And again:
"Affirmation! There is no affirmation except the belief in universal natural religion; all else is narrowness and sectarianism, though it call itself by the grandest name, compared with that. It impoverishes a man; it keeps his sympathy in one line of religious communication; it takes all the spiritual life of the race, and says, 'All of this that was not an effluence from Jesus you must set aside;' and so it makes you a member in full standing of some little sect, all of whose ideas, all of whose thoughts, revolved in the mind of some one narrow-minded theologian who founded it. It shuts you up there, and you die, suffocated for want of God's free air outside." (P. 59.)
But the reverend colonel here affirms nothing not affirmed by Christianity, nor any thing more than belongs to all men. Natural religion is simply the natural law, the moral law, prescribed to every man through his reason by the end for which he is created, and is included in the Christian religion as essential to the Christian character. What the free religionist does is not to affirm any thing not universally insisted on by the Catholic Church, but to deny all religion but universal natural religion; that is, he simply denies supernatural revelation, and the supernatural order, or that there is any reality broader than nature or above it. Free religion, as such, is, then, not affirmative, but purely negative; the negation of all religions in so far as they assert the supernatural. The real thought and design of the men and women composing the association is to get rid of every thing in every religion that transcends or professes to transcend nature. They make no direct war on the church or even on the sects, we concede; for they take it for granted that when people are once fully persuaded that nature is all, and that only natural religion is or can be true, all else will gradually die out of itself.
Mrs. Lucy Stone agrees in this with the others, and does not disguise her thought. She says:
"We come into the world, I believe, every one of us, with all that is needful in ourselves, if we will only trust it—all that is needful to help us on and up to the very highest heights to which a human being can ever climb; but we have covered it over by dogma and creed and sectarian theory, and by our own misdeeds, until these angel voices that are in us cease to be heard; not totally cease—I do not believe they ever totally cease—but they become less and less audible to us. But if we learn to heed their faintest whisper, reverently and obediently, I believe that there is no path where the soul asks you to go that you may not safely tread. It may carry you to the burning, fiery furnace, but you will come out, and the smell of fire even will not be on your garments. It may compel you into the lion's den, but the wild beast's mouth will be shut. You may walk where scorpions are in the way of duty, and you will not be hurt. It is this 'inner light;' it is not a text, it is not a creed, but it is this in ourselves which, if trusted, will lead us into all truth.
"I said I did not believe this voice was ever lost in the human soul. I do not forget that men grow very wicked, and women too, for that matter; I do not forget that men and women sometimes appear to us so lost and fallen that it seems as if no power in themselves, or any human power, could help them up; and yet to these worst, men and women, in some hallowed moment, is the word given, 'This is the way: walk ye in it.' And if, at the side of this man or woman, at that very moment, is some helping hand, some voice wise enough to counsel, he or she may be started to walk in that way." (P. 100.)
If Mr. Abbott is the logician of the association, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe is decidedly the wit. In the essay she read to the meeting she, with her keen woman's wit and her hard common sense, shows up in admirable style the ridiculousness and absurdity of the whole movement. She is not herself indeed free from all taint of radicalism, and much she says may be due to her facility in detecting and satirizing the follies and absurdities of her friends rather than those of her foes; but her essay proves that she has a soul, and knows that it has aspirations that go beyond nature, and wants which only a supernatural religion can satisfy. She evidently has glimpses of a truth higher, deeper, broader, than any recognized by any other radical who spoke. She disposes of free religion in a single sentence, "He is not religious who does not recognize the obligations of religion." We have space only for the concluding paragraph of her not very logical, self-consistent, but witty, shrewd, and satirical essay on Freedom and Restraint in Religion:
"But, friends, a sudden reaction comes over me. I determine to profess and practise the new religion. I have learned at the free religious club that I possess the first requisite for this, having never studied any theology at all. The ex-divines whom I have met there have so bewailed the artificial ignorance which they acquired in their divinity-school training, that I presume my natural knowledge to be its proper and desired antithesis. I have read the Bhavadgheeta and Mr. Emerson's poems, the psalms and gospel of the new faith. To be no Christian is the next important desideratum; and I believe that I shall find this, as most people do, easier than not. My first rule will be, 'Brahmins, beware of intercourse with Pariahs!' The three hundred incarnations of Vishnu, far more imposing in number than the single excarnation of which the old theology has made so much, shall be preached by me both as precept and example. The Confucian moralities, as illustrated by Californian experience, shall replace the Decalogue. Mr. Emerson's crowning sentence, that he who commits a crime hurts himself, will, of course, suffice to convert a whole society of criminals and reprobates. I will introduce the Joss into prisons, and give the myth of the Celestial Empire a literal interpretation. Our railroad and steamboat system will greatly facilitate the offering of children to the river, with the further advantage of offering the parents too. The strangling of female infants will relieve the present excess of female population in New England, and postpone the pressure of woman suffrage. The burning of widows alone will save the country no small outlay in pensions. Lastly, since the Turkish ethics are coming so much into favor, I should advise a more than Mormon application of them in our midst. Coöperative housekeeping could then be begun on the most immediate and harmonious footing. And so we will reconvert and transreform, and true progress shall consist in regress.
