Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

When we come up to the level of man, what do we find? Man as an animal is not the equal of a good many of the other animals in the world. He is not as swift as the deer, he is not as strong as the lion, he cannot fly in the air like a bird, he cannot live in the sea like the fishes. He is restricted to the comparatively contracted area of the surface of the land. He is not as perfect as an animal; but what has evolution done? It has given him power of conquest over all these, because the evolutionary force has left the bodily structure, we need expect no more marked changes there, and has gone to brain. So this feeblest of all the animals physically speaking he would be no match for a hundred different kinds of animals that are about us is able to outwit them all, that is, to outknow, he has become the ruler of the earth. And not only has this evolutionary force gone to brain, it has gone to heart; and man has become a being whose primest characteristic is love. The one thing that we think of as most perfect, that we dream of as characterizing his future development, is summed up in his affectional nature. Then, too, he has become a moral being.

There are times, like the present, when it seems as though the animal were at the top, and the affectional nature suppressed, and the conscience were ruled out of court; and yet you study the methods of modern warfare as compared with those of the past, you see how pity and tenderness and care walk by the side of every gun, hide in the rear of every battlefield to attend to the wounded and suffering. And you know what talk there has been of pity for the hungry, the desire of the world to feed those that need; and the one dominant note in the discussion of the war all over the world has been the question as to its being right. No matter how we may have decided, whether the decision be correct or not, the civilized world bows itself in the presence of its ideal of right, and demands that no war shall be fought the issue of which is not to be a better condition of mankind.

Evolution, then, tends to the development of brain, heart, conscience, and the spiritual nature of man. It has left nothing behind that is of any value to us. It has transformed or sublimed or lifted all up into the higher range of the life that we are living to-day, and contains within itself a promise of the higher and the grander life that we reach forward to to-morrow.

I wish now, for a moment, to illustrate the working of this in regard to some of the institutions of the world. If I had time, I could show you that the same law is apparent in the development of the arts, sculpture, painting, poetry. I must pass them by, however. As illustrating what I mean, let me take the one art of music. From the very beginning man has been interested in making some sort of sounds which, I suppose, have been regarded as music by him. Most of those that are associated with the barbaric man would be anything but music to us. The music, for example, that they give in connection with a play in a Chinese theatre would not be acceptable to the cultivated ear of Americans. We have left behind much that the world called music. We have left behind any number of musical instruments. We do not now have those that the Psalmist makes so much of, the old-time harp, the sackbut, the psaltery. I do not know, though you may, what kind of instruments they were. The world has completely forgotten them, and left them out of sight. And yet no musical note, no musical chord, no musical thought, no musical feeling, has been forgotten or dropped along the advancing pathway of the world's progress; and in our organs all the attempts at instruments of that kind from the beginning of the world are preserved, transformed and glorified. In our magnificent orchestras all the first feeble beginnings are developed until we have a conception of music to-day such as would have been utterly incomprehensible to the primeval man. What I wish you to note is and this is the use of my illustration that the advancing growth of the music of the world has forgotten nothing that it was worth while to keep.

Let me give you one more illustration. Take it in the line of government. The first tribes were governed by two forces, brute force and superstitious fear. These were the two things that kept the primal tribes of the world in order, such order as was maintained in those far-off times. The world has gone on developing different types of government, different types of social order. I need not stop to outline them for you this morning: you know what they are; and I only wish you to catch the thought I have in mind. I suppose that every time one of the old types was about to pass away the adherents of that type have been in a panic lest anarchy was threatening the world. Believers in these types have said that it was absolutely necessary to keep them, in order to preserve social order. Take the attitude of the monarchy to-day, for example, as towards the republic. When we attempted to establish our republic here in this western world, it was freely said by the adherents of the old political idea in Europe that it would of necessity be a failure, that there was no possibility of a stable human order without a hierarchy of nobles with a king at the top; and I suppose they believed it. But we have proved beyond question that we can have a strong government, an orderly government, without either nobility or king. There is less government in the United States here to-day than in almost any other country of the world, a nearer approach to what the philosopher would call anarchy. Anarchy does not mean disorder, when a philosopher is talking: it means merely the absence of external government. And that is the ideal that we are approaching.

Paul says, you know, that the law was made for wicked people, for the disobedient and the disorderly, not for good people. How many people are there in New York to-day, for example, who are honest, who pay their debts, who did not commit a burglary last night, who do not propose to be false to wife and home, on account of the law, the existence of courts and police? The great majority of the citizens of America to-day would go right on being honest and kind and loving and helpful, whether there were any laws or not. They are not kept to these courses of conduct by the law. They have learned that these are the fitting ways of life that these are the things for a man to do; and they despise themselves if they are less than man. In other words, this governmental order, which exists as an outside force, at last gets written in the heart and becomes a law of life.

Now precisely the same process is going on in other departments of the world: it is going on in religion. And now let me come to religion, and illustrate the working of the law here. The old types of religious thought and life and practice, the first ones that the world knew, are long since outgrown. We regard them as barbaric, as cruel.

We have learned that there are not a million gods of whom we need stand in awe. We have learned that God is no partial God. We have learned that God does not want us, as universal man once believed, to sacrifice the dearest object of our love. We have learned that he does not want us to sacrifice our first-born child, as the old Hebrews used to, and the remains of which custom are plainly visible throughout the Old Testament everywhere. We have left behind these old types of religious thought and life; but the world has lost nothing in the process. The world has not left religion behind. The whole process of growth and development in the sphere of the religious life and the development of man has been one of outgrowing crude and partial and inadequate thoughts and feelings about the universe and God and man and duty and destiny.

We do not care so much about ceremony as the world did once. The most civilized people in the world are not so given to these things in their religious development. We do not care so much about creed as they did a thousand or five hundred years ago. We do not believe that God is going to judge us by our intellectual conceptions of him and of our fellow- men. And I suppose it is true, always has been true as it is to-day, that the adherent of any particular form or theory of the religious life has the feeling that, when that is threatened, religion is threatened; and he defends it passionately, fights for it, perhaps bitterly, feels justified in opposing, perhaps hating, those he regards as the enemies of God and his great and sacred and religious hopes. And yet we know, as we study the past, whether we can quite appreciate it as true in regard to the theories which I am voicing to-day, that the truth has never been in any danger, and the highest and finest and sweetest things in the religious life have never been in any danger, are not in any danger to-day.

Let me indicate in two or three directions. There has been a class of thinkers, which has done a good deal of talking and writing in this direction, who are telling us that the poetry, the romance, the wonder, the mystery, of the world those things that tend to bring a man to his knees and to lift his eyes in awe and reverence are passing away; that science is going to explore everything; that there is going to be no more unknown; and that, when we have completed this process, one of the great essentials of religious thought and feeling and life will have perished from among men. I venture to say to you that there has never been a time in the history of the world when there was so much of mystery, so much of wonder, so much of reverence, so much of awe, as there is to-day. We are apt to fool ourselves in our thinking, and, when we have observed a fact, and labelled it, to think we know it.