E. - Society in America, Volume 2 (of 2) - 35

E.

DISCOURSE ON THE WANTS OF THE TIMES.

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The age, and especially the country, in which we live, are peculiar. They, therefore, require a peculiar kind of instruction, and, I may say, a peculiar mode of dispensing christian truth. They are unlike any which have preceded us. They are new, and consequently demand what I have called a new Dispensation of Christianity, a dispensation in perfect harmony with the new order of things which has sprung into existence. Yet of this fact we seem not to have been generally aware. The character of our religious institutions, the style of our preaching, the means we rely upon for the production of the christian virtues, are such as were adopted in a distant age, and fitted to wants which no longer exist, or which exist only in a greatly modified shape.

It is to this fact that I attribute that other fact, of which I have heretofore spoken, that our churches are far from being filled, and that a large and an increasing portion of our community take very little interest in religious institutions, and manifest a most perfect indifference to religious instruction. These persons do not stay away from our churches because they have no wish to be religious, no desire to meet and commune in the solemn Temple with their fellow men, and with the Great and Good Spirit which reigns everywhere around and within them. It is not because they do not value this communion, that they do not come into our churches, but because they do not find it in our churches. They cannot find, under the costume of our institutions, and our instructions, the Father-God, to love and adore, with whom to hold sweet and invigorating communings; they are unable to find that sympathy of man with man which they crave—to obtain that response to the warm affections of the heart, which would make them love to assemble together and bow together before one common altar.

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But were this difficulty obviated, were seats easily obtained by all, and so obtained as to imply on the part of no one an assumption of superiority, or a confession of inferiority, the preaching which is most common is far from being satisfactory, and the wants of the times would by no means be met. I say the preaching which is most common is far from being satisfactory; but not because it is not true. I accuse no preacher of not preaching the truth. The truth is, I believe, preached in all churches, of all denominations, to a certain extent at least; but not the right kind of truth, or not truth under the aspects demanded by the wants of the age and country. All truth is valuable, but all truths are not equally valuable; and all aspects of the same truths are not at all times, in all places, equally attractive. The fault I find with preaching in general is, that it is not on the right kind of topics to interest the masses in this age and country. The topics usually discussed may once have been of the highest importance; they may now be very interesting to the scholar, or to the student in his closet, or with his fellow-students; but they are, to a great extent, matters of perfect indifference to the many. The many care nothing about the meaning of a Greek particle, or the settling of a various reading; nothing about the meaning of dogmas long since deprived of life, about the manners and customs of a people of whom they may have heard, but in whose destiny they feel no peculiar interest; they are not fed by descriptions of a Jewish marriage-feast, a reiteration of Jewish threatenings, nor with beautiful essays, and rounded periods, on some petty duty, or some insignificant point in theology. They want strong language, stirring discourses on great principles, which go deep into the universal mind, and strike a chord which vibrates through the universal heart. They want to be directed to the deep things of God and humanity, and enlightened and warmed on matters with which they every day come in contact, and which will be to them matters of kindling thought and strong feeling through eternity.

That our religious institutions, or our modes of dispensing christian truth, are not in harmony with the wants of the times, is evinced by the increase of infidelity, and the success infidels have in their exertions to collect societies and organise opposition to Christianity. There is sustained in this city a society of infidels: free inquirers, I believe they call themselves. Why has this society been collected? Not, I will venture to say, because their leader is an infidel. People do not go to hear him because he advocates atheistical or pantheistical doctrines; not because he denies Christianity, rejects the bible, and indulges in various witticisms at the expense of members of the clerical profession; but because he opposes the aristocracy of our churches, and vindicates the rights of the mind. He succeeds, not because he is an infidel, but because he has hitherto shown himself a democrat.

Men are never infidels for the sake of infidelity. Infidelity—I use not the term reproachfully—has no charms of its own. There is no charm in looking around on our fellow men as mere plants that spring up in the morning, wither and die ere it is night. It is not pleasant to look up into the heavens, brilliant with their sapphire gems, and see no spirit shining there—over the rich and flowering earth, and see no spirit blooming there—abroad upon a world of mute, dead matter, and feel ourselves—alone. It is not pleasant to look upon the heavens as dispeopled of the Gods, and the earth of men, to feel ourselves in the centre of a universal blank, with no soul to love, no spirit with which to commune. I know well what is that sense of loneliness which comes over the unbeliever, the desolateness of soul under which he is oppressed: but I will not attempt to describe it.

