As the broad, comprehensive, interior study of literature will give breadth of sympathy, so the broad, comprehensive, and large study of history will give hope. When the fog covers the ocean, and the mariner befogged knows not where he is, and can not tell whence his course has been, nor where it shall be, he sometimes goes aloft and from the top-mast, looking above the fog, discerns the coast in the distance and the entrance into the harbor. In history we rise out of the fog that environs all in the lower level; we look above the fog and over it, and know then the courses we have traced, and see the harbor and the haven not far before us.
III. What is science, and for what purpose do we study it? I use, of course, the word science in its restricted sense, meaning natural science. For two purposes. Nature is a vast and wonderful machine; its mechanism may well arouse both our astonishment and our admiration. If you have a watch that keeps time so that it does not vary more than two or three minutes in a year you are proud of it, and if you should by chance have a watch that did not vary more than one minute in a year you would be a remarkably humble man if you did not boast of it to your acquaintances. But in the heavens the sun and the planets round it have been keeping time for the centuries, and as yet astronomy has not detected an appreciable variation in its time. What a wonderful mechanism is this! If an inventor should construct a furnace which would keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, no manufacturer would be able to supply the orders. But you have within you a furnace such that although you may go from the land of the Esquimaux with the thermometer 40° below zero, to the tropics with the thermometer 110° above zero, this furnace does not allow the habitation in which you dwell to vary more than four or five degrees. What a wonderful mechanism is this nature which we study! And we study this mechanism partly that we may use it, that we may lay hold on these great forces of nature and make them subservient to our will by understanding the laws which regulate and govern them. But nature is more than a machine; nature is also a book, and a wonderful book, written all over in hieroglyphics that require study for their apprehension. It is more than a mechanism. It is a revelation; and it reveals wondrous things to him who knows how to read it aright. Edison and Morse, Copernicus and Newton—they have interpreted nature on the one side; but Wordsworth, and Longfellow, and Bryant—they have interpreted nature on the other, and the one class of interpretations is as valuable as the other. We study nature as a mechanism that we may know how to use it; we study nature as a book that we may know how to read it.
Now, all that which is most valuable in nature, as a mechanism, we lay hold of and use without going through the labor necessary in the original examination by the first investigator. We do not need to understand the laws of heat and steam to use them; some one has learned the laws, and has brought fire and water together and has pronounced a nuptial blessing over them, and a child has been born of the marriage, and we take steam for our slave without knowing the ritual which married the father and mother. Some one must have learned how to reach his hand to the cloud, and bring down the electricity, make it run our errands and serve the purpose of our illumination; but we do not need to know the processes in order to sit under the light. Not only is it true that the mechanical uses that come from natural sciences we get without going through the processes, but the literary and spiritual we get also. Others have been turning over the pages of this marvelous book and have been reading it to us, and unconsciously, unknowingly, almost without the sense that we have been learning anything, we have learned great lessons in this book of nature. Scientists on the one side and theologians on the other have put science and religion into antagonism with one another. But they are sister teachers of the race; science has received all its life from the late comprehended revelation of the first chapter of Genesis that nature is man’s servant, not his god; and theology has learned some of its profoundest lessons from the book of nature which science has interpreted. Consider for one moment what a fundamental religious lesson we have learned in the school-room of science almost without knowing that she was our teacher. The ancient Hebrews believed that Palestine was the world; all the rest was a mere outlying district environing it, the back yard as it were. The Mediterranean was the Great Sea, the little pond of Galilee was the Sea of Galilee, the sun and moon and stars were torches for man’s illumination—that was their conception of the universe. With that conception it is not strange that they had an equally insignificant and unworthy conception of the God of the world, a conception against which the inspired writers were continually struggling, and from which they were continually endeavoring to lift the people up. When the Philistines fought against the Israelites and captured the ark of God they were in triumph. “We have captured God,” they thought; and the Israelites were almost equally in despair, for they also half thought that Jehovah had been carried off a prisoner. Now, science, even more than revelation, has been enlarging our conceptions of this universe. The Holy Land, a province about as large as Vermont, is no longer the earth; the Atlantic and the Pacific are the great seas; this globe on which we live is but one of the smaller globes of the planetary system; and the great planetary system itself is but a smaller one of the great planetary systems which are circling around some vast and distant sun. Science has taught us too that all this universe is linked together, bound together by a common