Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890

by Octavius Brooks Frothingham

In a sermon, "Living by Faith," he says:

There is no irony so great as to call this "flight out of nature" and the creeds that come of it, "faith." The purity of heart that really sees God will have a mighty idealization of humanity at the very basis of its creed, and act on it in all its treatment of the vicious, the morally incapable and diseased. It is time Christendom was on the search for it.

In the paper on "Transcendentalism," he says:

Christianity inherited the monarchical idea of a God separate from man, and a contempt for natural law and human faculty which crippled its faith in the spiritual and moral ideal. It became more and more a materialism of miracle, Bible, church. Even its essay to realize immanent Deity yielded a more or less exclusive, mediatorial God-man; and it treated personality as the mere consequence of one prescriptive, historical force, just as philosophical materialism treats it as mere product of sensations.

Mr. Johnson abhorred the monarchical principle. It was his endeavor to track it from its origin, through all its forms of institution, ceremonial, dogma, symbol, from the earliest times to the latest, through the whole East to the farthest West. This was the burden of his studies in Oriental religions, the sum of his criticism, the aim of his public teaching. He was profoundly, intensely, absorbingly religious, but the form of his religion was not "Christian" in any recognized sense, Romanist, Protestant, or Unitarian. The most radical thought did not altogether please him. His was a worship of Law, Order, Cause, Harmony, impersonal, living, natural; a recognition of mind as the supreme power in the universe; a cosmic, eternal, absolute faith in intellectual principles as the substance and soul of the world. God was, to him, a spiritual being, alive, vital, flowing in every mode.

All power of growth and service depends, know it or not as we may, on an ideal faith in somewhat all-sufficient, unerring, infinitely wise and tender, inseparable from the inmost of life, bent on our good as we are not, set against our failures as we cannot be. It means that there can in fact be no philosophy of life, no law of good, no belief in duty, no aspiration, but must have such in-dwelling perfection, as being alone reliable to guarantee its word. This only is my God; infinite ground of all finite being; essence of reason and good.... When you see a function of memory, or a law of perfection, let your natural piety recognize it as wise and just and good and fair. Be loyal to the moral authority that affirms it ought to be, and somehow must be. Let your soul bring in the leap of your mind to grasp it. Then, if you cannot see God in perfect, absolute essence, you will know the Infinite and Eternal in their relation to real and positive existence; feel their freedom in your own; know their inseparableness from every movement of your spiritual being.... The love we feel, the truth we pursue, the honor we cherish, the moral beauty we revere, blend in with the eternity of the principles they flow from, and then, glad as in the baptism of a harvest morning, expanding towards human need and the universal life of man, our souls walk free, breathing immortal air. That is God,—not an object but an experience. Words are but symbols, they do not define. We say "Him," "It" were as well, if thereby we mean life, wisdom, love.... Must we bind our communion with the just, the good, the true, the humanly adequate and becoming to some personal life, some special body of social circumstances, some individual's work in human progress and upon human idealism? How should that be, when the principles into which the moral sense flowers out in its maturity as spiritual liberty, essentially involve a freely advancing ideal at every new stage revealing more of God, whom nothing but such universal energy can adequately reveal?... If then, we cannot see the eternal substance and life of the universe, it is not because Deity is too far, but because it is too near. We can measure a statue or a star, and look round and beyond it; but the Life, Light, Liberty, Love, Peace, whereby we live and know, and are helpful and calm and free, which measures and surrounds and even animates us, is itself the very mystery of our being, and known only as felt and lived. God stands in all ideal thought, conviction, aim, which ever reach into the infinite; and thence, as if an angel should stand in the sun, come attractions that draw forth the divine capabilities within us, as the sun the life and beauty of the earth. God is the inmost motive, the common path, the infinite import of all work we respect, honor, purely rejoice in, and fulfil; of art, science, philosophy, intercourse,—whatsoever function befits the soul and the day.

These quotations, which might be multiplied indefinitely, in fact, which it is difficult not to multiply, are probably enough to satisfy any who really wish to know that here was a truly religious man, a really devout man, the possessor of a living faith; one who held fast to more Deity than the multitude cherished, and welcomed him in a much more cordial, comprehensive, natural manner; one who fairly drenched the world and man with a divine spirit, but who was all the more spiritual on this account, as a man attests his vigor by his ability to lay aside his crutches, and put the medicine-chest, bottles, and boxes on the shelf, to walk in cold weather without an overcoat, or lie naked on the ice and melt it through.

Of course, the only justification of a pretension of this kind is the actual vitality necessary for such a feat, the sanity demanded by one who would stand or go alone. In Samuel Johnson's case there was no question of this. Spiritually, he was a whole man, self-poised, self-contained, strong, clear, alert, a hero and a saint. His conversation, his bearing, conduct, entire attitude and manner indicated the most jubilant faith. He never faltered in his confidence, never wavered in his conviction, never abated a jot of hope that in the order of Providence all good things would come. There was something staggering to the ordinary mind, in his assurance of the divine wisdom and love. There was something altogether admirable in the elevation of his character above the trials and vexations that are incident to the human lot, and that seemed heaped upon him. For his own was not a smooth or fortunate life, as men estimate felicity. His health was far from satisfactory. He was not rich or famous or popular or sought after. He lived a life of labor, in some respects, of denial and sacrifice. Not until after his death was the full amount of his renunciation apparent even to those who thought they knew him well.

He was a Transcendentalist—that is to say, he believed in the intuitive powers of the mind; he was sure that all primary truths, such ideas as those of unity, universe, law, cause, substance, will, duty, obligation, permanence, were perceived directly, and are not to be accounted for by any data of observation or inference, but must be ascribed at once to an organic or constitutional relation of the mind with truth.

That the name "Transcendentalism" was given, a century ago, to a method in philosophy opposed to the theory of Locke—that all knowledge comes from the senses,—is more widely known than the fact that what this method affirmed or involved is of profound import for all generations. It emphasized Mind as a formative force behind all definable contents or acts of consciousness—as that which makes it possible to speak of anything as known. It recognized, as primal condition of knowing, the transmutation of sense-impressions by original laws of mind, whose constructive power is not to be explained or measured by the data of sensation; just as they use the eye or ear to transform unknown spatial notions into the obviously human conceptions which we call color and sound. All this the Lockian system overlooked—a very serious omission, as regards both science and common-sense.