Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

To illustrate, take me physically, leave out of account all the rest of my nature now for a moment, and consider me as an animal. From the point of view of my body, that which conduces to length of life, to fullness, to completion, to enjoyment of life, is right, the only right, from this physical point of view. That which threatens my life, that which takes away my sum of strength, injures my health, takes away from my possibility of enjoyment, that, from a physical point of view, is wrong; and there can be no other right or wrong from the point of view of the body.

But I am not simply body. So this principle must be modified. Come up to the fact that I am an intellectual being. In order to develop myself intellectually, I may have to forego things that would be pleasant on the bodily plane. I sacrifice the lower for the higher; and that which would be right on the physical plane becomes relatively wrong now, because it interferes with something that is higher and more important.

Rise one step to man as an affectional being. If you wish to develop him to the finest and highest here, you may not only be obliged under certain conditions to sacrifice the body, but you may be obliged to sacrifice his intellectual development. In order that he may be the best up here, he must put the others sometimes, relatively, under his feet. So, again, that which would be right on the physical plane or the intellectual plane becomes relatively wrong, if it interferes with that which is higher still.

And so, if you recognize man as a spiritual being, a child of God, then you say it is right, if need be, to put all these other things under his feet, in order that he may attain the highest and best that he is capable of here. But you see it is life all the way, it is the physical life or it is the mental life or it is the affectional life or it is the spiritual life; and that which is necessary for the cultivation and development of these different grades of life becomes on those grades right, and that which threatens or injures one or either of these grades becomes, so far as that grade is concerned, wrong.

Life, then, continuance, fullness, joy, use, this is the standard of right and wrong; a standard which no book ever set up, which no book can ever overthrow; a standard which is inherent, natural, necessary, a part of the very nature of things.

I wish now for a moment I must of course do it briefly to consider the relation of religion to this natural morality. And perhaps you will hardly be ready some of you, at any rate for the statement which I propose to make, that sometimes, in order to be grandly moral, a man must be irreligious. I mean, of course, from the point of view of the conventional religion of his time, he must be ready to be regarded as irreligious. In the earliest development of the religious and moral life of a tribe, very likely, the two went hand in hand, side by side; for the dead chief now worshipped as god would be looked upon as in favor of those customs or practices which the tribe had come to regard as right. But religion perhaps you will know by this time, if you have thought of it carefully is the most conservative thing in the world. Naturally, it is the last thing that people are willing to change. This reluctance grows out of their reverence, grows out of their worshipful nature, grows out of their fear that they may be wrong.

But now let me illustrate what I mean. Religion, standing still in this way, has become an institution, a set of beliefs, of rites and ceremonies, which do not change. The moral experience of the people goes right on; and so it sometimes comes to pass that the moral ideal has outgrown the religious ideal of the community. And now, as a practical illustration to illume the whole point, let us go back to ancient Athens for a moment at the time of Socrates. Here we are confronted with the curious fact that Socrates, who has been regarded from that day to this as the most grandly moral man of his time, the one man who taught the highest and noblest human ideals, is put to death as an irreligious man. The popular religion of the time cast him out, and put the hemlock to his lips; and at the same time his teaching in regard to righteousness and truth was unspeakably ahead of the popular religion of his day.

Let us come to the modern Athens for a moment, to the time of Theodore Parker in Boston. We are confronted here, again, with this strange fact. There was not a church in Boston that could abide him, not even the Unitarian churches; and in the prayer-meetings of the day they were beseeching God to take him out of the world, because they thought he was such a force for evil. And at the same time Theodore Parker stood for the very highest, tenderest, truest moral ideal of his age.

There was no man walking the earth at that time who so grandly voiced the real law of God as did Theodore Parker. And yet he was outcast by the popular religious sentiment of his time.

This, then, is what I mean when I say that we ought to be careful, and study and think in forming our religious ideals, and see that we do not identify our own unwillingness to think with the eternal and changeless law of God. This is what I have meant in some of the strictures which I have uttered during the last year upon some of the theological creeds of the time. The people have grown to be better than their creeds, but they have not yet developed the courage to make those creeds utter the highest and finest things which they think and feel. This is what I have meant when I have said that the character of God as outlined in many of these creeds is away behind and below the noblest and finest and sweetest ideals of what we regard as fitting even to humanity to-day.