Different cla.s.ses of minds require different religions. A mult.i.tude require the pictorial faith and the absolute authority of the Catholic church. A great many require the divine-human figure of Christ. A certain cla.s.s of minds will be pantheistic. To some the wonders of the physical world will be the most impressive revelation. Natures strong in spiritual insight will be transcendentalists. Those in whom personal affection is profound will have the gospel of "In Memoriam"
and Lucy Smith. Active, serviceable, unimaginative men will often be content with a cheerful agnosticism. Some, after pushing their inquiry to the farthest, and keeping it united with right living, will rest in "devout and contented uncertainty."
The advance of knowledge has been the great fact of the world"s intellectual life for the past century.
The increase by this means of material good; the upward push of the people, strengthened by knowledge and by prosperity won through knowledge; the widening and deepening of human sympathy,--these are the great social facts.
The imminent situation is that knowledge has destroyed the old religious basis, and is only just beginning to construct a new religious cultus. Socially, the common people seem on the point of a great advance, while the too eager push for material good brings temporarily a moral injury.
Among the constructive forces are: a knowledge of man and the world which enables us to build on broader foundations than Jesus or St.
Francis; a vivified sense of humanity which gives the emotional force which is always the strongest dynamic factor; and a new sense of natural beauty which feeds the religious life and imparts peace.
The immediate future is uncertain,--the barbarian invasion and the religious wars may have a parallel in another period of disasters. But the large onward movement is clear, and the personal ideal was never at once so reasonable and so ardent as now. Though storms should rise high, faith and hope may hold fast, remembering that
"all the past of Time reveals A bridal dawn of thunder-peals Wherever Thought hath wedded Fact."
Democracy is just a continuation of the upward push which out of the mollusk has made man. Altruism is not the only nor the primary upward force. Before it and along with it goes the individual"s struggle for his own betterment,--the outreach, first, of hunger and s.e.x; then toward finer forms of pleasure; then of moral aspiration. Democracy, socialism are an effort for _common_ betterment; the egoistic merges with the altruistic impulse.
The mind must be held open to the free winds of knowledge. If they can shake the foundations, let them. And just as one"s personal courage must often tremble before personal risks, so there must sometimes be intellectual tremors.
If in the ardent temper and sweet spirit of the New Testament we try to discriminate as to what phases of human conduct receive the chief stress, we find the strongest emphasis is on brotherly love and chast.i.ty. The ethical service of the Christian church has been greatest in the direction of these two qualities. What it has done for purity is beyond our power to measure. And it is just at that point that even yet the struggle of humanity to emerge from the b.e.s.t.i.a.l condition seems most difficult and doubtful. Some writer has remarked that Christianity apparently introduced no really new virtue into human society, with the exception of male chast.i.ty. Shakspere in one sonnet gives tremendous expression to the evil of l.u.s.t, with this conclusion:--
"This all the world doth know; yet none know well To shun the heaven, that leadeth to this h.e.l.l."
Christianity, in a way of its own, opened a gate out of that h.e.l.l. The gate was the power of a pure spiritual affection. Paul describes, in language that strikes home to-day, the war of flesh and spirit. For him, its conclusion is: "O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank G.o.d through Jesus Christ our Lord!" At the crisis there rises in his spirit the consciousness, vivid as a personal presence, of that great, pure, loving soul; and temptation falls dead. Augustine relates more fully a like experience.
The turning-point of his life comes when, still bound after long struggles by a sinful tie, there comes to him the message, "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh to fulfill the l.u.s.ts thereof." The church has not confined itself to a single form of influence. It has invested the command to purity with the sanction of a divine behest; has used threats and penalties; has employed asceticism, often with most disastrous results; has appealed variously to the spiritual imagination with legend and story. The fresh blood of the Northern peoples has come in to reenforce the spent and struggling morality of the South. A romantic conception of love has blended nature"s two great forces--sense and spirit--instead of setting them in opposition, and has invested wedlock with its true sanct.i.ty, in place of the false exaltation of celibacy. And, under various influences, the relation of the s.e.xes has upon the whole been so far heightened that we see this at the end of two thousand years,--that marriage, which Paul himself looked upon as a kind of necessary evil, is recognized as the best guardian and teacher of purity.
The connection between the two most strongly marked phases of Christian morality--between love and purity--is not an arbitrary or accidental one. It is an ideal affection that best masters the sensuous nature.
In the words of "Ecce h.o.m.o," "No heart is pure that is not pa.s.sionate; no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic."
The modern att.i.tude has two broad differences from early Christianity.
Man addresses all his energy to understanding and controlling the forces of nature, instead of regarding them as alien or hostile and his own salvation as a matter of supernatural relation.
And his relation with the Infinite and the Hereafter is far more various, subtle, intimate.
Epictetus gives the heaven of the conscience, Jesus of the heart, Emerson of the intellect.
Man"s problems now are to find the physical and the social heaven,--to rightly correlate the spirit with the body and the earth, and to more perfectly organize society.
