Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

For example, here is this mysterious force that we call electricity, which is flashing such light in our homes and through our streets as the world has never known before. The cars, loaded, are speeding along our highways with no visible means of propulsion. We step up to a little box, and put a shell to our ear, and speak and listen, and converse with a friend in Boston or Chicago, recognizing the voice perfectly, as though this friend were by our side. We send a message over a wire, under the deep, and talk to London and all round the globe; and we have labelled this force electricity. And, instead of getting down on our knees in reverence, we get impatient if our communication is delayed two minutes or three. We fool ourselves with the thought that, because we have called it electricity, we know it, we have taken the mystery out of the fact. Why, friends, do you know anything about electricity? Do you know what it is? Do you know why it works as it does? I do not; and I do not know of anybody on the face of the earth who does. The wonder of the "Arabian Nights" is cheap and tame and theatrical compared to the wonder of this everyday workaday world of ours, in the midst of which and by means of which we are carrying on our business and our daily avocations. The wonder of the carpet that would carry the person through the air who sat upon it and wished is nothing compared with the power of electricity, steam, any one of these invisible, intangible powers that are thrilling through the world to-day. There never was so much room for mystery, for awe, for poetry, for romance, as there is in the midst of our commercial life in this nineteenth century.

This element of religion, then, is in no danger. We know nothing ultimately. Who can tell me what a particle of matter is? Who can tell me what a ray of light is, as it comes from a star? Who can tell me how the movements in the particles of air striking my eye run up into nerve and brain, and become translated into thought, into light, into form, into motion, into all this wondrous universe that surrounds us on every hand?

Then take the element of trust. People used to think they could trust in their gods. Rebecca, for example, stole her father's gods, and hid them in the trappings of her camel, and sat on them. She thought, then, that she had a god near her who would care for her. The old Hebrew, with an ox-team, carried his God, in a box that he called the ark, into battle, and supposed that he had a very present help in time of need. But we have the eternal stability and order of the universe, a God that never forgets, a God on whom we can lean, in whom we can trust, who is not away off in heaven, but here, closer to us than the air we breathe, a God in whom we live and move and have our being.

And has this evolution of the religious life of the world threatened the stability of truth? There never was a time on earth when there was such a passion for truth as there is today. What means all this intense activity of the scientific world? these men that devote their lives to some little fraction of the universe which they study through their microscope, not for pay, to find one little fragment of the truth of God; these critics that are rummaging the dust-heaps of the ages in the hope that they may find one little, bright-glittering particle of truth in the midst of the rubbish? There never was such a passion for truth as there is here and now.

Are we going to lose the sense of righteousness which is the very heart of religion? There never was a time since the world began when the average man cared so much for righteousness, when he laid so much emphasis on human conduct, on kindness, on help, on all those things that make this life of ours desirable and sweet. The ideal of character and behavior has risen step by step from the beginning, and is higher to-day than it ever was before. Not because men fear a whipping, not because they are threatened with hell in another world, not because a God of vengeance is preached to them, because they have grown to see the beauty of righteousness, because they know that obedience to the laws of God means health, means sanity, means peace, means prosperity, means well-being, means all high and good and noble things. This righteousness is not driven into one by blows from outside: it blossoms out from the intellect and the conscience and the heart, as the recognized law of all fine and desirable and human living.

What are we losing, then, as the result of this growth of the world in accordance with the law of evolution? Are we losing our hope of the future? The form of that hope is passing away. We no longer believe in an underground world of the dead, as the Hebrews did. We no longer believe in a heaven just above the blue, as Christendom has believed for so long. We no longer believe in a heaven where all struggle and thought and study and growth are left out, where there is to be only a monotonous enjoyment that would pall upon any living rational soul. The form of it is passing away; but there never was a time when there was such a great and inspiring hope, not simply for myself and my friends, not simply for my neighbors, not simply for my particular church. There never was a time when there was such a great hope, including humanity for this world and for the next, as that which inspires us now.

Nothing, then, in religion that is of any worth has the world forgotten or is it likely to forget. All the old reverences and loves and trusts and inspirations and hopes and tendernesses are here intermingled. They are in the highest and noblest people; and they are being carried on and refined and purified and glorified as the world goes on.

And now let me suggest one thought more that may be of comfort to some. A great many people have been accustomed to associate so much of their religion with the forms of their religious expression that they fancy that the world's outgrowing these means that religion is being outgrown. I said, you remember, when touching upon government as an illustration of the working of the law of evolution, that governmental forms were being outgrown just as fast as the world was becoming civilized. If this world ever becomes perfect, government will cease to be, in the sense of these external forms, simply because there will be no need of it; just as you take down a staging when you have completed a house. So I look forward to less and less care for the external forms of the religious life. I believe they will remain, and they ought to remain, just as long as they are any practical help to anybody; but, because a person ceases to need them, you must not think that he has ceased to be religious. When the world gets to be perfectly religious, there will be no need of any churches, there will be no need any more of preachers, there will be no need of any of the external ceremony of religion.

You remember what the old seer says in the book of Revelation, as he looks forward to the perfect condition of things. He is picturing that ideal city which he saw in his vision coming down from God out of heaven. This was his poetical way of setting forth his idea of the perfected condition of humanity; and he said, speaking of that city, "And I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God was the temple of it."

The external forms pass away when the life needs them no more. Take, for example, the condition of things when Jesus came to Jerusalem. You know how they put him to death. And what did they put him to death for? They put him to death because he preached of a time when there would be no need of any temple, no need of any priesthood, no need of any of the external things that they regarded as essential to religious life. They thought he was blaspheming, they thought he was an enemy of God and of his fellowmen, because he talked that way. He said to the woman of Samaria, You think you must worship God on this mountain, Gerizim, and the Jews think they must worship him on Mount Moriah; but God is spirit, and the time will come when you will not care whether you are in this place or that, but will worship him in spirit and in truth.