Heart of Man by George Edward Woodberry
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George Edward Woodberry >> Heart of Man
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"Such authority, then, as is commonly granted in science, politics, or
commerce to the past results and expectations of men bringing human life
in these provinces down to our time and delivering it, not as a new, but
as an incomplete thing, into the hands of our generation, we may yield
also in religion. The lives of the saints and all those who in history
have illustrated the methods and results of piety, their convictions,
speculations, and hopes, their warning and encouragement, compose a
great volume of instruction, illustration, and education of the
religious life. It is folly to ignore this, as it would be to ignore
the alphabet of letters, the Arabic numerals, or the Constitution; for,
as these are the monuments of past achievement and an advantage we have
at our start over savage man, so in religion there are as well
established results of life already lived. Though the religious life be
personal, it is not more so than all life of thought and emotion; and in
it we do not begin at the beginning of time any more than in other parts
of life. We begin with an inheritance of many experiments hitherto, of
many methods, of a whole race-history of partial error, partial truth;
and we take up the matter where our fathers laid it down, with the
respect due to their earnest toil, their sincere effort and trial, their
convictions; and the youth who does not feel their impressiveness as
enforcing his responsibility has as nascent a life in religion as he
would have, in the similar case, in learning or in citizenship.
"The question of authority in the religious life, however, is more
specific than this, and is not to be met by an admission of the general
respect due to the human past and its choicer spirits, and our
dependence thereon for the fostering of instinctive impulses,
direction, and the confirmation of our experience. It is organized
religion that here makes its claim to fealty, as organized liberty,
organized justice do, in man's communal life. There is a joint and
general consent in the masses of men with similar experience united
into the Church, with respect to the religious way of life, similar to
that of such masses united into a government with respect to secular
things. The history of the Church with its embodied dogmas--the past of
Christendom--contains that consent; and the Church founds its claim to
veneration on this broad accumulation of experience, so gathered from
all ages and all conditions of men as to have lost all traces of
individuality and become the conviction of mankind to a degree that no
free constitution and no legal code can claim. To substitute the simple
faith of the young heart, however immediate, in the place of this hoary
and commanding tradition is a daring thing, and may seem both arrogance
and folly; to stand apart from it, though willing to be taught within
the free exercise of our own faculties, abashes us; and it is necessary,
for our own self-respect, to adopt some attitude toward the Church
definitely, not as a part of the common mass of race-tradition in a
diffused state like philosophy, but as an institution like the Throne or
the Parliament.
"But may it not be pleaded that, however slight by comparison personal
life may seem, yet if it be true, the Church must include this in its
own mighty sum; and that what the Church adds to define, expand, and
elevate, to guide and support, belongs to growth in spiritual things,
not to those beginnings which only are here spoken of? And in defence of
a private view and hesitancy, such as is also felt in the organized
social life elsewhere, may it not be suggested that the past of
Christendom, great as it is in mental force, moral ardour, and spiritual
insight, and illustrious with triumphs over evil in man and in society,
and shining always with the leading of a great light, is yet a human
past, an imperfect stage of progress at every era? Is its historic life,
with all its accumulation of creed and custom, not a process of
Christianization, in which much has been sloughed off at every new birth
of the world? In reading the Fathers we come on states of mind and forms
of emotion due to transitory influences and surroundings; and in the
history of the Church, we come upon dogmas, ceremonials, methods of work
and aims of effort, which were of contemporary validity only. Such are
no longer rational or possible; they have passed out of life, belonging
to that body of man which is forever dying, not to the spirit that is
forever growing; and, too, as all men and bodies of men share in
imperfection, we come, in the Fathers and in the Church, upon passions,
persecutions, wars, vices, degradation, and failure, necessarily to be
accounted as a portion of the admixture of sin and wrong, of evil, in
the whole of man's historic life. In view of these obvious facts, and
also of the great discrepancies of such organic bodies as are here
spoken of in their total mass as the Church, and of their emphasis upon
such particularities, is not an attitude of reserve justifiable in a
young and conscientious heart? It may seem to be partial scepticism,
especially as the necessity for rejection of some portion of this
embodied past becomes clearer in the growth of the mind's information
and the strengthening of moral judgment in a rightful independence. But
if much must be cast away, let it not disturb us; it must be the more
in proportion as the nature of man suffers redemption. Let us own, then,
and reverence the great tradition of the Church; but he has feebly
grasped the idea of Christ leavening the world, and has read little in
the records of pious ages even, who does not know that even in the
Church it is needful to sift truth from falsehood, dead from living
truth.