I say, then, it is not infidelity that gives the leader of the infidel party success. It is his defence of free inquiry and of democracy. In vindicating his own right to disbelieve Christianity, he has vindicated the rights of the mind, proved that all have a right to inquire fully into all subjects, and to abide by the honest convictions of their own understandings. In doing this he has met the wants of a large portion of the community, and met them as no church has ever yet been able to meet them. I say not that he himself is a free inquirer, but he proclaims free inquiry as one of the rights of man; and in doing this, he has proclaimed what thousands feel, though they may not generally dare own it. The want to inquire, to ascertain what is truth, what and wherefore we believe, is becoming more and more urgent; we may disown, unchurch, anathematise it, but suppress it we cannot. It is too late to stay the progress of free inquiry. The dams and dykes we construct to keep back its swelling tide are but mere resting-places, from which it may break forth in renovated power, and with redoubled fury. It is sweeping on; and, I say, let it sweep on, let it sweep on; the truth has nothing to fear.

Next to the want to inquire, to philosophise, the age is distinguished by its tendency to democracy, and its craving for social reform. Be pleased or displeased as we may, the age is unquestionably tending to democracy; the democratic spirit is triumphing. The millions awake. The masses appear, and every day is more and more disclosed

"The might that slumbers in a peasant's arm."

The voice of the awakened millions rising into new and undreamed-of importance, crying out for popular institutions, comes to us on every breeze, and mingles in every sound. All over the christian world a contest is going on, not as in former times between monarchs and nobles, but between the people and their masters, between the many and the few, the privileged and the unprivileged—and victory, though here and there seeming at first view doubtful, everywhere inclines to the party of the many. Old distinctions are losing their value; titles are becoming less and less able to confer dignity; simple tastes, simple habits, simple manners are becoming fashionable; the simple dignity of man is more and more coveted, and with the discerning it has already become more honourable to call one simply a MAN than a gentleman.

Now it is to this democratic spirit that the leader of the infidel party appeals, and in which he finds a powerful element of his success. Correspondents of his paper attempt even to identify atheism and democracy. I myself once firmly believed that there could be no social progress, that man could not rise to his true dignity without the destruction of religion; I really believed that religious institutions, tastes, and beliefs were the greatest, almost the sole, barrier to human improvement: and what I once honestly believed, is now as honestly believed by thousands, who would identify the progress of humanity with the progress of infidelity.

It is, I own, a new state of things, for infidelity to profess to be a democrat. Hobbes, one of the fathers, if not the father, of modern infidelity, had no sympathy with the masses; Hume and Gibbon dreamed of very little social progress, and manifested no desire to elevate the low, and loosen the chains of the bound. Before Thomas Paine, no infidel writer in our language, to my knowledge, was a democrat, or thought of giving infidelity a democratic tendency. Since his times, the infidel has been fond of calling himself a democrat, and he has pretty generally claimed to be the friend of the masses, and the advocate of progress. He now labours to prove the church aristocratic, to prove that it has no regard for the melioration of man's earthly mode of being. Unhappily, in proportion as he succeeds, the church furnishes him with new instruments of success. In proportion as he seems to identify his infidelity and the democratic spirit, the church disowns that spirit, and declares it wholly opposed to the faith. When, some years since, the thought passed through my head, that there were things in society which needed mending, and I dreamed of being a social reformer I found my bitterest opponents, clergyman as I was among the clergy, and those who were most zealous for the faith. That I erred in the inference I drew from this fact, as unbelievers now err in theirs, I am willing to own; but the fact itself has the appearance of proving that religion and religion's advocates are unfriendly to social progress.

These are the principal reasons why infidelity succeeds. Its advocates meet two great wants, that of free inquiry, and that of social progress—two wants which are at the present time, and in this country, quite urgent—and meet them better than they are met by any of our churches. We need not, then, ascribe their success to any peculiar depravity of the heart, nor to an peculiar obtuseness of the understanding. They are right in their vindication of the rights of the mind, and in advocating social progress. They are wrong only in supposing that free inquiry and the progress of society are elements of infidelity, when they are only, in fact, its accidents. They constitute, in reality, two important elements of religion; as such I own them, accept them, and assure the religious everywhere that they too must accept them, or see religion for a time wholly obscured, and infidelity triumphant.

