereafter_. The personal life in its present relations, the human society under earthly conditions,--these give to us the main field and problem. The hereafter of the individual gives background and atmosphere.
For "holy living and dying" we put simply holy living. To give fullness and perfection to each day, each act, is all and is enough.
The thought of death should not swerve or alter a particle. When the last hour of life comes, what retrospect shall we wish? Only to have filled life with the best.
The religious emotion will often and freely personify, and must do so.
The highest feeling takes on a quality of love, and love goes to a personal object. It is sometimes as toward one divine friend and G.o.d, sometimes toward the one beloved human being, sometimes the Christ, sometimes a universe of living and loving beings. These are distinctions of form rather than of substance, the expression by different minds of the same reality.
To the modern mind, the distinct personification of deity is less natural than formerly. The very vastness of the Infinite, as we conceive it, precludes this definite personalizing of it as a habitual mode of thought or basis of conduct. Yet under lofty and high-wrought emotion, the yearning of the soul toward the Supreme Power often breaks spontaneously into the language of personality. In the exquisite sense of deliverance from sharp trouble,--when the trouble itself seems more than justified by the heightened gladness, as in t.i.tian"s a.s.sumption the face of the Virgin Mother shines in the welcome of that heaven to which the way has led through all earthly and motherly sorrow,--in such emergence, the heart utters again the very words of the Psalmist: "I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications.
The sorrows of death compa.s.sed me, and the pains of h.e.l.l gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow. Then called I upon the name of the Lord, O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul! Gracious is the Lord and righteous; yea, our G.o.d is merciful. Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with me. For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling."
If we would weigh and measure the value of mankind, we have no scales or measures. As much is to be said for the badness of men as for their goodness. Still more impossible is it to trace their individual responsibility for what they are. But the determination of the value of mankind, even the lowest, is by a different process from that of the speculative intellect. Are men worthy of love? Love them, and you shall know! The att.i.tude of love vindicates itself. No one who has heartily given himself to the service of others turns back saying, "They are not worth it."
Encompa.s.sing light creates in the developing creature an eye. So encompa.s.sing love--human love--draws out response in its object, makes it lovable.
One cla.s.s of truths are certain for all and at all times. These are such as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; the obligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true att.i.tude; receptivity toward knowledge, beauty, and humor.
There are other perceptions which vary greatly in their frequency and vividness. They are impulses of rea.s.surance, joy, hope, victory. They surpa.s.s all other sources of strength and comfort.
They cannot, in their clearness and fullness, be transferred or expressed; they cannot even, by the mind experiencing them, be resolved into intellectual propositions.
They are not peculiar to what we usually call religion. The experience of love between man and woman opens a new world. So does music; so do all the finer forms of happiness.
All these, when they come, are felt as gifts,--as revelations. They are not within our direct and immediate command.
What relation do they bear to the life which is within our command,--to our deliberate, purposeful, self-ordered life? First, in that life we cultivate the two traits which fit us for the vision, though they do not command it,--sensitiveness and self-control.
So no man or woman can foresee whether the love of wedlock shall come to them, but each can render himself worthy of love, and no high experience of love is possible except to one trained long beforehand in purity and unselfishness.
Next, these higher moods, when they come, should be accepted as giving law to the unillumined hours. They do not change, but they intensify, the aim at rightness of life, and they add to it the spirit of courage, of trust, of joy.
The hope of immortality--the a.s.surance of some good beyond, which we express by "immortality"--is born from a sense of the value of life.
Life is felt to be precious as it is consecrated by the moral struggle in ourselves, and as it is viewed in others with sympathy. We give our moral effort and our sympathy, and these are encountered by the tremendous play of human joys and sorrows, and the result is a sense of life as intensely significant.
The feeling of communion with Christ, with angels and saints,--its natural basis is the reverence and love for great souls. As such reverence and love is deep, and as death removes the objects, the sense of a continued communion arises spontaneously. No form of our consciousness is more vivid and profound than this. It has a background of mystery,--mystery scarcely deeper or other than that which envelops the earthly love. _What_ do I love in the friend whom here I see? Is it the individuality, or that higher power of which it transmits a ray?
The sense of this blending of the human and divine does not weaken or perplex our affection for the friend we see; it intensifies and sublimates it. So, in the sense of communion with the unseen friend, it disturbs us not that we cannot say how much is there of the remembered personality, how much of the one eternal deity. The essence of what we loved and love is sure and undying.
The creature succeeds as its functions and organs become fitted to its environment. Man succeeds as he fits himself to a moral environment.
