And you, as many of you as have authority and dignity, labor hard with the pen, the voice, example, and precept to prevent the youth not yet contaminated with this new licentiousness, nor yet drunk with that perfume which lulls before it suffocates, from turning renegades to the spirituality of art. Make them improve the feeling rather than the style of their productions. Make them disavow the causes whose effects we groan under, and which Providence has allowed so long to afflict us. Make them rise above the prejudices of the journals and the abjectness of officials, as well as the mercenary motives of a utilitarian world and from practices which make a trade of art. Let them never forget the lofty mission of art, and that the form is merely a garb and outfit to clothe the moral idea. For beauty is the perfection of being, perceived by the spirit, felt in the heart, and its handmaid is truth, represented with love. And, without doubt, for him whose aim is truth, the best way of finding it is in subjects and deeds of religion. Let us banish, then, indifference, which slays love and genius alike, and that cold calculation which smothers trustful faith. The time, the people, the man best fitted for the culture of art, will be those whose life, at once profound and active, shall not be bound down, but indeed lifted up by beliefs that are fixed and by customs that are right; who combine fidelity to nature with the impulse of enthusiasm; retaining power over matter, with due regard to historical and moral proprieties; exciting that emotion which is not unaccompanied by pleasure, but pleasure mingled with admiration.
Restore, I entreat you, art to its great principles! Fill life again with those sweet illusions and great delights, making a language of the deepest thoughts of a civilization ever more refined, and so accustom us to realize the ideal, to ennoble humanity! Give it back to its great office, to bear witness to right belief, and to give joy to the little ones, who are our brethren in Christ!
MAX MÜLLER’S “CHIPS.” [119]
Mr. Max Müller, the learned German professor, and Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, wrote, and in 1868 published, a collection of essays on the science of religion which he calls Chips from a German Workshop. He tells us this title was given him by the late Chevalier Bunsen, who, on advising him to undertake the translation of the Sacred Book of the Brahmins, the Rig-Veda, bade him give, from time to time, to the public some chips from his workshop. The intensely absorbing and delightful nature of his studies is to be seen very clearly by these specimens. They embrace two of the most important and most attractive branches of human science—that of the varied forms of human thought in its relations to God; and that of the multifold languages of the earth, and their mutual relations. Prof. Müller’s philological investigations are confined chiefly to the Indo-Germanic family, and confirm beyond possibility of cavil the intimate connection between the many branches of that family—the Sanskrit, the Brahmanic language in use at present, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin with its offshoots, the Italian, the French, and the Spanish, the Celtic and the English. In exemplifying what he says on this subject, he speaks of the meaning of the word Veda. Rig-Veda, he tells us, means praise of knowledge or wisdom—Rig or Rich signifying praise or hymn, and Veda knowledge or wisdom. He calls our attention to this word Veda in support of the theory of the connection of the Aryan or Indo-Germanic group of languages. The root of it, or the word deprived of its final vowel—Ved—is to be seen by substituting the interchanging consonants in the English words wit, wot, the German weiss, Gothic vait, Anglo-Saxon wat, Greek οἶδα, to which may be added the Latin word video, to see, evidently closely connected with this Sanskrit word signifying to know, for knowledge is intellectual vision.
What impresses us most, at first sight, is the practical conclusion to be drawn from the advanced state of philological studies. We have here a striking proof of the unity of the race of man. Max Müller speaks of this proof in favor of the unity of the Aryan races as beyond gainsaying; words are there to establish the truth. Now, if we see such differently constituted peoples—such as the English and the Hindoo, the French and the Persian, the Celt and the Italian—all members of one family, can any one be so rash as to wish to exclude from fellowship with that family the tawny Arab, the swarthy Malay, or the dark son of Africa, simply because they are to be classed under the heads of Semitic and Turanian? It is well known among physiologists that the differences of facial angles and cranial thickness constitute nothing essential; while the investigations of national thought and customs, hitherto veiled by unintelligible languages, tend continually to demonstrate and confirm the unity of man, to show that all men are of one common stock, of one man and of one woman, all made after the one type—that which exists, as the Bible tells us, in God. So far, in fact, is real science from doing harm to revelation, that when it attains its perfection it confirms the truths that have been revealed. Whence we may draw this conclusion: that men who are wise will take care to have revelation for their guide, even in science; they will, it is clear, be saved from going astray, since their ultimate examinations confirm its truth. It is not unfrequently the case that the eager scientific man, by a logical process, draws his conclusion without the slightest suspicion of error in his premises. It is no wonder he is tenacious of his conclusion; but how often are his ideas overthrown by “chance,” that strange discoverer of more than one great treasure of the human race! And how often sober, thoughtful men, meeting to determine the basis on which they stand, have to say, as did the Geological Congress of Paris in 1867: “The state of the science is not such as to enable us to make deductions wholly free from danger of error”! or, certainly it is most just that we should love science and follow it faithfully, but always with an eye to that old and familiar adage, “It is human to err.” There is really nothing after all that saves a man from mistakes and confusion so much as a proper estimate of his own conclusions, and a readiness to have them corrected by others. It is a habit of mind that distinguishes really great men, like the sounder portion of the Prehistorical Congress of Bologna, in the autumn of 1871: “There is nothing in prehistorical discoveries that is in contradiction with revelation.” Bacon has bid us all put aside the idola, and thus free our minds from prejudice. We should begin by banishing the idol of self, the reliance on our own judgment, so as to be ready at once to abandon cherished ideas, and to look on the principles of science as more or less liable to be one day, by further investigation, shown to be other than we think them. This is all the more important