And lastly, friends, as we do not, cannot know, it is presumably wise that we should not know. The vanity of all our efforts to grasp the infinite, should teach us that on this island of time whereon we live, lies our work. In its joys we may freely take delight; for its woes we should reserve our sympathies, and in laboring to advance the progress of the good we must find our satisfaction.
Before closing this subject however let us recall vividly to our minds that the desire for continuance after death is capable of the most noble expression, and of supplying us with wholesome consolation and inspiriting motives to action. The individual passes, but the race lives! There is a law in nature that no force is ever lost. The thousand varying forms that ebb and flow around us are various only to our feeble vision. At the core they are one, transmuted, yet the same, changing yet changeless, perishing to rise anew. The law of the conservation of energy holds good throughout the entire domain of matter. And such a law too obtains in our spiritual life. The law of the conservation of moral energy is no less an abiding truth; we are not dust merely, that returns to dust; we are not summer flies that bask in the sunshine of the passing day; we are not bounded in our influence by the narrow tenure of our years. Say not when the sod has closed above those who have been dear to you that all is gone. Say not that the grace and loveliness, and wisdom that once dwelt within the pallid form is breathed away like a hollow wind. Nor yet stand idly gazing upon the cloud-land of the future, watching if you can trace perchance their shadowy lineaments fading into the dimness of untried worlds. The dead are not dead if we have loved them truly. In our own lives we give them immortality. Let us arise and take up the work they have left unfinished, and preserve the treasures they have won, and round out the circuit of their being to the fullness of an ampler orbit in our own.
All the good that was in them lives in you, the germ and nucleus of the better that shall be. All the evil that inhered in them shall be cleansed away in you and your virtues shall be the atonement for their sins. Thus shall the fathers live in the children, and from generation to generation the bond that connects the past with the future remains unbroken. They that have left you are not afar; their presence is near and real, a silent and august companionship. In the still hours of meditation; under the starlit night, in the stress of action, in trials and temptations, you will hear their voices whispering words of cheer or warning, and your deeds are their deeds and your lives are their lives.
So does the light of other days still shine in the bright hued flowers that clothe our fields; so do they who are long since gathered into the silent city of the dead still move about our houses, distributing kindness and nobleness among our lives. So does the toll of the funeral bell become an alarum to rouse us to more active effort and to the nobler service of mankind.
II. RELIGION.
The question, Have we still a religion, propounded by David Friedrich Strauss some few years ago, will long engage the attention of radical thinkers. It is clear that to answer it satisfactorily we must determine, in the first instance, what meaning ought rightly to be attached to the term religion. In common parlance, it is often used with reference to mere externals, a religious person being one who conforms to the rites and usages of some particular church. On the other hand, every innovation in the sphere of doctrine is branded as irreligious. Thus Luther was deemed irreligious by the Catholics; St. Boniface by the heathen Germans, Jesus by the Jews, Elijah by the servants of Baal. There is not any single form, nor even a single fundamental principle common to all religions. Religion is not identical with theology. It is indeed often maintained that the belief in a personal God should be regarded as the foundation and criterion of religion; but upon this assumption, two facts remain inexplicable, the existence of religion before ever the idea of a deity had arisen among men, and the existence of what may be termed an atheistical religion, in conscious antagonism to the doctrine of a personal God. Among the lower races we find men worshipping, sacrificing and uttering their invocations to mountains, fountains, rivers, rocks and stones: they know not a deity—sometimes they have not even idols, and yet they certainly have, after a fashion of their own, a religion. Again, Buddhism, while possessing a subtle system of philosophy and an admirable code of ethics, starts with the proposition that there never was a creation, and in consequence, never a creator, and yet more than four hundred millions of the earth's inhabitants call it their religion!
The question returns to us, What is religion? It is not creed; it is not sacrifice; it is not prayer; it is not covered by the dogmas of any special form of belief; it has acted as a controlling force in all ages, in every zone, among all manner of men. Are we devoid of it? Of it? Of what?
The feeling which the presence of the Infinite in the thoughts of man awakens within him, is called, the feeling of the sublime. The feeling of the sublime is the root of the religious sentiment. It assumes various phases, and to these correspond the various religions. Let us endeavor to enumerate some of the most prominent.
The feeling of the sublime is awakened by the mysterious. The indefinite gives us our earliest presentiment of the infinite; the religion of mystery is fetishism. The feeling of the sublime is awakened by exhibitions of superhuman power. The religion of power is paganism. The feeling of the sublime is evoked by vastness; the religions of vastness are Brahminism and Buddhism. The loftiest type of sublimity is to be found in the morally infinite. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have sought to give it expression.*