"If, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such a use of reason as
we make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing them
historically with reference to their constant service to mankind and
their particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was the
case with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the Church
proclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of which
it would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices,
reserved in Puritan thought to God only,--then does it not usurp the
function of the soul itself, suppress the personal revelation of the
divine by taking from the soul the seals of original sovereignty, remove
God to the first year of our era, relying on his mediate revelation in
time, and thus take from common man the evidence of religion and
therewith its certainty, and in general substitute faith in things for
the vital faith? If the voice of the Church is to find only its own echo
in the inner voice of life, if its evidences of religion involve more
than is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, if its
rites have any other reality than that of the heart which expresses
itself in them and so gives them life and significance, then its
authority is external wholly and has nothing in common with that
authority which free men erect over themselves because it is themselves
embodied in an outward principle. If personality has any place in the
soul, if the soul has any original office, then the authority that
religion as an organic social form may take on must lie within limits
that reserve to the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un-borrowed
radiance, and to all men its possession, simple or learned, lay or
cleric, through their common experience and ordinary faculties in the
normal course of life. Otherwise, it seems to me, personal experience
cannot be the beginning of Christian conviction, the true available test
of it, the underlying basis of it as we build the temple of God's
presence within us, and, as I have called it, the vitality of the whole
matter.
"Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, under
such reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justice
in which we are bred and which are forms of the cardinal fact of the
value of the personal soul in all men,--what to us is the office of the
Church? In theology it defines a philosophy which, though an
interpretation of divine truth, takes its place in the intellectual
scheme of theory like other human philosophies, and has a similar value,
differing only in the gravity of its subject-matter, which is the most
mysterious known to thought. In its specific rites it dignifies the
great moments of life--birth, marriage, and death--with its solemn
sanctions; and in its general ceremonies it affords appropriate forms in
which religious emotion finds noble and tender expression; especially it
enables masses of men to unite in one great act of the heart with the
impressiveness that belongs to the act of a community, and to make that
act, though emotional in a multitude of hearts, single and whole in
manifestation; and it does this habitually in the life of its least
groups by Sabbath observances, and in the life of nations by public
thanksgivings, and in the life of entire Christendom by its general
feasts of Christmas and Easter, and, though within narrower limits, by
its seasons of fasting and prayer. In its administration it facilitates
its daily work among men. The Church is thus a mighty organizer of
thought in theology, of the forms of emotion in its ritual, and of
practical action in its executive. Its doctrines, however conflicting in
various divisions of the whole vast body, are the result of profound,
conscientious, and long-continued thought among its successive synods,
which are the custodians of creeds as senates are of constitutions, and
whose affirmations and interpretations have a like weight in their own
speculative sphere as these possess in the province of political thought
age after age. Its counsels are ripe with a many-centuried knowledge of
human nature. Its joys and consolations are the most precious
inheritance of the heart of man. Its saints open our pathways, and go
before, following in the ways of the spirit. Its doors concentrate
within their shelter the general faith, and give it there a home. Its
table is spread for all men. I do not speak of the Church Invisible,
but mean to embrace with this catholicity of statement all
organizations, howsoever divided, which own Christ as their Head.
