WHOм may the people trust? Not those, the base confederates of state, Who'd lay their country's fortunes desolate, Pluck her fair ensigns down to seal the Black man's fate, But they, the generous and the just, And freedom's banner waves o'er an enfranchised land. These are the Nation's trust, They are the Patriots just. A. BRONSON ALCOTT. A TALE FROM THE GULISTAN. THEY tell a story of an oppressor who purchased firewood from the poor by force, and gave it gratuitously to the rich. A judicious man passing that way said, "You are a snake that bites every one you see, or an owl that destroys every place where you sit; although your injustice may pass unpunished amongst us, it will not escape the observation of that God to whom all secrets are revealed. Injure not the inhabitants of this world, that the sighs of the oppressed may not ascend to heaven." The oppressor was displeased at his words, frowned on him, and took no further notice of him, until one night when fire, issuing from the kitchen, caught the stock of wood, and consumed all his goods; when his soft bed became a seat of warm ashes. It happened that this same judicious person, passing by, and hearing him say to his friends, "I know not from whence this fire fell upon my house," replied, "From the smoke of the hearts of the poor." Beware of the groans of the wounded souls, since the inward sore will at length break out; oppress not to the utmost a single heart, for a single sigh has power to overset a whole world. On the crown of Kaikusrou was the following inscription: "For how many years, during what space of time, shall men pass over my grave? As the kingdom came to me by succession, in like manner shall it pass to the hands of others." I PARIS, JANUARY, 1866. REGRETTED not to have been able to send you some word for THE RADICAL before leaving America. I should have liked at least to express the interest I felt in its publication, in the ideas which it will advocate, in its tone and spirit. Its name, simple, direct and pronounced, its assumption on the very title of the broadest, most inclusive meaning of the word, Religion, were both most satisfactory and full of good omen. I trust and believe that its purpose will be fulfilled by the frankest, most unreserved, most unmanipulated statements of doctrine, unabated by any qualifications except such as will be dictated by good sense and good feeling, and above all, by the earnest desire to find and communicate the truth. There never was a time when clear thought and decided statement were more needed, or could be more useful. In the confusion of old opinions broken up; in the fog of new ideas half formed; in the unreconciled and illogical mixture of systems and tendencies; in the temptation to stretch the old phraseology to cover new thoughts, and to use the new phrases without a distinct meaning; in the mutual misunderstandings of wings and schools; in the pain of unsettled convictions and the danger of intellectual dishonesty; in the sincere desire for light and the sincere fear of losing the way; in all that characterizes the present theological condition of America, any clear statement of matured conviction may be of immense service. And the more straightforward and outspoken, the more serviceable. So, I hope your contributors will always remember that it is THE RADICAL for which they are writing. And I hope you will hold to that larger meaning of Religion which I suppose you to keep in setting it in your title as if it summed up all that your Magazine would have to treat of; and I am sure that you do not mean to confine its pages to mere theological criticism or devout sentiment. It is of great consequence that men should come to use the word Religion as covering all of life, and not shut it off to name only one enclosure, however important. All of life, I mean, viewed in the higher aspects; viewed in those spiritual, eternal relations which thoughtful men see to lie back of the surface-aspects of all. The sooner we get entirely rid of the technical division of sacred and profane, the better. The sooner we get rid of the division between sacred and worldly as a division by walls on the same surface, and come to see it as a separation only of higher and lower planes, of superficial and central, the better. I need not say, then, that I entirely disagree with your trenchant and impassioned correspondent, H. J., (I wish he had not such a bad habit of calling names,) in his attempt to confine Religion to its purely redemptory significance, to its single relation of salvation from sin. Even in that "grim and uncompromising past" to which he so confidently appeals against the "modern sentimentalism," this has not been the only conception of Religion; though it may have been too often a predominant one. In all times men have regarded God as life-giving, beneficent, as Creator, 66 305 Protector, Father; and not only as Punisher and Pardoner. But were it otherwise, we ought to believe that in the growth of the race higher and completer conceptions would naturally take the place of the old, imperfect ones; that what was latent in the past would become prominent, and that what was predominant might become secondary. I admired very much the picturesqueness of those carved fifteenth-century chairs which I saw the other day at the Musée de Cluny among a multitude of fascinating antiquities; and I wanted one of them very much. But I should count that man as doting and debauched," (to borrow H. J.'s mild phrase,) who should assert that the builders of those hard, narrow, straight-backed seats of a "grim and uncompromising past," alone knew what was fit for a Christian to sit in. I protest against every theology founded on the Fall of Man. I protest against this merely pathological view of Religion. Religion is Health; but it is not necessarily Cure. I believe in the falls of men ; but I believe it better to be saved from falling, than to be saved from the consequences of having fallen. We should do well to carry the modern therapeutics into the spiritual sphere, and substitute, as much as possible, Regimen for Medicine. I have no doubt that we inherit some bad tendencies from our ancestor, the Past, but many good ones, too, and among them the power to do better than he. Some men, it has been said, are so well born that they do not need to be born again; and this is true of most men, in some particular. Our aim should be to make it true of all men in all respects. Thankful we needs must be for the Divine Physician, the Healing Spirit beyond whose restorative power no soul can ever sink. But I think we ought to insist more and more on those sweet native ties which in so many simple, wholesome, cheerful ways bind us instinctively and voluntarily to Him from whom we are never sundered but in part, never utterly alienated, never hopelessly fallen, nor ever can be; whose children we are not by adoption but by birth. But recognizing this; declaring that Religion, or our conscious union with God is a native not a superinduced relation, and so finding Religion as I said, to cover all of life, it does not follow that every thing which a man does can properly be called religious. A woman sitting in churchtime on Boston Common; a man mending a steam-engine on Sunday, are not necessarily religious. I should want to know what thought was in the mind, what disposition in the heart, what motive in the