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The Address Begins
The Address Begins
Delivered Before The Senior Class In Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday
Evening, July 15, 1838
In this refulgent summer it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.
The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in
the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of
the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the
heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour
their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge
globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his
eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed
more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures,
and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward has not
yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the
perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide, how rich,
what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man! In its
fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in
its forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in the
powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, - it is well worth the
pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The planters, the
mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders of
cities and the captains, history delights to honor.
But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the
universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once
into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks
the human spirit with a curiosity newkindled, but never to be quenched. Behold
these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way
and that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like,
so unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.
These works of thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all
ages.
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his
heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in what
is above him. He learns that his being is without bound; that to the good, to
the perfect, he is born, low as he now lies in evil and weakness. That which
he venerates is still his own, though he has not realized it yet. He ought. He
knows the sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to
render account of it. When in innocency, or when by intellectual perception,
he attains to say: - "I love the Right; Truth is beautiful within and without
forevermore. Virtue, I am thine; save me; use me; thee will I serve, day and
night, in great, in small, that I may be not virtuous, but virtue;" - then is
the end of the creation answered, and God is well pleased.
The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the presence of
certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game of life we play,
covers, under what seem foolish details, principles that astonish. The child
amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular
force; and in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and
God interact. These laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be
written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering
thought; yet we read them hourly in each other`s faces, in each other`s
actions, in our own remorse. The moral traits which are all globed into every
virtuous act and thought, - in speech, we must sever, and describe or suggest
by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet, as this sentiment is the
essence of all religion, let me guide your eye to the precise objects of the
sentiment, by an enumeration of some of those classes of facts in which this
element is conspicuous.
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of
the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out
of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus, in the soul of man there is a
justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is
instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself
contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at
heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of
God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice. If a man
dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his
own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness adores with total humility.
Every step so downward is a step upward. The man who renounces himself comes
to himself.
See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs,
correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its
operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the
soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his
goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich;
alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least
admixture of a lie - for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to
make a good impression, a favorable appearance - will instantly vitiate the
effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with
unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are
vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there do seem to stir
and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it
applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are,
so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity,
the vile. Thus of their own volition souls proceed into heaven, into hell.
These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the
world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and
that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet
of the pool; and whatever opposes that will is everywhere balked and baffled,
because things are made so, and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is
merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of
heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and
real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things
proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice,
temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives
different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out
of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good
ends, he is strong by the whole strength of Nature. In so far as he roves from
these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks
out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until
absolute badness is absolute death.
The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a sentiment which
we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness.
Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is
the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary.
It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is
it. By it is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power.
Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity;
but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart gives and is the
assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds, time, space,
eternity, do seem to break out into joy.
This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of man. It
makes him illimitable. Through it the soul first knows itself. It corrects the
capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to be great by following the
great, and hopes to derive advantages from another, by showing the fountain of
all good to be in himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet
into the deeps of Reason. When he says, "I ought;" when love warns him; when
he chooses, warned from on high, the good and the great deed, - then deep
melodies wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. Then he can worship, and
be enlarged by his worship; for he can never go behind this sentiment. In the
sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never
outgrown.
This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, and successively
creates all forms of worship. The principle of veneration never dies out. Man
fallen into superstition, into sensuality, is never quite without the visions
of the moral sentiment. In like manner all the expressions of this sentiment
are sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. The expressions of
this sentiment affect us more than all other compositions. The sentences of
the oldest time, which ejaculate this piety, are still fresh and fragrant.
This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and
contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest
expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always
owed to Oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all
sane men found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon
mankind, whose name is not so much written as ploughed into the history of
this world, is proof of the subtle virtue of this infusion.
Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand open, night and day,
before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by
one stern condition; this, namely, it is an intuition. It cannot be received
at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I
can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or
wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can
accept nothing. On the contrary, the absence of this primary faith is the
presence of degradation. As is the flood, so is the ebb. Let this faith
depart, and the very words it spake, and the things it made, become false and
hurtful. Then falls the church, the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of
the divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the
constitution. Once man was all; now he is an appendage, a nuisance. And
because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly be got rid of, the
doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed
to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest, and denied with fury. The
doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base doctrine of the majority of voices
usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophecy, poetry; the
ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient history merely; they are not in
the belief nor in the aspiration of society; but, when suggested, seem
ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade
out of sight, and man becomes nearsighted, and can only attend to what
addresses the senses.
These general views, which, whilst they are general, none will contest,
find abundant illustration in the history of religion, and especially in the
history of the Christian church. In that, all of us have had our birth and
nurture. The truth contained in that, you, my young friends, are now setting
forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established worship of the civilized world,
it has great historical interest for us. Of its blessed words, which have been
the consolation of humanity, you need not that I should speak. I shall
endeavor to discharge my duty to you, on this occasion, by pointing out two
errors in its administration, which daily appear more gross from the point of
view we have just now taken.
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye
the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its
beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he
estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what was in you and me. He
saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take
possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion: - "I am
divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me;
or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think." But what a distortion
did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following
ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the
Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet`s lips,
and said, in the next age: - "This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will
kill you if you say he was a man." The idioms of his language and the figures
of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not
built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as
the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for
he felt that man`s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that
this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word "miracle,"
as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is
"monster." It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.
He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at
postponing their initial revelations to the hour and the man that now is, to
the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that
the law in us is commanding he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly,
with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus is he, as I
think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of a man.
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