There are two schemes of religious thought generically in the world, as there has been—and are now to some extent—two systems of astronomical speculation, one obtaining in uncivilized countries, and the other in civilized. One system of astronomical speculation takes the earth as the center around which the heavens revolve. That seems according to our senses; that is the architecture of the heavens according to the natural man. When the Rev. Mr. Jasper, at Richmond, insists that “the sun do move,” he seems to have the judgment and the sense of every seeing man with him. [Laughter.] And we know what comes of it,—uninterpreted and unintelligible and contradictory motions in all the sky; a baffled heaven scribbled o’er with cycle and epicycle. The other system of astronomical speculation takes its start from the sun as the center and the governor of the planetary system, and finds that sun himself, with all his dependent orbs, marching onward through the heavens. And we know what comes of that. (There came a book from Dr. Hill, years ago, which I read with the intensest interest, concerning the relation of the stars.) [Applause.] There comes order and harmony in all the system of the heavens. We measure and weigh the planet in its course. The astronomer catches the comet in its far flight, measures its motion and predicts its course and its return. The butterfly floating in the air is balanced against the sun. Every shell on the beach, every bud on the tree, is brought into relation with the farthest nebula whose lace-work stains the distant azure. It is the astronomy of science; it is the astronomy of advanced and cultivated thought.
There are two systems of religious speculation. The one takes man as its center and starting-point, regarding him as a finished fact, practically. In its grosser forms it does not profess to know, as we have been told by the brother who preceded me, whence he came; but it suspects that his nature is evolved out of the brutal. It does not know whither he is going; but it treats the future as the scoffing French sceptic treated it, as at best “a grand Perhaps.” It does not know about God, or whether there be any God other than the sum of universal forces. It has no moral law except a general average of probable experiences. And so it comes to men and tells them to go on and live as they list. It tells them that there is no fear of retribution, no need of atonement, and it has no place in all its compass for any doctrine of regeneration and of the Holy Spirit of God. I do not mean, of course, that everybody who holds this system will accept fully my statement of it. In fact it is sometimes hard to find out exactly how they state it, or what they mean by their statements themselves. I am reminded occasionally of the man who had a clock which somebody criticised, saying, “Your clock, Mr. Jones, does not keep good time.” “Why,” said he, “it does keep perfectly good time, only you do not understand it. The fact is that when the hands on that clock point to twelve, then it strikes three, and what that means is that it wants twenty minutes to seven. [Laughter and applause.] Now if you will keep that in mind, you will hit the right time in every instance.” [Laughter.] Well, I intend to speak very seriously, and yet I cannot help being reminded by some of the language which is made use of in some of these what-we-call agnostic publications, into which the richest Christian words are sometimes brought as if to give a kind of artificial and fictitious consecration to the doctrine which I think a detestable doctrine underneath,—I can not help being reminded of a very careful paraphrase which was made by a very bright and faithful Indian girl at the school at Hampton. Her teacher told her—she did all of this innocently, of course—to take a certain passage of Roman history and write a paraphrase of it in her own words. So she went at it; and when the teacher read the paraphrase she was astounded at finding this statement in it: That “on a certain time the city was made sick by cooking the entrails of animals.” Well, what on earth that meant she could not imagine, nor how it got into this paraphrase, until she turned to the original passage and then she found the statement that “at a certain time the city was disturbed by intestine broils.” [Great laughter and applause.]
Now, over against that system stands the theology which starts with God as the center, as the Lord and Sovereign and Judge, as well as the Creator of the earth and men upon it; and it takes what God declares, in that which the history of the world declares to be his Word, and what the devout spirit reverently accepts as the Word of God, concerning himself and man, and man’s need, and the hereafter. Here inspiration and redemption, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, retribution in the future, time as the proof of eternity, come vividly before us as the thoughts of God. He shows them to us in characters as broad as if he had written them in a great theodicy of star-fires and enduring orbs in the heavens. This system of theology does not cast any discredit on human nature; it exalts it by showing it the object of divine solicitude. It casts the splendor and the solemnity of eternity upon the present experience and life of man; and it gives to the Bible an immeasurable and an almost inconceivable importance and value.