Temple, cathedral, and chapel have each their daily use to those who
gather there with Christian hearts; each is a living fountain to its own
fold. The village spire, wherever it rises on American or English
ground, bespeaks an association of families who find in this bond an
inward companionship and outward expression of it in a public habit
continuing from the fathers down, sanctified by the memories of
generations gone, and tender with the hope of the generation to come;
and this is of measureless good within such families for young and old
alike. It bespeaks also an instrument of charity, unobtrusive, friendly,
and searching, and growing more and more unconfined; it bespeaks a rock
of public morality deep-set in the foundations of the state.
"It is true that in uniting with such a Church, under the specific
conditions natural to both temperament and residence, a man yields
something of private right, and sacrifices in a greater or less degree
his personality; but this is the common condition of all social
cooperation, whether in party action or any union to a common end. The
compromise, involved in any platform of principles, tolerates essential
differences in important matters, but matters not then important in view
of what is to be gained in the main. The advantages of an organized
religious life are too plain to be ignored; it is reasonable to go to
the very verge in order to avail of them, both for a man's self and for
his efficiency in society, just as it is to unite with a general party
in the state, and serve it in local primaries, for the ends of
citizenship; such means of help and opportunities of accomplishment are
not to be lightly neglected. Happy is he who, christened at the font,
naturally accepts the duties devolved upon him, and stands in his
parents' place; and fortunate I count the youth who, without stress and
trouble, undertakes in his turn his father's part. But some there are,
born of that resolute manliness of the fathers, which is finer than
tempered steel, and of the conscience of the mothers which is more
sensitive than the bare nerve,--the very flower of the Puritan
tradition, and my heart goes out to them. And if there be a youth in
our days who feels hesitancy in such an early surrender into the bosom
of a Church, however broadly inclusive of firm consciences, strong
heads, and free hearts; if primitive Puritanism is bred in his bone and
blood and is there the large reserve of liberty natural to the American
heart; if the spirit is so living in him that he dispenses with the
form, which to those of less strenuous strain is rather a support; if
truth is so precious to him that he will not subscribe to more or less
than he believes, or tolerate in inclusive statements speculative and
uncertain elements, traditional error, and all that body of rejected
doctrine which, though he himself be free from it, must yet be slowly
uprooted from the general belief; if emotion is so sacred to him that
his native and habitual reticence becomes so sensitive in this most
private part of life as to make it here something between God and him
only; if his heart of charity and hand of friendship find out his
fellow-men with no intervention; if for these reasons, or any of them,
or if from that modesty of nature, which is so much more common in
American youth than is believed, he hesitates, out of pure awe of the
responsibility before God and man which he incurs, to think himself
worthy of such vows, such hopes, such duties,--if in any way, being of
noble nature, he keeps by himself,--let him not think he thereby
withdraws from the life of Christendom, nor that in the Church itself he
may not still take some portion of its great good. So far as its
authority is of the heart only, so far as it has organized the religious
life itself without regard to other ends and free from intellectual,
historical, and governmental entanglements that are supplementary at
most, he needs no formal act to be one with its spirit; and, however
much he may deny himself by his self-limitation, he remains a
Christian."
* * * * *
There was no doubt about it; we were lost. The faint tracks in the soil
had long ago disappeared, and we followed, as was natural, the draws
between the slopes; and now, for the last quarter-hour, the grass had
deepened till it was above the wheels and to the shoulders of the
ponies. They did not mind; they were born to it. What solitude there was
in it, as we pulled up and came to a stand! What wildness was there!
Only the great blue sky, with a westward dropping sun of lonely
splendour, and green horizons, broken and nigh, of the waving prairie,
whispering with the high wind,--and no life but ours shut in among the
group of low, close hills all about, in that grassy gulf! The earth
seemed near, waiting for us; in such places, just like this, men lost
had died and none knew it; half-unconsciously I found myself thinking of
Childe Roland's Tower,--
"those two hills on the right
Couched,"--
and the reality of crossing the prairie in old days came back on me.
That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of
life, an arrival, an end.