Infidels are wrong in pretending that infidelity can effect the progress of mankind. Infidelity has no element of progress. The purest morality it enjoins is selfishness. It does not pretend to offer man any higher motives of action than that of self-interest. But self-interest can make no man a reformer. No great reforms are ever effected without sacrifice. In labouring for the benefit of others, we are often obliged to forget ourselves, to expose ourselves, without fear and without regret, to the loss of property, ease, reputation, and sometimes of life itself. He who consults only his own interest will never consent to be so exposed. Or admitting that we could convince men, that to labour for a universal regeneration of mankind is for the greatest ultimate good of each one, the experience of every day proves that no one will do it, when a small, immediate good intervenes which it is necessary to abandon. A small, immediate, present good always outbalances the vastly greater, but distant good. The only principle of reform on which we can rely is love. We must love the human race in order to be able to devote ourselves to their greatest good, to be able to do and to dare everything for their progress. But we cannot love what does not appear to us loveable. We cannot love mankind unless we see something in them which is worthy to be loved. But infidelity strips man of every quality which we can love. In the view of the infidel, man is nothing more than an animal, born to propagate his species and die. It is religion that discloses man's true dignity, reveals the soul, unveils the immortality within us, and presents in every man the incarnate God, before whom he may stand in awe, whom he may love and adore. Infidelity cannot, then, effect what its friends assert that it can. It cannot make us love mankind: and not being able to make us love them, it is not able to make us labour for their amelioration.

But I say this, without meaning to reproach infidels. I do and must condemn infidelity; but I have taught myself to recognise in the infidel a man, an equal, a brother, one for whom Jesus died, and for whom I, too, if need were, should be willing to die. I have no right to reproach the infidel, no right to censure him for his speculative opinions. If those opinions are wrong, as I most assuredly believe they are, it is my duty to count them his misfortune, not his crime, and to do all in my power to aid him to correct them. We wrong our brother, when we refuse him the same tolerance for his opinions which we would have him extend to ours. We wrong Christianity, whenever we censure, ridicule, or treat with the least possible disrespect any man for his honest opinions, be they what they may. We have often done violence to the gospel in our treatment of those who have, in our opinion, misinterpreted or disowned it. We have not always treated their opinions, as we ask them to treat ours. We have not always been scrupulous to yield to others the rights we claim for ourselves. We have been unjust, and our injustice has brought, as it always must, reproach upon the opinions we avow, and the cause we profess. There was, there is, no need of being unjust, nor uncharitable to unbelievers. We believe we have the truth. Let us not so wrong the truth we advocate as to fear it can suffer by any encounter with falsehood. Let us adopt one rule for judging all men, infidels and all; not that of their speculative opinions, but their real moral characters.

I prefer to meet the infidel on his own ground; I freely accept whatever I find him advocating which I believe true, and just as freely oppose whatever he supports which I believe to be false and mischievous. I think him right in his vindication of free inquiry and social progress. I accept them both, not as elements of infidelity, but as elements of Christianity. Should it now be asked, as it has been, what I mean by the new dispensation of Christianity, the new form of religion, of which I have often spoken in this place and elsewhere, I answer, I mean religious institutions, and modes of dispensing religious truth and influences, which recognise the rights of the mind, and propose social progress as one of the great ends to be obtained. In that New Church of which I have sometimes dreamed, and I hope more than dreamed, I would have the unlimited freedom of the mind unequivocally acknowledged. No interdict should be placed upon thought. To reason should be a christian, not an infidel, act. Every man should be encouraged to inquire, and to inquire not a little merely, within certain prescribed limits; but freely, fearlessly, fully, to scan heaven, air, ocean, earth, and to master God, nature, and humanity, if he can. He who inquires for truth honestly, faithfully, perseveringly, to the utmost extent of his power, does all that can be asked of him; he does God's will, and should be allowed to abide by his own conclusions, without fear of reproach from God or man.