law, bound together by a common order of phenomena. It has investigated the sun and the stars, it has analyzed their light, it has shown us that the substances of these bodies are identical with the substances of ours. It has taught us the unity of nature, it has taught us the vastness of nature. There are stars in the firmament which you can see with the naked eye, on which if a man were standing with a telescope fine enough and powerful enough to see what is transpiring on this globe, and should look through it to-day, he would see not this congregation assembled under this roof, but the first outbreaking of the revolution, so long does it take light to traverse from our globe to the stars, light that takes but eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. There are stars so distant that he would see not Chautauqua gathered here to-night, but the crucifixion of Christ taking place on the hill of Calvary; stars so distant, that with a telescope powerful enough to carry the message of this world to his sight, he would see Abraham coming out of the land of his idolatry into the promised land; stars so distant that he would see this earth first taking on its brightness in the birth-day of its glory. So vast is our universe that the mind can not attempt to comprehend its majestic distances. It is not theology, it is not religion, it is not even the Bible that has unfolded this vastness; it is science. It is impossible that men who have once learned anything of this greatness of creation, or anything of this unity of creation, should ever bow down again before idols of wood and stone. So long as men thought that the laws of the material universe were antagonistic and anarchic, that the universe was made up of warring tribes and provinces, so long it was not strange that they should worship many gods. So long as they thought that it was a little province on which they lived, the boundaries of which they could themselves measure with their tape-line, they might well worship before images they had formed with their utterances or with their hands. But to-day you might burn every Bible in the land, you might burn every church and Sunday-school house, you might put all the priests and ministers in America on the great bonfire, and consume them as well, and then you might erase from every mind every lesson that had been learned from church or Sunday-school, from priest or minister, and this nation could not go back to idolatry, unless it went back to the utter barbarism of utter ignorance. That which is highest and supremest in science you can learn without becoming a scientist; and you can not learn it without learning the large reverence that is the very foundation of religion.
IV. What is philosophy? The study of philosophy is the study of the laws which govern the spiritual realm, as the study of natural science is the study of the laws which govern the natural and the physical realm. It is not studying Hegel, and Kant, and Schleiermacher; it is not studying Hickock or Hopkins; it is not studying what philosophers have thought—they are the mere translators, the mere “ponies.” Philosophy is the law of humanity, either social or individual. The study of philosophy is the study of the laws which God has ordained for the binding of men together into a common organism, or for the government of their individual lives. Men believed that the foundation of the State was a compact, and that each citizen gave up something of his rights for the common welfare; they believed that the foundation of the Nation was a compact in which each State gave up something which it had of right to secure the advantage of a commonwealth. So believing, they concluded that any State might withdraw from its allegiance, and they might have easily concluded that any individual might withdraw from his allegiance. It is only as we learned that we are born into the government and made a part of the State from the beginning by the ordinance of God, that we have learned what is the bond that has bound the nation together. Revolting from the Romish doctrine that marriage is a sacrament, Protestantism has been teaching for years that it is merely a civil contract. We are reaping the result of this false teaching. To-day in Puritan Connecticut, the minister can not tie the marriage bond much faster than the courts across the street can dissolve it. We have yet to learn that marriage is more than a civil contract, that it is an ordinance of God; that he who made man and woman made them that these twain should become one flesh, and made the home to be the first Church and the first State. When we have learned that, we shall have learned the foundation of the home as we have learned the foundation of the State. To study philosophy is to study the laws which govern society in its organism. All text-books are only instructions to teach us how to study life itself, which is the great text-book. To study philosophy is also to study the laws which govern the individual. It is to know that God has made you body, soul and spirit; that he has given you a physical organism, wonderful, but simply a mechanism in your hands; that he has given you a mental power wonderful in its reasoning qualities, but with its partial parallels in the animals about you; it is to know that far above the body and the mind is the spirit—reverence, and love, and hope, and a living faith—that makes you one with God, and that points you to your eternal habitation. This it is to study mental and moral philosophy. It is to know how to read the secrets of your own soul. It is to know how to read the inner life of the souls of others. Books will help; scholarship will help; but the great book is the human soul, and we need not have scholarship to read that book. Burns and Shakspere were not great scholars; but no scholar ever surpassed Burns and Shakspere in the reading of the human soul.