To the undeveloped man the world is full of forces which are hostile or indifferent to his right action; a thousand things distract him from doing right; he is like a creature in a watery world with half-developed fins. But as a man becomes morally developed he finds moral opportunity everywhere,--finds occasion for service, for admiration, grat.i.tude, reverence, hope. This moral development includes the whole man: he needs a good body; he needs much that only inheritance can supply. His own effort is one factor, not the sum of factors. We must be patient with ourselves,--accept our inevitable imperfections as part of the grand plan, and find a joy in what is above and beyond ourselves.
Man first solves the problem of his own life,--finds the key in devotion to the highest ideal of character,--finds the answer in moral growth following his effort, forgiveness meeting his repentance, human love answering his love, beauty meeting his desire, truth opening to his search, a support and a.s.surance found in emergency.
Then, and only then, he can rightly study the world. For he must first have the standard of values in human life; he must have, too, the utter devotion to truth.
Studying the universe, he learns that man has come into being through the processes of material law,--that the aeons of astronomy and geology have been working toward his production. He finds that man develops into moral man, with the power of choice and of love; develops into a being loyal and sensitive to duty and to his kind. This type of man tends to become the universal type. Human goodness tends to spread itself. There is a society, living from age to age, of those devoted to the good of man: this sentiment grows purer, more enlightened, more enthusiastic; it is the heart of all reforms, all social progress; no equal power opposes it. It is combated by selfishness, greed, ignorance, violence, but these forces have no spiritual cohesion among themselves, no inner unity; they are destined to fall before the advance of the higher spirit.
Hand in hand with this advancing goodness goes advancing knowledge, growing sense of beauty, greater powers of happiness.
We see thus a power working for good through man, making him its instrument, absorbing him into itself.
The movement is continuous, from the star-mist to the saint.
This is one element in the sum of things. It is the element that man knows best. The lives of the gnat and the tiger he scarcely more than guesses at. Other possible existences than his own there may be, even within this mundane sphere, of which he knows nothing. Of humanity he knows something, and he sees that it is moved toward the goal of perfection.
The power which thus moves it he inevitably identifies with that which he has found urging himself toward goodness, touching him in his best estate with a sense of harmony, and sustaining him in all emergencies.
To this Power of Good he devotes himself and trusts himself. His supreme prayer is, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." He seeks to be used by this power for its own ends; better than any wish he can frame must be the end to which it works.
The final product of the world-forces, the flower of the universe, the child of G.o.d, is man, in his fidelity, tenderness, yearning. To him belong the saint"s aspiration, the poet"s vision, the mother"s love.
And this highest type, by all its finest faculties, reaches toward a hereafter.
The ruling power turns often a harsh face upon its creatures. There is unbounded suffering. There is the perpetual destruction of the individual. Even the moral growth meets obstacles often insurmountable; inheritance limits; circ.u.mstances betray; we see sudden falls and slow deterioration; whole races wane.
But we see that evil is somehow a stepping-stone to all our good.
Heroism, piety, tenderness, have been born out of pain. The expectation of a hereafter gives hope that no individual moral germ is lost. And we see that the crowning victory of life is the persistence of man"s good against the evil; as in the mother whose love the prodigal cannot exhaust; in the Siberian exile who will not despair; in Jesus when before the cross he prays, "Thy will be done." This is faith, this is the soul"s supreme act,--the allegiance to good, the trust in good, in face of the very worst. Man, in that depth feels lifted by a power transcending himself. So, when the beloved is taken by death, the heart, in face of that loss, loves on; feels its love greater than that which has befallen; says, "O Death, where is thy sting! O grave, where is thy victory!"
The best living unites us closely and mysteriously with some greater whole of which we are a part. The three great faculties are knowledge, conduct, love. Knowledge finds always new objects, new connections, a more perfect and wonderful whole. Right conduct brings a sense of being in true relations,--of fulfilling some high destiny. Love blends the individual with the universal; its successive steps are the highest form of human education.
Christianity was a feminine religion in its virtues, as purity and tenderness; and also in its att.i.tude of pure dependence, submission, pet.i.tion. The masculine elements have not been duly recognized as religious, even when having a great place in the actual working of things,--self-reliance, physical hardihood, civic virtue, the pursuit of truth.
In her subject state, woman has learned piety. She brings that as she emerges into her free state, her gift to man, as his to her is strength and self-reliance.
The moral power of the dogmatic systems has been very limited. They pretended to all knowledge and all power, but they have only gone a little way to sweeten and purify human life. The "enthusiasm of humanity" advances society farther in a decade than the old religion did in a century.
We are taught by scientists the extreme slowness with which races have improved. But do we know how fast races or families can improve if brought in contact with the most helpful influences of other races or families? Has that experiment ever been fairly tried? Do not results with hardened convicts, with Indian and negro pupils, suggest that there may be an immense acceleration of moral progress?