Now I understand perfectly that the natural tendency of men is to accept the preceding system, as the natural tendency of man is to believe that the earth is the center, and the heavens go around it. Man finds self-consciousness the first element of thought. The impulse of self-assertion appears to be the primary impulse of human nature. It is simply the egotistic man, of whom it might be said, as was said by a friend of mine, speaking rather roughly and not very elegantly about a man who was very egotistic, and who had offended him by his egotism: “I believe that that man thinks that his house is placed where the leg of the compasses was put down when the earth was made round.” [Laughter.] There is a certain tendency in every human heart to feel that it is central, and that it has rights and privileges and possibilities belonging to itself inherently, and with which no being can properly interfere. And civilization works with its multiple forces and instruments and wealth in the same direction, taking a man feeling his lordship of the earth and reminding him more and more, and encouraging him to feel that he is lord of his destiny, and lord of the hereafter as well. There are certain philanthropic sentiments which work in the same direction, no doubt, tending to make men believe that all will be right hereafter somehow or other, and that after some possible brief unpleasantness in the future there will be a universal deliverance and restoration into holiness and its peace. And the secular spirit of the time, intense, widening, ever increasing, moves in the same direction. It enters into literature; it enters into life on every side; it finds no reality in religion; it believes it a matter of poetic aspiration, or of cultivated literary leisure, or of fine speculation, or of social observance, or possibly of ethics, or more likely of æsthetic art; but the grand reality of religion, as a bond uniting the human soul with the divine, it does not recognize or feel. It is this which gives significance and importance to infidel harangues; it is this spirit which spreads beneath and behind them. The harangues are merely the surface pustules, while the disease is within. They are the red and sulphurous flames, while the fires are underneath. And yet they multiply! The business of this city of Portland could not be carried on on the principles of these harangues. There is not a bank or an insurance company here that would not have to shut its doors if it posted within its walls, “This is an agnostic establishment. [Applause.] It is carried on upon these principles: that there is no God about whom we know anything; there is no hereafter probable; man came out of the monkey; and there is no moral law.” Let such sentiments prevail in this city, and it would have been better if the fire of a few years ago had swept away every house within it, and left nothing but the bay and the beach on which to plant a new town. And yet men love to crowd halls and pay money in order to hear these infidel speculations which are in substance as old as the ages.
And thus it comes to pass that religious thought loses its power among those who are not directly touched by such harangues,—that the influence widens continually to make the Bible a neglected book, and to make the Sabbath a secular day, to make the Church a mere convocation of people coming together at leisure to hear a lecture.
It is at such times that the spirit of liberalism, as it is called, in religious speculations tending all the time to loosen the bonds and unstring the strength of the Gospel of Christ, finds opportunity and incitement and comes more widely to prevail. Liberalism! I repudiate the term. [Applause.] I do not understand what function liberality has either in the record or in the interpretation of facts. I do not understand how he is a liberal mathematician who makes his calculations bend to the preferences of himself and of his pupils. I do not understand how he is a liberal chemist who feels at liberty to play fast and loose with the principles of his science, and will not quite affirm whether gunpowder will explode or not when fire touches it. How is he a liberal chart-maker who rubs out all the reefs and rocks and bars and warning headlands from his maps, and shows a smooth coast-line with nothing but smiling shores and welcoming bays? How is he a liberal interpreter of the globe who denies the granite above and the fire beneath, and affirms that the whole is built, if we only knew it, of excellently selected wood-pulp? What possible province has liberality in the record of facts or in the interpretation of them? I understand perfectly what liberality means as toward the opinions of others who differ from us. I understand what liberality means as toward the character of others who are entirely opposed in opinion and in action to us. Coleridge’s canon has always seemed to me perfectly to cover the ground. “Tolerate no belief,” he says, “which you deem false and of injurious tendency, but arraign no belief. The man is more and other than his belief, and God only knows how large or how small a part of him the belief in man may be.” But liberality in the statement of facts—there we want exactness, we want earnestness, we want precise fidelity to the truth of things; and there is no opportunity for what calls itself liberality there. How is it less liberal to tell a man that strychnine will kill him than to tell him that it will certainly give him a pain in his stomach? [Laughter.] How is it less liberal to tell a man that if he goes over Niagara he goes to a sure death, than it is to tell him that if he takes that awful plunge he will almost certainly wet his feet. [Laughter.] No! When a man comes to me and says, “These are the liberal doctrines; there is not probably any God; we do not know where men come from; there is no law above him; there is no retribution—or if there be any, it is a small one—waiting for him,” I say, I perfectly understand your doctrines. There is no reason why I should not. There is nothing immense or complex or mysterious about them,—in fact, they are rather thin. [Laughter.] They remind one of the pillows which one of the waiters stole at a White Mountain hotel where they didn’t have very solid pillows. They knew he stole them, because they found them on him, both of them, in his waistcoat pocket. [Laughter.] We carry these doctrines very easily in our thought and hand. There is nothing massive or majestic about them; there is nothing liberal in them. If a man is true to his convictions, he is true to them; and he has no right to be liberal in the way of giving away a part of what he believes, or hiding it under any mystery of words and imposing upon men with a thought which is not really his. And when I look at the drift and working of such doctrines, I find at once that they tend to build no grand characters; they give no motive to men for repentance and faith; they do not seek, they do not tend, to lift man nearer to the level of the holiness and happiness of God on high; they work only in degradation of character; they authorize and encourage men to imitate their grandfathers, which, on that system of doctrine, is to make beasts of themselves. [Laughter.]