because false principles always do practical harm, and, if nothing else, they retard the attainment of what we are searching for, in putting us on the wrong path. We do not wish to be thought to condemn all scientific principles as one day liable to be proven false. There are some, the essential agreement of whose subject and predicate absolutely excludes all danger of error, others which the constant experience of the human race has shown to be true, such as, for instance, the mathematical, and many of those that form the basis of natural science. These do not contradict revelation, and will never be proven false. The history of the past, however, is too full of the débris of systems of every kind that any one of solid information should not take warning from them, and be on his guard against looking on any proposition in natural science as irrefragable which the concordant testimony of men since the enunciation of it has not shown to be so. The Ptolemean system, after an undisputed sway, yielded before the assaults of Copernicus and Galileo, and its solid spheres, whose music filled the poet’s mind with delight, and charmed the privileged spirits to whom it was given to hear it, came down in awful ruin, and their sounds were hushed for ever. Then those whose years did not begin with the century can recall how eagerly they drank in the doctrine of the imponderable principles; and lo! what has become of them? The progress of the age has substituted for it the teaching of the unity of forces, and motion answers for them all. The solidity of the sun and its dark spots, under the telescope and the combined investigations of astronomers, have disappeared, and gaseous substance and interruption in its continuity have taken the place of both. And in the recent brilliant discoveries in regard to the constituent gases of the sun, who is to make us sure that the lines in the spectrum, by which we profess to know the existence in the sun of certain determinate objects, may not be produced by other causes of which we know nothing? All these theories, we grant, have great probability in their favor, and we do not cite them with any intent to discredit the labors of the gifted men who have formed them; but it is wise not to look on them as the end of all investigation and beyond all controversy. As we think of these vicissitudes of science, there occur to us, though not in a spirit of disregard for true science, the words written long ago: “I have seen the trouble which God hath given the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made all things good in their time, and hath delivered the world to their consideration, so that man cannot find out the work which God hath made from the beginning to the end.” (Eccles. iii. 10, 11.) This, however, is a digression; let us return to our Chips.
By far the most important topic treated of by Prof. Müller is the knowledge of God existing among the varied nations of men. He gives great weight, and deservedly, to the result of his observation in this respect, and we can readily understand why he should lay so much stress on the importance of the study of the “science of religion,” or the comparative study of the different religions of the earth. As a matter of erudition, it must always be a subject of the greatest interest, not only in itself, but also because it serves to illustrate the words of the Apostle to the Romans, ch. i. 18-20: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those men that detain the truth of God in injustice: because that which is capable of being known[120] of God is manifest in them: for God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity, so that they are inexcusable.” We shall have occasion to return to these words. Here we may remark that this knowledge of God that transpires in all the citations the learned Orientalist has laid before us, is nothing more than what as Christians we expected to hear. But in this connection we have to say that the contrary effect is produced to that intended by Prof. Müller. This corroboration of the words of St. Paul, uttered more than eighteen centuries ago, and proclaimed long before by the author of the Book of Wisdom, ch. xiii., proves that, so far from the religions of the earth meriting praise for their reference to a Supreme Being, they deserve to be censured because they detained the truth in darkness—in injustice. The words of the Professor are: “We shall learn [from this comparative study] that there is hardly one religion which does not contain some important truth; truth sufficient to enable those who seek the Lord, and feel after him, to find him in the hour of their need.” The first portion of this assertion is true; the second is incorrect in its expression, and dangerous in its tendency. It is incorrect in its expression, inasmuch as it attributes to these religions, as such, the possession of truth—not all, to be sure, but some truth. We say, on the contrary, that the truth contained in these various religious systems is the common inheritance of the human mind.
The light of Almighty God’s countenance shines on us all, no matter who we are. The Psalmist asks: “Quis ostendet nobis bona?” and he answers: “Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui Domine!” It is wrong, therefore, to give credit to a false system for the truth it has enveloped in darkness. And the reason of this is palpable. If we turn to the words of the apostle, as given above, do we find him giving credit to the false religions of mankind for the truth they contain? Anything but this. He says: “The invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity, so that they are inexcusable. Because, when they knew God, they did not glorify him as God.... And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds and four-footed beasts, and of creeping things.” Here we have a sentence pronounced against these very religions our author speaks of as containing sufficient truth to enable those who seek the Lord and feel after him, to find him in the hour of their need. The apostle condemns them because “they detained the truth of God in injustice.”
This is to be said of these false religions even at their best. But what is to be said of them when we take into consideration the immense majority of those among the heathen do not attain to any refined spirituality, but are engrossed in the material, sensual forms of idolatry, like the conservative Parsees, so graphically described in the book before us? We must therefore conclude that, granting Prof. Müller intended to refer to man’s natural knowledge or his reason as a means of knowing God, to which the apostle bears witness, he has used an incorrect form of speech in attributing to these religions efficacy in finding God. It would have been in every way better to write that, in spite of the errors of these various systems, there was still light enough left to man, through his reason, to lead him to God—a truth not only substantiated by the teaching of theologians, but, as we have seen, expressly laid down in Holy Writ.