In asserting this I am but recalling the community to Christianity. Jesus reproved the Jews for not of themselves judging what is right, thus plainly recognising in them, and if in them in us, both the right and the power to judge for themselves. "If I do not the works of my Father," says Jesus, "believe me not;" obviously implying both man's right and ability to determine what are, and what are not, "works of the Father:" that is, in other words, what is or what is not truth. An apostle commands us to "stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free," "to prove all things," and to "hold fast that which is good." In fact, the very spirit of the gospel is that of freedom; it is called a "law of liberty," and its great end is to free the soul from all restraint, but that of its obligation to do right. They wrong it who would restrain thought, and hand-cuff inquiry; they doubt or deny its truth and power who fear to expose it to the severest scrutiny, the most searching investigation; and, were I in an accusing mood, I would bring the charge of infidelity against every one who will not or dare not inquire, who will not or dare not encourage inquiry in others.

I have said that social progress must enter into the church I would have established, as one of the ends to be gained. Social progress holds a great place in the sentiments of this age. Infidels seize upon it; find in it one of the most powerful elements of their success. I too would seize upon it, give it a religious direction, and find in it an element of the triumph of Christianity. I have a right to it. As a Christian, I am bound to rescue social progress, or if you please, the democratic spirit, from the possession of the infidel. He has no right to it; he has usurped it through the negligence of the church. It is a christian spirit. Jesus was the man, the teacher of the masses. They were fishermen, deemed the lowest of his countrymen, who were his apostles; they were the "common people," who heard him gladly; they were the Pharisee and Sadducee, the chief priest and scribe, the rich and the distinguished, in one word the aristocracy of that age, who conspired against him, and caused him to be crucified between two thieves. He himself professed to be anointed of God, because he was anointed to preach the gospel to the poor, to proclaim liberty to them that are bound, and to let the captive go free. To John he expressly assigns the kindling fact, that the poor had the gospel preached unto them, as the most striking proof of his claims to the Messiahship.

And what was this gospel which was preached to the poor? Was it a gospel suited to the views of the Autocrat of the Russias, such as despots ever love? Did it command the poor, in the name of God, to submit to an order of things of which they are the victims, to be contented to pine in neglect, and die of wretchedness? No, no: Jesus preached no such tyrant-pleasing and tyrant-sustaining gospel. The gospel which he preached, was the gospel of human brotherhood. He preached the gospel, the holy evangile, good news to the poor, when he proclaimed them members of the common family of man, when he taught that we are all brethren, having one and the same Father in heaven; he preached the gospel to the poor, when he declared to the boastingly religious of his age, that even publicans and harlots would go into the kingdom of heaven sooner than they; when he declared that the poor widow, who out of her necessities, cast her two mites into the treasury of the Lord, cast in more than all the rich; and whoever preaches the universal fraternity of the human race, preaches the gospel to the poor, though he speak only to the rich.

There is power in this great doctrine of the universal brotherhood of mankind. It gives the reformer a mighty advantage. It enables him to speak words of an import, and in a tone, which may almost wake the dead. Hold thy hand, oppressor, it permits him to say, thou wrongest a brother! Withhold thy scorn, thou bitter satirist of the human race, thou vilifiest thy brother! In passing by that child in the street yesterday, and leaving it to grow up in ignorance and vice, notwithstanding God had given thee wealth to train it to knowledge and virtue, thou didst neglect thy brother's child. Oh, did we but feel this truth, that we are all brothers and sisters, children of the same parent, we should feel that every wrong done to a human being, was violence done to our own flesh!

I say again, that Jesus was emphatically the teacher of the masses; the prophet of the working men if you will; of all those who "labour and are heavy laden." Were I to repeat his words in this city or elsewhere, with the intimation that I believed they meant something; were I to say, as he said, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven," and to say it in a tone that indicated I believed he attached any meaning to what he said, you would call me a "radical," an "agrarian," a "trades unionist," a "leveller," a "disorganiser," or some other name equally barbarous and horrific. It were more than a man's reputation for sanity, or respectability as a Christian, is worth, to be as bold even in these days in defence of the "common people" as Jesus was.