The modern man, instead of appealing to Jehovah or Christ, grasps the powers of nature and of life as they are put into his own hands.
Walter Scott writes in his journal, in a sharp exigency: "G.o.d help--no, G.o.d _bless_--man must _help_ himself."
"Love G.o.d and man; what higher rule can there be?" we are asked. But the actual work of the modern man is widely different from what Jesus or Paul perceived. To understand natural forces and ally himself with them; to rightly order that vastly complex organism, the state; to frankly enjoy the pleasures of the healthy body; to discern the beauty of the surrounding world; to reproduce beauty in art; to relish the humor of the world,--these are aims which would have sounded strange to Paul, to Jesus, or to Epictetus.
To seek the best, not for ourselves alone but for others, even at cost to ourselves; to control our lower natures by our higher natures; to feel a relation with the Supreme,--these were the aims and inspirations of the earlier Christianity; and they remain, but with enlarged and new application.
Science has not penetrated to the inner secret of life, which is best reached by other approaches. But it has enormously affected all thinking by the discovery of Evolution. The recognition of growth--a gradual, causal process--in mankind"s whole advance, alters the entire face of history and prophecy. Just as it eliminates supernaturalism from the past, so it guides present progress and inspires while it moderates antic.i.p.ation of the future.
There grows the sense of some unfathomable unity. Creator and creature are not sharply separated, as by the theologians: they are even more closely united than the "father" and "son" of Jesus. So, too, the unity of humanity--of all souls--until the idea of personal immortality blends with some dimly conceived but greater reality.
It is impossible to portray under a single image the ideal of to-day, because many ideals coexist. There is infinite difference of moral development, as many characters as there are men; the variety of the spiritual world is like that of the material world, and the diversity gives richness and charm. And the forward movement of the ages is immeasurably complex. Yet certain broad movements are traceable.
"Do right and fear nothing," was the word of Stoicism.
"G.o.d is holy; be ye holy," was the word of Hebraism, growing clearer, stamping itself by inst.i.tutions and inheritance.
"G.o.d is love; love ye," was the word of Christianity. The life of Jesus was the symbol of that idea, and gave impulse and law to the new society.
It was in keeping with the Stoic doctrine of Providence, but it came through the imagination to the heart, more powerful than the calm utterance of reason.
The Christian sense of sin was the intense force to rouse the ancient world from its easy-going content. It was necessary that purity should become a pa.s.sion. The dogma of depravity was the intellectual exaggeration of this. A G.o.d who died to save men from sin and h.e.l.l was its natural counterpart.
When the church had worked under the control of these ideas for fifteen hundred years, there woke again in mankind the sense of joy, beauty, knowledge, as good in themselves and G.o.d-given. Humanity was only half ripe for this truth, and again the austere impulse rea.s.serted itself in Calvinism, in Puritanism, in the Jesuits. But knowledge, joy, naturalness, went on growing; they have changed the conception of religion itself, turning it to the sense of a present as well as a future fruition.
The sense of human suffering comes in our day to full realization. The best impulse of the time throws itself against that, as formerly against sin. Just as the evil of sin was overstated and became an exaggeration and terror, so the sense of human suffering is often overstretched and becomes pessimism. But, essentially, a fresh and powerful enthusiasm a.s.sails the evils of mankind. It aims to educate and elevate the whole being,--to save men. It has in science a new instrument.
The old hope of some speedy millennium is gone. We see that the general advance must be slow. But we also see that the imperfect condition is not so terrible as it was once supposed: it does not incur h.e.l.l; it does not imply total depravity; it may even serve as stepping-stone to higher things.
All the higher phases of man"s nature point together. The highest thought says, "All is well;" the deepest feeling, "G.o.d is love;" the human affection realizes its immortality; the seeing eye finds universal beauty; the profoundest yearning enfolds the promise, "I shall be satisfied."
We may follow the story by another thread.
A human society inspired and bound together by the highest traits, consciously ensphered in a divine power and inspired by it,--this is the ideal which has been reached toward and grown toward through all the ages.
Its primitive germ was Israel"s hope of a splendid national future.
In Jesus this expanded into the Kingdom of G.o.d among men,--that is, the perfect reign of goodness, love, and the human-divine relation of son and father. He looked for its realization by miracle, and when that failed said, "Thy will be done," and died, trusting all to the Father.
His followers, at first under the dream of his second coming, settled into a society bound together by common rules and ideals. The Catholic church was born and grew. Mixed with all human elements of imperfection, it advanced a long way toward the goal, then divided its sway with new energies.
In the political and social life of Europe, and especially of England, there slowly grew up a population fit for self-government in place of government by the few.
Thomas More foresaw prophetically a community which should realize the loftiest vision, and whose bond should be human and social, not theologic.
The Puritan tried to enforce the will of G.o.d, as he understood it, by authority,--to build a commonwealth on Hebrew lines. He failed, in England and America, but stamped his character on both peoples.
Then came the essay of the Quaker toward a reign of peace.