And vales of bliss; the intellectual power
Bends from his awful throne a wandering ear,
And smiles."
As a theme worthy of your consideration to-day, I have selected
"Culture and Christianity: Their Relation and Necessity."
The Greek word for man, [Greek: anthropos], signifies etymologically to look upward. Man is the only terrestrial being capable of looking inward and upward. In this there lies between him and the animal creation an impassable gulf. Man alone can look into his inner nature, and thereby make his very failures the stepping-stones to a higher life. God designed that man's progress should be upward; hence his high destiny is attained, not by creation, but by development. The ladder at whose foot he begins his immortal career rests upon the eternal throne. This is not a development into man, but a development of man. The theory of development into man is of the flesh; but the development of man is of the spirit. Since man is destined for eternity, it is not befitting that he should attain perfection in time. Hence he does not develop as the beast of the field, or the fowl of the air. They soon learn all that they ever know. They soon enjoy all they are capable of enjoying. They soon attain to the perfection of their being, and fulfill the end of their creation. The swallow builds her nest and the beaver his dam precisely as they did in the days before the flood. Nor can it ever be otherwise. But it is not so with man. This life is too short and this world too small for his development. He but begins to live in this world. This life is simply a state of probation. Our faculties but begin to unfold on the things of time when we are called hence. This unfolding of our faculties, this development of our inner self, is the result of culture—a culture not of the flesh, but of the spirit; not of the outer, but of the inner man.
Culture and Christianity, properly considered, are inseparable. He who relies on culture apart from Christianity misconceives the end of his being. He appreciates not his high destiny. Animals have minds susceptible of a high degree of cultivation, but not of a culture which reaches beyond time. Their culture is wholly a thing of this life; but not more so than is the culture of men unsanctified by the religion of Christ. A culture that terminates with death is in harmony with the nature of a horse, but contrary to the nature of a man. What is culture? This is a question on whose solution man's eternal destiny is largely suspended. Our age prides itself on being an age of culture; but do we know in what true culture really consists? As a whole, I think not. A smattering of sentimental literature, a superficial refinement of manners, a few borrowed phrases and appropriated customs of "society," the rendering of a few pieces by rote, and fashionable dress, constitute with, alas! too many the standard of culture. How unworthy of their race are those who entertain the thought! All this may be but the gilding of barbarism; beneath this external glitter there may be a heart and character steeped in moral rudeness and degradation.
True culture consists not in the cultivation of outward accomplishments. It consists not in intellectual acquirements. It consists in the development of the triune man—body, soul and spirit—in their divine harmony. Without a cultivation of the spirit in harmony with its immortal destiny, all that this world calls culture is but the gilded tinsel that bedecks the putrefaction of death. The truly cultured man is developed in harmony with the laws of his being. This being is compound, having a fleshly and a spiritual side. Hence, to cultivate one to the neglect of the other is to disproportion him whom God created in His own image. As we exist first in time and next in eternity, that culture which loses sight of either state misconceives the full mission of man. Man's conception of his present mission and ultimate destiny determines his standard of culture. He must have an ideal, and if that ideal be low, his life will be correspondingly low. Nothing but Christianity can furnish man an ideal worthy of himself; and nothing but Christian culture can develop him in the direction of that ideal.
Classical antiquity never conceived a destiny worthy of man. It never contemplated him in that relation of Christ-likeness to his God, which the Bible reveals. Even Aristotle, the most cultivated of all heathen philosophers, thought that only a part of mankind possessed a rational soul. With such a conception man is incapable of the highest culture. It is degrading to his dignity. All culture based on such a hypothesis must be a culture of the flesh, and not of the spirit. It is the culture of materialism, not of Christianity. Between modern materialism and the cultivated heathenism of the ancient Greeks the difference is not worth the naming. "To assume the existence of a soul," says Vogt, "which uses the brain as an instrument with which to work as it pleases, is utter nonsense. Physiology distinctly and categorically pronounces against any individual immortality, and against all ideas which are connected with a figment of a separate existence of the soul." "Man," says Moleschott, "is produced from wind and ashes. The action of vegetable life called him into existence.... Thought consists in the motion of matter, it is a translocation of the cerebral substance; without phosphorus there can be no thought; and consciousness itself is nothing but an attribute of matter." This deification of the flesh, this "gospel of dirt," makes man consist simply of what he eats. The missionaries of this heathen gospel have no need to address the reason of men; only feed them on the right kind of food and their regeneration is accomplished! Materialism is a religion of the flesh, a deification of matter; its laver of regeneration is the chemist's retort; its new birth, phosphorus! Give the brain plenty of phosphorus by high living, and you develop the soul of materialism! Yet the heralds of this soulless gospel talk flippantly about culture!
Man's fall was due to an attempt to acquire knowledge at the expense of heart culture. Here, amid the bowers of "paradise lost" is found the root of all false culture, and from that root the world has ever been filled with a noxious growth. True culture consists in a correction of the process which