The sun was too low for further adventuring. We struck due west on as
straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the
Looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to
mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to
which we drove,--a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our
nooning in. We drove to the door, and called; it was long before any
answer came; but at last a woman opened the door, her face and figure
the very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair. Alone on
that prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a human
countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, and
hardly answered to our question of the road. She was the type of the
abandonment of human life. I did not speak to her; but I see her now, as
I saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be,
by human life, like that. There was no one else in the house; and she
shut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as
if we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in that
green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles. I have often
thought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found some
image of other solitudes--and men and women in them--as expansive, as
alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows
dehumanized, and dies.
We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us in
case of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, before
darkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward,--a
splendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, and
dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and
on we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go. At the first
farmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to our
control, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly,
under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long. It
was then I took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a
change, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day with
wrist and eye, while he listened. So we drove down, and knew the moon
was up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of
the creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light,
lay the long valley like a larger river. We still felt the upland,
however, as a loftier air; and always as, when night comes, nature
exercises some mysterious magic of the dark hour in strange places,
there, as all day long, we seemed to draw closer to earth--not earth as
it is in landscape, a thing of beauty and colour and human kinship, but
earth, the soil, the element, the globe.
This was in both our minds, and I had thought of it before he spoke
after a long pause over the briar pipes that had comraded our talk since
morning. "I can't talk of it now," he said; "it's gone into me in an
hour that you have been years in thinking; but that is what you are to
us." I say the things he said, for I cannot otherwise give his way, and
that trust of love in which these thoughts were born on my lips; all
those years, in many a distant place, I had thought for him almost as
much as for myself. "You knighted us," he said, "and we fight your
cause,"--not knowing that kingship, however great or humble, is but the
lowly knights made one in him who by God's grace can speak the word. "I
have no doubt it's true, what you say; but it is different. I expected
it would be; but we used to speak of nature more than the soul, and of
nature's being a guide. Poor Robin, I remember, began with that." "There
is a sonnet of Arnold's you know," I answered, "that tells another
tale. But I did not learn it from him. And, besides, what else he has to
say is not cheerful. Nothing is wise," I interjected, "that is not
cheerful."
But without repeating the wandering talk of reality with its changeful
tones,--and however serious the matter might be it was never far from a
touch of lightness shuttling in and out like sunshine,--I told him, as
we drove down the dark valley, my hand resting now on his shoulder near
me, how nature is antipodal to the soul; or, if not the antipodes, is
apart from us, and cares not for the virtues we have erected, for
authority and mercy, for justice, chastity, and sacrifice, for nothing
that is man's except the life of the body itself, the race-life, as if
man were a chemical element or a wave-motion of ether that are parts of
physics. "I convinced myself," I said, "that the soul is not a term in
the life of nature, but that nature is in it as a physical vigour and to
it an outward spectacle, whereby the soul acquires a preparation for
immortality, whether immortality come or not. And I have sometimes
thought," I continued, "that on the spiritual side an explanation of the
inequalities of human conditions, both past and present, may be
contained in the idea that for all alike, lowly and lofty, wretched and
fortunate, simple and learned, life remains in all its conditions an
opportunity to know God and exercise the soul in virtue, and is an
education of the soul in all its essential knowledge and faculties, at
least within Christian times, broadly speaking, and in more than one
pagan civilization. Material success, fame, wealth, and power--birth
even, with all it involves of opportunity and fate--are insignificant,
if the soul's life is thus secured. I do not mean that such a thought
clears the mystery of the different lots of mankind; but it suggests
another view of the apparent injustice of the world in its most rigid
forms. This, however, is a wandering thought. The great reversal of the
law of nature in the soul lies in the fact that whereas she proceeds by
the selfish will of the strongest trampling out the weak, spiritual law
requires the best to sacrifice itself for the least. Scientific ethics,
which would chloroform the feeble, can never succeed until the race
makes bold to amend what it now receives as the mysterious ways of
heaven, and identifies a degenerate body with a dead soul. Such a code
is at issue with true democracy, which requires that every soul, being
equal in value in view of its unknown future, shall receive the benefit
of every doubt in earthly life, and be left as a being in the hands of
the secret power that ordained its existence in the hour when nature was
constituted to be its mode of birth, consciousness, and death. And if
the choice must be made on the broad scale, it is our practical faith
that the service of the best, even to the point of death, is due to the
least in the hope of bettering the lot of man. Hence, as we are willing
that in communities the noblest should die for a cause, we consent to
the death of high civilizations, if they spread in some Hellenization of
a Roman, some Romanizing of a barbaric world; and to the extinction of
aristocracies, if their virtues thereby are disseminated and the social
goods they monopolized made common in a people; and to the falling of
the flower of man's spirit everywhere, if its seeds be sown on all the
winds of the future for the blessing of the world's fuller and more
populous life. Such has been the history of our civilization, and still
is, and must be till the whole earth's surface be conquered for
mankind, embodied in its highest ideals, personal and social. This is
not nature's way, who raises her trophy over the slain; our trophy is
man's laurel upon our grave. So, everywhere except in the physical
sphere of life, if you would find the soul's commands, reverse nature's
will. This superiority to nature, as it seems to me, this living in an
element plainly antithetical to her sphere, is a sign of 'an ampler
ether, a diviner air.'"