So I turn to the system of truth, which takes God for its center, his law as our rule, his gospel as our light, his Son as our Redeemer, and his immortality as the possible and glorious home of every created being redeemed by the Son of God and renewed by his Spirit; and I say here is the gospel of the ancient time and of the present time. You need not call it antiquated. Everything which is best in the world is old. Sunshine is as old as the earth itself and the sun when the fire-mist was rounded into an orb,—the same to-day, playing on the streets of Portland, as when it played on the bowers of Paradise. The air is old, pouring its refreshing currents into our lungs and renewing our life to-day as in all time past. The great arch of the heavens is old; it has not been taken down and built up again on modern brick-work since the creation. These doctrines are old but full of motion, full of energy as the river is full of movements,—full of life-giving power, as the sunlight and the vital air. They are the doctrines out of which the missionary work sprang,—doctrines in which is all its life and the spring of its power. They are the doctrines of Paul, that first great missionary, of whom we heard in the sermon the other evening. He had strong convictions. He did not doubt. He knew whom he had believed, and was persuaded that he was able to keep him and to save the world. And who is the successor of Paul? Who holds the same faith with him and teaches it with the same earnest fidelity? I do not care to know especially what he believed unless I believe it myself. I do not want any uncertain or broken ice-bridge of outward ordinations between me and the Apostle; I want to have his faith in my heart and to preach it with the emphasis with which he preached it, and then I feel myself a successor of the great missionary to the Roman Empire. [Applause.]
Our fathers had these convictions and because of them they gave of their wealth; they prayed, they sacrificed, they gave themselves to the work. I remember as a lad in a distant school seeing that man to whom our president refers—Champion—who went out from a great fortune to lay his bones in Western Africa in the service of his Master; and though I was a careless boy, unmindful of these things, I remember that his face shone almost as the face of Stephen when he looked up and saw the Lord on high, and the vision of it has never failed to come back to me whenever I have heard his name. They gave themselves. The motive of their missionary work was found in this Gospel of Christ. This was the instrument by which they accomplished their work in other lands. This was the instrument by which Paul wrought his mighty work in his day, and those who followed him in the Empire and in barbarous tribes, wherever they could get access to men. It is this gospel which has built New England. It is this gospel which, under the power of the Spirit of God, is to change the earth—this gospel and nothing else.
Do not let us mask its doctrines in any mystery of words. Do not let us evaporate its doctrines into any thin mist of speculation. Do not let us emasculate it of its energy by taking away any of its vital forces. It seems to me that to state this gospel in novel forms and doubtful forms, in order to conciliate unbelief, is very much like the woman’s wisdom who kept the burglars out of the house by leaving all the valuables on the doorstep. [Laughter.] It seems to me that we shall have no inspiration in us, no great powerful impulse to the work, and no instrument to work with in that work, except as the old gospel of man, not a cultivated monkey but a fallen prince, of God’s law binding on him, of the light of the near eternity flashing on his spirit, of the cross of Christ and its redemptive efficacy, of the Spirit of God with his renewing power—except as this old gospel is not merely in our hands or on our lips, but is in our brains and in our hearts; and then we shall conquer. [Applause.]