false expectations. Conscience tells no Munchausen tales. structure of the human constitution is not an organised lie. Creator keeps His word with us." The "The 15. But if there is no existence after death, conscience does tell Munchausen tales; man is bunglingly made; his constitution raises false expectations; his structure is an organized lie. Our age has many in it who wander as lost babes in the woods, not asking whether there is any way out of uncertainties on the highest of all themes, and in suppressed sadness beyond that of tears. Small philosophers are great characters in democratic centuries when every man thinks for himself; but lost babes are greater. There is a feeling that we can know nothing of what we most desire to know. I hold first of all to the truth that man may know, not everything, but enough for practical purposes. If I have a Father in heaven, if I am created by an intelligent and benevolent Being, then it is worth while to ask the way out of these woods. I will not be a questionless lost babe, for I believe there is a way, and that, although we may not know the map of all the forest, we can find the path home. There are four stages of culture, and they are all represented to-day in every highly civilised quarter of the globe. There is the first stage, in which we usually think we know everything. Then comes the second stage, in which, as our knowledge grows, we are confronted with so many questions which we can ask and cannot answer, that we say, in our sophmorical, despairing mood, that we can know nothing. A little above that we say we can know something, but only what is just before our senses. Then, lastly, we come to the stage in which we say, not that we can know everything; not that we can know much, indeed; but in which we are sure we can know enough for practical purposes. Everything, nothing, something, enough! There are the infantine, adolescent, juvenile, and mature stages of culture. 16. But so far as human observation extends, we know inductively that there is no exception to the law that every constitutional instinct has its correlate to match it. 17. Wherever we find a wing, we find air to match it; a fin, water to match it; an eye, light to match it; an ear, sound to match it; perception of the beautiful, beauty to match it; reasoning power, cause and effect to match it; and so through all the myriads of known cases. 18. From our possession of a constitutional or organic instinct by which we expect existence after death, we must therefore infer the fact of such existence, as the migrating bird might infer the existence of a South from its instinct of migration. 19. This inference proceeds strictly upon the scientific principle of the universality of law. 20. It everywhere implies, not the absorption of the soul into the mass of general being, but its personal continuance. Your poet, William Cullen Byrant, once sat in the sweet country side, and heard the bugle of the wild migrating swan as the bird passed over him southward in the twilight. Looking up into the assenting azure, this seer uttered reposefully the deepest words of his philosophy : "Whither, midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, "There is a Power whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, The desert and illimitable air, Lone wandering, but not lost. "He who, from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, THEODORE PARKER'S ABSOLUTE RELIGION. BY THE REV. JOSEPH COOK. WHEN Daniel Webster was asked how he obtained his clear ideas, ne replied: "By attention to definitions." Dr. Johnson, whose business it was to explain words, was once riding on a rural road in Scotland, and as he paused to water his horse at a wayside spring, he was requested by a woman of advanced age to tell her how he, the great Dr. Johnson, author of a renowned dictionary, could possibly have defined the word pastern the knee of a horse. "Ignorance, madam," was the reply; "pure ignorance." For one, if I am forced to make a confession as to my personal difficulties with Orthodoxy of the scholarly type, I must use, as perhaps many another student might, both Webster's and Johnson's phrases as the outlines of the story. Before I attended to definitions I had difficulties. After I attended to them in the spirit of the scientific method, my own serious account to myself of the origin of my perplexities was in most cases given in Johnson's words-"Ignorance; pure ignorance." Theodore Parker's chief intellectural fault was inadequate attention to definitions. As a consequence, his caricatures or misconceptions of Christian truth were many and ghastly. I cannot discuss them all; but, in addition to his failure to distinguish between intuition and instinct, and between inspiration and illumination, it must be said, in continuance of the list of his chief errors, he did not carefully distinguish from each other inspiration and dictation. When Benjamin Franklin was a young man, one of his hungriest desires was to acquire a perfect style of writing; and as he admired Addison more than any other author, he was accustomed to take an essay of The Spectator and make very full notes of all its thoughts, images, sentiments, and of some few of the phrases. He then would place his manuscript in his drawer, wait several weeks, or until he had forgotten the language of the original, and then would take his memoranda and write out an essay, including every idea, every pulse of emotion, every flash of imagination, that he had transferred from Addison to his notes. Then he would compare his work with the original, and humiliate himself by the contrast of his own uncouth rhetorical garment with Addison's perfect robe of flowing silk. He studied how to improve his