So I spoke, as the words came to me, while we were still driving down
the dark valley, in deeper shadows, under higher bluffs, looking out on
a levelled world westward, stretching off with low, white, wreathing
mists and moonlit distances of plains beyond the further bunk. We turned
a great shoulder of the hills, and the moon shone out bright and clear,
riding in heaven; and the southward reach unlocked, and gave itself for
miles to our eyes. At the instant, while the ponies came back upon their
haunches at the drop of the long descent ahead, we both cried out, "the
Looking-glass!" There it was, about a mile away before and below us, as
plain as a pikestaff,--a silvery reach, like a long narrow lake, smooth
as the floor of cloud seen from above among mountains, silent,
motionless,--for all the world like an immense, spectral looking-glass,
set there in the half-darkened waste. It was evidently what gave the
name to the creek, and I have since noticed the same name elsewhere in
the Western country, and I suppose the phenomenon is not uncommon. For
an hour or more it remained; we never seemed to get nearer to it; it was
an eerie thing--the earth-light of the moon on that side,--I saw it all
the time.
"The difference you spoke of," I began, with my eyes upon that spectral
pool, "is only that change which belongs to life, dissolving like
illusion, but not itself illusion. I am not aware of any break; it is
the old life in a higher form with clearer selfhood. Life, in the soul
especially, seems less a state of being than a thing of transformation,
whose successive shapes we wear; and so far as that change is
self-determined," I continued, making almost an effort to think, so
weird was that scene before us, "the soul proceeds by foreknowledge of
itself in the ideal, and wills the change by ideal living, which is not
a conflict with the actual but a process out of it, conditioned in
almost a Darwinian way on that brain-futuring which entered into the
struggle for animal existence even with such enormous modifying power.
In our old days, under the sway of new scientific knowledge, we
instinctively saw man in the perspective of nature, and then man seemed
almost an after-thought of nature; but having been produced, late in her
material history, and gifted with foresight that distinguished him from
all else in her scheme, his own evolution gathered thereby that speed
which is so perplexing a contrast to the inconceivable slowness of the
orbing of stars and the building of continents. He has used his powers
of prescience for his own ends; but, fanciful as the thought is, might
it happen that through his control of elemental forces and his
acquaintance with infinite space, he should reach the point of applying
prescience in nature's own material frame, and wield the world for the
better accomplishment of her apparent ends,--that, though unimaginable
now, would constitute the true polarity to her blind and half-chaotic
motions,--chaotic in intelligence, I mean, and to the moral reason.
Unreal as such a thought is, a glimpse of some such feeling toward
nature is discernible in the work of some impressionist landscape
painters, who present colour and atmosphere and space without human
intention, as a kind of artistry of science, having the same sort of
elemental substance and interest that scientific truth has as an object
of knowledge,--a curious form of the beauty of truth."
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