The present movement of the world is toward a nobler social order. It is to lift the common man upward, on material good as a stepping-stone, toward the height of the saint and seer. This is the better soul of democracy, the noble element in politics, the reformation in the churches, the bond of sympathy with Christ.
Along with this goes a new personal ideal, exemplified in Emerson,—accepting the present world as the symbol and instrument of a celestial destiny. "Contenting himself with obedience, man becomes divine."
In the Gospel history, the figures of the woman and the child take a high place. In Jesus himself the feminine element blent with the masculine. Medieval religion and art found their best symbol in the figure of the mother clasping her babe. Our modern time is giving freedom to woman and recognizing her equality with man, and we are learning that the secret of the world's advance lies in the right training of children under natural law. So the sentiment which grows up in the natural relations of life is elevated by religion, then developed and perfected by freedom and by science.
For us the practical problem is the cultivation of the religious nature along with the other elements of a complete manhood. We are not obliged by intellectual process to create a religious sentiment in ourselves. We inherit that sentiment. It is like the sense of purity or of beauty,—beyond demonstration, except the demonstration of experience. We need only to supply the right conditions for its education and application.
The belief that the spiritual life was dependent on certain institutions and beliefs was the key to the ecclesiastical tyranny of the past. We have virtually escaped that tyranny. Now, in the atmosphere of freedom, we cultivate the spiritual life, and it proves deeper and fairer than ever before.
V
DAILY BREAD
When Charles Lyell addressed himself to the problems of geology, he found that his predecessors in the study had accounted for all the stupendous phenomena whose story is written in the earth's crust, on the supposition of vast catastrophic disturbances in the remote past, because they held that these effects were too prodigious to have been wrought by the ordinary slow processes of nature with which we are familiar. Lyell took up the question by the near and homely end. He patiently watched the workings of heat and cold, sunshine and rain and frost, summer and winter, in the fields about his own house. He learned there what these familiar forces are capable of, in what directions they operate, and in them he found the clew to the story of the past aeons. Right about his doorstep were the magicians that had done it all.
That illustrates the process of discovery in the spiritual universe. We are not to soar up into infinity to find God. The only air that will support our wings is that which encircles closely this familiar planet. Let us look for a divine significance in homely things.
Here is Goodness. It is right about us, in people whom we know and meet every day, plainly visible to eyes that know how to see it. Here are all its forms. Innocence,—the very image of it looks upon you from many a child's face. Courage, firmness, self-control,—you may read them in the lines of many a manly countenance. Purity,—who has not felt its hallowing regard fall upon him from the eyes of maid and matron? Pity, tenderness, sympathy,—these angels move about us in human forms, and he that hath eyes to see them sees.