crabbed, cold, or obscure phrases by the light of Addison's noon of luminousness and imaginative and moral heat. Now Franklin's essay was, you would say in such a case, not dictated by Addison, but was inspired by Addison. Plainly, there is a difference between inspiration and dictation. Orthodoxy believes the Bible to be inspired, and her definition of inspiration is the gift of infallibility in teaching moral and religious truth. But by inspiration, thus defined, Orthodoxy does not mean dictation. She means that the Bible is as full of God as Franklin's echoed essay was of Addison. As in his essay there were both an Addisonian and a Franklinian element, so, speaking roundly, there are in the Bible a divine and a human element. But the former is swallowed up in the latter even more completely than the Franklinian was in the Addisonian. All the thought in Franklin's essay is, by supposition, Addison's, and some of the phrases are his; but Franklin's words are there. All the moral and religious thought of the Bible is, according to the definition of inspiration, divine, and so are some of the phrases; but human words are there. The chief proof, after all, that the Bible is good food is the eating of it. The healing efficacy of a medicine when it is used is the demonstration that it is good. Now, the world has been eating the Bible as it never ate any other book, and the Bible has been saturating the veins of the ages as they were never saturated by the food derived from any other volume; but there is no spiritual disease that you can point to that is the outcome of biblical inculcation. We all feel sure that it would be better than well for the world if all the precepts of this volume were absorbed and transmuted into the actions of men. The astounding fact is that the Bible is the only book in the world that will bear full and permanent translation into life. The careless and superficial sometimes do not distinguish from each other the biblical record and the biblical inculcation. I know that fearful things are recorded in the Bible concerning men who, in some respects, were approved of God; but it is the biblical inculcation which I pronounce free from adulterate elements, not the biblical record. Of course, in a mirror held up before the human heart, there will be reflected blotches; but the inculcation of the Scriptures, from the beginning to the end of the sixty-six pamphlets, is known by experience to be free from adulterate elements, and I defy the world to show any disease that ever has come from the absorption into the veins of the ages of the biblical inculcation. And, moreover, I defy the ages to show any other book that could be absorbed thus in its inculcations and not produce dizziness of the head, pimples on the skin, staggering at last, and the sowing of dragons' teeth. There is something very peculiar about this one book, in the incontrovertible fact that its inculcations are preserved from such error as would work out, in experience, moral disease in the world. Plato taught such doctrines that, if the world had followed him as it has the Bible, and had absorbed not his account of men's vices, but his positive inculcation, we to-day should be living in barracks, and we could not know who are our brothers and who are our sisters.* There was in Plato, you say, inspiration. Very well; his inculcation under what you call inspiration and I call illumination would, as every scholar knows, have turned this fat world into a pasturage-ground for the intellectual and powerful on the one side; but the poor, on the other side, it would have ground down into the position of unaspiring and hopeless hewers of wood and drawers of water. And, worse than that, it would have quenched the divinest spark in natural religion-family life. Dictation and plenary inspiration are not the same. I avoid technical terms here; but you must allow me, since Theodore Parker so often spoke against the plenary inspiration of the Bible, to say that by plenary inspiration Orthodoxy does not mean verbal inspiration. Franklin's essay was plenarily, but not always verbally, inspired by Addison. If the Bible is written by dictation or verbal inspiration, as Theodore Parker often taught that Orthodox scholarship supposes that it is, even then it would not be at all clear that any translation of the Bible is verbally inspired. If anything was dictated, of course only the original was dictated. In places I believe we have in the Bible absolute dictation; and yet inspiration and dictation are two things, and the difference between them is worth pointing out when Orthodoxy is held responsible for a caricature of her definition, and when men are thrown into unrest on this point, as if they were called on to believe self-contradiction. The fact that all portions of the Bible are inspired does not imply at all that King James's version, or the German, or the French, or the Hindustanee, or any other, is dictated by the Holy Ghost. Even these versions, however, are full of God, as Franklin's essay was of Addison, and fuller. They, too, will bear translation into life. Sometimes, as in the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount, and in transfigured Psalm and Prophecy, it well may be that we have in the original words which came not by the will of man. There are three degrees of inspiration, and the distinctions between them are not manufactured by me, here and now, to meet the exigency of this discussion. They are as old as John Locke. It is commonplace in religious science to speak of the inspiration of superintendence, as in Acts or Chronicles; the inspiration of elevation, as in the Psalms; and the inspiration of suggestion, as in the * Grote's Plato, The Republic; social laws. |