[58] Mr. Henry Ward Beecher.
[59] Dr. Junqua, whose name almost became celebrated a few years ago, also tried to found a church, the Church of Liberty; those who entered were at liberty to believe almost anything they liked, not even the atheist, properly so called, being excluded. The church in question was to have been purely symbolic: baptism it was to recognize as the symbol of initiation into Christian civilization; confirmation as the symbol of an enrolment among the soldiers of Liberty; and the eucharist, that is to say a religious love feast, as the symbol of the brotherhood of man. It is to be added that these sacraments were not obligatory and that the members might abstain from them entirely if they chose. Still, they would be members of a communion. Their faith would be designated by a common name, they would be in relations with a priest who would comment in their presence on texts of the New Testament, and would talk of Christ if he and they believed in Him. The church of Dr. Junqua might easily have succeeded in England with Mr. Moncure Conway and the secularists.
[60] See the author’s work on la Morale d’Épicure et ses rapports avec les doctrines contemporaines, p. 186.
[61] Toward the end of his life Luther felt an increasing discouragement and disquietude on the subject of the reform inaugurated by him: “It is by severe laws and by superstition,” he wrote with bitterness, “that the world desires to be guided. If I could reconcile it with my conscience I would labour that the Pope with all his abominations might become once more our master.” Responsibility to one’s own conscience was indeed Luther’s fundamental idea—the idea which justifies the Reformation in the eyes of history, as formerly in the eyes of its own author.
[62] See the author’s Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 188, etc.
[63] “If God had consciously created the human will of such essential perversity as to find its natural expression in thwarting Him, He would be impotent in the face of it; could only show Himself compassionate; could only regret His own act in creating it. His duty would not be to punish mankind but to the utmost possible degree to lighten their sufferings, to show Himself gentle and good directly in proportion to this evil; and the damned, if they were truly incurable, would be in greater need of the joys of heaven than the elect themselves. Either the sinner can be reclaimed; and in that event hell would be nothing more than an immense school, an immense house of correction for preparing the culpable with the utmost possible rapidity for heaven; or the sinner is incorrigible, is analogous to an incurable maniac (which is absurd), and then he is eternally to be pitied and a supreme Goodness would endeavour to compensate him for his misery by every imaginable means by showering upon him every bliss that he was capable of enjoying. Turn it as one will, the dogma of hell stands thus in direct opposition to the truth.
“For the rest, by the very act of damning a soul, that is to say shutting it out forever from His presence, or, in terms less mystical, excluding it forever from a knowledge of the truth, would not God in turn be shutting Himself out from the soul, limiting His own power, and so to speak in some measure damning Himself also? The penalty of the damnation would fall in part on Him who inflicted it. As to the physical torment of which theologians speak, interpreted metaphorically, it becomes even more inadmissible. Instead of damning mankind God ought eternally to gather about Him those who have strayed from Him; it is for the culpable above all others that, as Michel Angelo said, God opened wide his arms upon the cross. We represent Him as looking down upon the sinning multitude from too great a height for them ever to be anything to Him but the incarnation of misfortune. Well, just in so far as they are unfortunate must they not logically be the especial favourites of divine goodness?”—Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 189.
[64] The fact has been verified by the English authorities and has been commented on by the physiologist W. Preyer (Über die Erforschung des Lebens, Jena, and Sammlung physiologischer Abhandlungen). Yoghis who have attained the highest degree of perfection, and are insensible to cold and to heat and have contracted, by a series of experiments, the habit of breathing almost not at all, have been buried alive and resuscitated at the end of some weeks. When they were reawakened a heightening of the temperature was noticed as in the case of the reawaking of hibernating mammals, and it is indeed to the phenomena of hibernation that this strange voluntary suspension of animation most closely approaches—this mystical return to a life merely vegetative, this absorption in the bosom of the unconscious, where the Yoghis hopes to find God. As a preliminary discipline the Yoghis diminishes little by little the quantity of air and light necessary to his life; he lives in a cell which is lit and ventilated by no more than a single chink; he minimizes all movement in order to minimize the necessity of respiration; he does not speak except to repeat to himself twelve thousand times a day the mystic name of Om; he remains for hours together motionless as a statue. He practises breathing over again and again the same body of air, and the longer the period between inspiration and expiration, the greater his sanctity! Finally he carefully seals all the openings of his body with wax and cotton and closes the opening of the throat with the tongue, which certain incisions permit him to fold over backward, and finally falls into a lethargy in which the movements of respiration may be suspended without the thread of life positively being severed.
[66] This, however, is exceptional; in church, during the services, the majority of the faces remain inexpressive, for the reason that prayer with the majority of the faithful is almost always mechanical.