No one ever exerted so profound an influence on the life of humanity as Jesus of Nazareth. You may think that Jesus was simply a man; you will not doubt that from the teachings of Jesus have gone forth an influence greater by far than went forth from Plato, or Socrates, or Confucius, or Buddha. You may think with me that he was the Son of God; you surely will not doubt the potency of the influence that proceeded from the incarnate Son of God. Jesus, the son of the carpenter, what did he know of literature, of science, of philosophy? Rather, what knowledge did he employ? He was thoroughly familiar with the literature of his day—that is, the Bible; but he never displayed or employed any critical or literary knowledge respecting it. He never discussed questions of authorship, he never debated questions of origin or date, he did not touch that which lay on the surface. He read the interior and spiritual truth. He saw in that which to their mind was a mere annal, and a mere law the beating heart of the inspired prophet telling of God. He tore off the wrapping and made the world see it. He plucked from the psalm of David this bud, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” and in his hand it blossomed into the parable of the Good Shepherd. He plucked from the psalm of David this utterance, “Like as a father pitieth his children,” and in his hand it blossomed into the parable of the Prodigal Son. He knew the life back of literature. He invented no machine, gave no hint of any, suggested no steam engine, no steam boat, no electric light. What he knew I say not. I may say what he used, and knowledge of nature as a mechanism he never used; but he looked into nature as a book, read her teachings, and interpreted them; in the sower going forth to sow, in the fisher gathering his fish from his net; in the bird’s song in the air he heard the sweet note of trust; in the flowers blossoming from the ground he read the sweet promise of God’s providing care. Things which men having eyes saw not and ears heard not be brought to their vision and their hearing. He propounded no scheme of political philosophy, none of psychology, or theology, but he taught that “One is your father, even God in heaven, and ye all are brethren;” and the great laws that are to bind together, rather the one great law of order, the law of love, this law he expounded. The son of the carpenter lived that he might teach, among the other lessons, this lesson of the democracy of learning; that learning, in its higher and more valued forms, is for the mechanic busy at his bench, for the smith grimy with toil at his forge, for the mother busiest of all, with hands and brain and heart filled with her children.
Kings of the earth have fought that they might hold the power in their own hands, and the many might be subject to them. The people have risen, and grown strong, until at last they have trampled the king and the army under their feet, and have rushed into the citadel and the palace and taken possession, and the citadel of oppression and the palace of luxury have become the temple of liberty. The priests have fought long that they might keep the people out of the temple and hold the mysteries of religion an exclusive possession. But the people have surged up against the priests and trampled them under foot, and occupied the temple of religion. The temples of earning are open; the kings of learning stand at the door, and with their scepters beckon you to come and share their coronation and their crown. The priests of learning bid you come, that they may open to you the mysteries of literature. For in the republic of letters there is no aristocracy but that of service. And they only are great who have learned how best to serve their fellow-men.
The triumph that I read in your eyes is not a false triumph. You have plucked the first fruits, and all the other brightest and best are before you for your plucking. The expectation that I read in your eyes is not a delusive expectation. The fruit is yours. The desire that I read in your eyes is not a cheating desire. The aspiration that burns within you for learning may have its gratification. You have no money? Literature is cheap. You have no time? You have as much time as Schliemann had, who stood in the long line before the postoffice and studied his Greek while waiting for the letters. You have as much time as Mary Somerville had, who wrote the volume which gave her a princely reputation among astronomers, while tending with motherly care the children in the nursery pulling at her skirts. The forces of nature come out of the ground and offer themselves to you to do the drudgery which aforetime was left to human hands, that you may have time to learn the truth of God, and the works of God, and the will of God. We stand to-day on the mountain height. We look just across the valley. The Jordan is no longer overflowing its banks, but is a narrow and shallow stream. The promised land lies there in all its richness and brilliance, and God’s providence utters its promise to us Americans in this nineteenth century: “Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the Lord thy God has given thee this land for a possession forever.”
Another immense audience assembled in the Amphitheater at two o’clock to listen to the addresses delivered to the graduating class by President Lewis Miller, and Dr. J. H. Vincent.