will and hand, before deciding. If there were mere idle or superficial thought, a purely material aim, mere animal enjoyment or animal activity, there was so far no religion, though there may have been no harm. If there was frivolity, or ill-temper, or any form of selfishness, so far there was irreligion. And cisely the same would be true if they were at church, or reading the Bible, or doing any act commonly called religious. Man's outward life, whether preof work, or play, or ritual worship, can all be carried on without religion. But also into the most ordinary, commonplace things of it there may be put such a spirit of conscientious fidelity, such a sense of duty, such a hearty unselfishness, such a sweet feeling of human affection, such a cheerful sense of God's presence, and of a will of His to be done in that homely way, that the act becomes truly a religious act. In short, it is a striking through the outward service into eternal sentiments, principles, ideas, that brings us into the sphere of religion; and that sphere lies close to life. And in devoting your Magazine to Religion you mean to say, I suppose, that whatever is discussed in its pages will be looked at reverently as from this deeper point of view, treated in the light of ideas and principles. How much of God's good-will to man do our social customs and institutions embody? How do our Politics, our Trade, look beside His justice? How much of His ways and working does our Science reveal? How much of spiritual truth is in our Theology, of spiritual beauty in our Art, of spiritual life and peace in our Worship? Passing a bookseller's one day here in Paris, my eye fell upon a little paper in the window bearing the title, "La Morale Independante.” I bought some numbers of it, and found that it was the organ of a movement here which is somewhat significant and quite in the line of this question of the true definition of Religion. How extensive the movement is I do not know; I find the same four or five names attached to the articles in all the numbers I have read. But it is of sufficient importance to have attracted the attention of the church, and a series of sermons has just been preached against it at Notre Dame by a celebrated preacher, the Rev. Father Hyacinthe. The system of the "Morale Independante" is, as the name indicates, an endeavor to establish Morality upon its own basis, separated entirely from Theology. You will see the positivest element in it. It declares itself to be not atheistic; it neither denies nor affirms God; it leaves the theological question entirely aside, regarding it as at best purely hypothetical and speculative, a question of man's origin and end, of no practical value, with no basis of certainty, leading therefore to perpetual controversy and division. It leaves the religious question, therefore, to the individual to settle, each for himself and each differently, Catholic, Protestant, Deist, Pantheist, but calls all to come upon this ground of unity where all may agree; Morality on its own impregnable foundation in the nature of man; morality one, identical, universal; disengaged from every foreign element. Every man finds in his nature the fact of a free personality; with this a demand that his personality be respected by others, and reciprocally an obligation to respect theirs. This fact is the basis of Morality. Generalized and elevated by the reason, sanctioned by the moral sensibility, idealized by the imagination, that which was at first individual and egotistic rises to the sentiment of Duty, to the idea of Right, to the ideal of Justice. It thus becomes a Power, a Law and an End, impersonal and universal. It becomes the ground and motive of all private virtues and of all social progress. That is good doctrine, I should say. Preach it by all means and everywhere, good friends. It cannot but do good to teach men self-respect and respect for others; still more to teach them a Law and a Power above their individual egoisms. It cannot but do good to teach them to find in them 307 selves a basis for that which should govern their lives. And believe that in teaching this you are teaching a Religion. For the moment you have passed beyond an individual fact into an eternal principle and universal idea, you have entered the sphere of religion. You may not like the work, indeed, on account of false notions associated with it. For the same reason you may not like to use the name God. But you are teaching God, for you teach a spiritual power which, though in man, is yet above him. Knowing that it is but right and manly for men to reluct at a moral law which is represented in the churches as an arbitrary will of a distant and individual God, whose detailed volitions are revealed only through a few messengers, and recorded only in the pages of the Bible, you send them to human nature as to an accessible and certain source. selves, and something beyond themselves; a law which leaves them free They will find these thembecause it is their own nature, and which binds them because from that nature they cannot escape; a law that is in them and yet is above them, because they did not make it, nor yet any man, nor can they unmake it; because though revealed in the individual, it is perceived to be universal. It is then truly a Religion which you teach. But it is not all of Religion. There is in human nature another fact, another sentiment, another idea, another ideal; equally accessible, equally certain, equally universal. It is the fact that by force of his nature man conceives of, reaches out towards, an invisible Being beyond himself, beyond nature; it is the sentiment of reverence, trust, love, dependence towards this being. It is the idea of Supreme Spirit, of God; it is the ideal of heaven, a kingdom of God on this earth or beyond. Make as much as you may of the varying, confused, contradictory notions that have gathered about them, the grand fact, sentiment, idea, ideal remain fixed and essential in human nature, pointing still beyond it. The variations can be matched by the variations which exist about morals, without impugning in either case the ground of unity, universality, certainty, existing beneath. Of this fact and its connections science is bound to take cognizance; to listen to and sift the testimony of the witnesses, the experts, the saints. Now to the idea of God thus reached-to this Theology-morality (which may doubtless be investigated and practised by itself,) readily attaches, not as a "foreign," but a kindred element. That moral something in man which is yet above him—what is it but the presence in him of the Infinite Justice of God, working in him and ruling him in a sweet and natural way as the forces of material nature work in and rule his body. The law of himself and yet more than himself; just right lies not in the arbitrary will of an individual God, but in the very nature and being of the spiritual God. It is not uttered through oracles and written in statute-books, but wrought into the constitution of things and of man. In obeying it man is obeying the law of his own nature, and so while firmly bound is beautifully free, and keeps his manhood and his liberty. Something like this I should say to the supporters of the "Morale Indépendante." (And you may think, so have I run on, that my letter ought to be sent to that paper instead of the RADICAL.) It was not, however, ex |