I say still again, that Jesus was emphatically the teacher of the masses, the prophet of the people. Not that he addressed himself to any one description of persons to the exclusion of another, not that he sought to benefit one portion of the human race at another's expense; for if any one thing more than another distinguished him, it was, that he rose above all the factitious distinctions of society, and spoke to universal man, to the universal mind, and to the universal heart. I call him the prophet of the people, because he recognised the rights of humanity; brought out, and suffered and died to establish principles, which in their legitimate effect, cannot fail to bring up the low and bowed down, and give to the many, who, in all ages, and in all countries, have been the tools of the few, their due rank and social importance. His spirit, in its political aspect, is what I have called the democratic spirit; in its most general aspect, it is the spirit of progress, in the individual and in the race, towards perfection, towards union with God. It is that spirit which for eighteen hundred years has been at work in society, like the leaven hidden in three measures of meal; before which slavery, in nearly all Christendom, has disappeared; which has destroyed the warrior aristocracy, nearly subdued the aristocracy of birth, which is now struggling with the aristocracy of wealth, and which promises, ere long, to bring up and establish the true aristocracy—the aristocracy of merit.

If it be now asked, as it has been asked, to what denomination I belong, I reply, that I belong to that denomination, whose starting point is free inquiry, which acknowledges in good faith, and without any mental reservation, the rights of the mind, and which proposes the melioration of man's earthly mode of being, as one of the great ends of its labours. I know not that such a denomination exists. I know, in fact, of no denomination, which, as a denomination, fully meets the wants of the times. Yet let me not be misinterpreted. I am not here to accuse, or to make war upon, any existing denomination; I contend with no church; I have no controversy with my Calvinistic brother, none with my Arminian, Unitarian, or Trinitarian brother. Every church has its idea, its truth; and more truth, much more, I believe, than any one church will admit of in those from which it differs. For myself, I delight to find truth in all churches, and I own it wherever I find it; but still I must say, I find no church which owns, as its central truth, the great central truth of Christianity—a truth which may now be brought out of the darkness in which it has remained, and which it is now more than ever necessary to reinstate in its rights.

Let me say, then, that though I am here for an object, which is not, to my knowledge, the special object of any existing church, I am not here to make war upon any church, nor to injure any one in the least possible degree. I would that they all had as much fellowship for one another, as I have for them all! I interfere with none of them. I am here for a special object, but one so high, one so broad, they may all cooperate in gaining it. My creed is a simple one. Its first article is, free, unlimited inquiry, perfect liberty to enjoy and express one's own honest convictions, and perfect respect for the free and honest inquirer, whatever be the results to which he arrives. The second article is social progress. I would have it a special object of the society I would collect, to labour to perfect all social institutions, and raise every man to a social position, which will give him free scope for the full and harmonious development of all his faculties. I say, perfect, not destroy, all social institutions. I do not feel that God has given me a work of destruction. I would improve, preserve, whatever is good, and remedy whatever is defective, and thus reconcile the Conservator and the Radical. My third article is, that man should labour for his soul in preference to his body. Man has a soul; he is not mere body. He has more than animal wants. He has a soul, which is in relation with the absolute and the Infinite—a soul, which is for ever rushing off into the unknown, and rising through a universe of darkness up to the "first Good and the first Fair." This soul is immortal. To perfect it is our highest aim. I would encourage inquiry; I would perfect society, not as ultimate ends, but as means to the growth and maturity of man's higher nature—his soul.

These are my views, and views which, I believe, meet the wants of the times. They make war upon no sect of Christians. They are adopted in the spirit of love to humanity, and they can be acted upon only in the spirit of peace. They threaten no hostility, except to sin: with that, indeed, they call us to war. We must fight against all unrighteousness, against spiritual wickedness in high places, and in low places; but the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but spiritual. We must go forth to the battle in faith and love, go forth to vindicate the rights of the mind, to perfect society, to make it the abode of all the virtues, and all the graces, to clothe man in his native dignity, and enable him to look forth in the image of his Maker upon a world of beauty.

This is my object. I am not here to preach to working men, nor to those who are not working men, in the interests of aristocracy, nor of democracy. I am here for humanity; to plead for universal man; to unfurl the banner of the cross on a new and more commanding position, and call the human race around it. I am here to speak to all who feel themselves human beings; to all whose hearts swell at the name of man; to all who long to lessen the sum of human misery, and increase that of human happiness; to all who have any perception of the Beautiful and Good, and a craving for the Infinite, the Eternal, and Indestructible, on whom to repose the wearied soul and find rest—to all such is my appeal: to them I commit the object I have stated, and before which I stand in awe, and entreat them by all that is good in their natures, holy in religion, or desirable in the joy of a regenerated world, to unite and march to its acquisition, prepared to dare with the hero, to suffer with the saint, or to die with the martyr.