"But, as Archimedes asked to get out of the world in order to move it, we shall be forced to go outside of Christendom in order to accomplish this revolution. And if I may believe my friends of the Free Religious Association, the surest way to do this will be to keep closely in their midst. For, elsewhere, between steamboats and missionaries, we cannot be sure of meeting people who shall be sure of not being Christians.
"Perish the jest, and let the jester perish, if in aught but saddest earnest she exchanged the serious for the comic mask. Laughter is sometimes made to convey pathos that lies too deep for tears. I have but faintly sketched the scene-painting that would have to be done to-day, if religion could slip back and miss the sacred and indispensable mediation of Christianity. Take back the English language beyond the noble building of Shakespeare and Milton; take back philosophy beyond the labor of the Germans and the intuition of the Greeks; take back mathematics beyond Laplace and Newton; take back politics from the enlargement of republican experience—you will have yet a harder task when you shall carry religion back to its ante-Christian status and interpretation.
"Lastly, and to sum up. The freedom of religion is the satisfaction of obeying the innermost and highest impulses of the human soul, to the disregard of all secondary powers and considerations. I find this freedom inseparable from the constraint which obliges the man toward this highest effort, as the laws of the tidal flow force the wave to high-water mark. Our human dignity consists in the assertion of this freedom, the acknowledgment of this obligation. Intellectual freedom is found in study and the progress of thought, which is ever substituting enlarged and improved for rude and narrow processes. But the liberal heart precedes the liberal mind, and conditions it. To be careless as to authority and rash in conclusions, is not to be free; to be strict in logic and scrupulous in derivation, is not to be unfree. Let me end my discursive remarks with one phrase from a dear, melancholy, Calvinistic poet, who passed his life in damning himself and blessing others, repenting of a thousand sins he was never able to commit:
'He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves beside.'"(Pp. 53-57.)
A stranger, who gave his name as Gustave Watson, made a brief, modest, sensible speech, which fully refuted the radical pretensions. He told them that he had listened in vain to hear pronounced the great affirmative truth the speakers professed to have. An evangelical minister, a Rev. Jesse H. Jones, took up the defence of Christianity, but was too ignorant of the Christian faith, and too far gone himself in radicalism, to be able to effect much. He took up the weakest line of defence possible, and labored chiefly to show the novelty of Christianity against St. Augustine, and its identity, under one of its aspects, with carnal Judaism or modern socialism. An orthodox Jew sent an essay and a liberal Jew spoke. A professor of spiritism made a speech, and several radicals spoke whose speeches we are obliged to pass over, though as good as those we have noticed.
We have refrained as far as possible from ridiculing the proceedings of the association, which is no association at all, since it is founded on the principle of free individualism; for we wish to treat all men and women with the respect due to ourselves, if not to themselves. The chief actors in the movement we have formerly known, and some of them intimately. We have no doubt of their sincerity and earnestness; but we must be permitted to say that we have found nothing new or striking in their speeches, and we cannot remember the time when we were not perfectly familiar with all their doctrines and pretensions. Their views and aims were set forth in the New England metropolis nearly forty years ago, if with less mental refinement and polish, with an originality and freshness, a force and energy, which they can hardly hope to rival. They were embodied in 1836, and attempted to be realized in the Society for Christian Union and Progress, which its founder abandoned because he would not suffer it to grow into a sect, because he saw his movement was leading no whither, and could accomplish nothing for the glory of God or the good of mankind here or hereafter, and because, through the grace and mercy of God, he became convinced of the truth and sanctity of the Catholic Church against which the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century rebelled. He may not now be very proud of these radicals, but they are, to a great extent, the product of a movement of which he and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the earliest and principal leaders in Boston.
We readily acknowledge that the pretensions of these radical men and women are very great, but they show no great intellectual ability, and are painfully narrow and superficial. The ministers and ex-ministers who figured on the occasion exhibited neither depth nor breadth of view, neither strength nor energy of mind. They proved themselves passable rhetoricians, but deplorably ignorant of the past and the present, of the religions they believed themselves to have outgrown, and especially of human nature and the wants of the human soul. They appeared to know only their own theories projected from themselves, and which are as frail and as attenuated as any spider's web ever rendered visible by the morning dew. They pretend to have studied, mastered, and exhausted all the past systems, religions, and mythologies; they pride themselves on the universality of their knowledge, and their having lost all bigotry, intolerance, or severity toward any sect or denomination. They speak even patronizingly of the church, and are quite ready to concede that she was good and useful to humanity in her day, in barbarous times, and in the infancy of the race; but humanity, having attained its majority, has outgrown her, and demands now a more manly and robust, a purer and broader and a more living and life-giving religion—a religion, in a word, more Christian than Christianity, more Catholic than Catholicity. Ignorant or worse than ignorant of the lowest elements of Catholic teaching, they fancy they have outgrown it, as the adult man has outgrown the garments of his childhood. Their self-conceit is sublime. Why, they are not large enough to wear the fig-leaf aprons fabricated by the reformers of the sixteenth century with which to cover their nakedness. The tallest and stoutest among them is a dwarf by the side of a Luther or a Calvin, or even of the stern old Puritan founders of New England; nay, they cannot bear an intellectual comparison even with the originators of New England Unitarianism.