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The Remedy
The Remedy
And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in these desponding days can be
done by us? The remedy is already declared in the ground of our complaint of
the Church. We have contrasted the Church with the Soul. In the soul, then,
let the redemption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution.
The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things
transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the
wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea
and nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of
inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the
character of Jesus by representing him as a man, - indicate with sufficient
clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to
show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. The true
Christianity - a faith like Christ`s in the infinitude of man - is lost. None
believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed.
Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet,
avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They cannot see in secret; they love to
be blind in public. They think society wiser than their soul, and know not
that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. See how nations
and races flit by on the sea of time, and leave no ripple to tell where they
floated or sunk, and one good soul shall make the name of Moses, or of Zeno,
or of Zoroaster reverend forever. None essayeth the stern ambition to be the
Self of the nation and of Nature, but each would be an easy secondary to some
Christian scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent man. Once leave
your own knowledge of God, your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge,
as St. Paul`s, or George Fox`s, or Swedenborg`s, and you get wide from God
with every year this secondary form lasts, and if, as now, for centuries, -
the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can scarcely be convinced there is
in them anything divine.
Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good
models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to
love God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you shall find who will hold
up to your emulation Wesleys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank God for
these good men, but say, "I also am a man." Imitation cannot go above its
model. The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it,
because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator,
something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come
short of another man`s.
Yourself a new-born bard of the Holy Ghost, - cast behind you all
conformity, and acquaint men at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and
only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money are nothing to you,
- are not bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see, - but live with the
privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all
families and each family in your parish connection, - when you meet one of
these men or women, be to them a divine man; be to them thought or virtue; let
their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be
genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have
doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting your own
heart, you shall gain more confidence in other men. For all our penny- wisdom,
for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all
men have sublime thoughts; that all men value the few real hours of life; they
love to be heard; they love to be caught up into the vision of principles. We
mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary
years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke
what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we
inly were. Discharge to men the priestly office, and, present or absent, you
shall be followed with their love as by an angel.
And to this end let us not aim at common degrees of merit. Can we not
leave to such as love it the virtue that glitters for the commendation of
society, and ourselves pierce the deep solitudes of absolute ability and
worth? We easily come up to the standard of goodness in society. Society`s
praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men are content with those easy
merits; but the instant effect of conversing with God will be to put them
away. There are persons who are not actors, not speakers, but influences;
persons too great for fame, for display; who disdain eloquence; to whom all we
call art and artist seems too nearly allied to show and by-ends, to the
exaggeration of the finite and selfish, and loss of the universal. The
orators, the poets, the commanders encroach on us only as fair women do, by
our allowance and homage. Slight them by preoccupation of mind, slight them as
you can well afford to do, by high and universal aims, and they instantly feel
that you have right, and that it is in lower places that they must shine. They
also feel your right; for they with you are open to the influx of the
all-knowing Spirit, which annihilates before its broad noon the little shades
and gradations of intelligence in the compositions we call wiser and wisest.
In such high communion let us study the grand strokes of rectitude: a
bold benevolence, an independence of friends so that not the unjust wishes of
those who love us will impair our freedom, but we shall resist for truth`s
sake the freest flow of kindness, and appeal to sympathies far in advance;
and - what is the highest form in which we know this beautiful element - a
certain solidity of merit, that has nothing to do with opinion, and which is
so essentially and manifestly virtue, that it is taken for granted that the
right, the brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and nobody thinks of
commending it. You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would
not praise an angel. The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing
in the world is the highest applause. Such souls, when they appear, are the
Imperial Guard of Virtue, the perpetual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One
needs not praise their courage, - they are the heart and soul of nature. Oh my
friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn. There are men
who rise refreshed on hearing a threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates
and paralyzes the majority - demanding not the faculties of prudence and
thrift, but comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice - comes
graceful and beloved as a bride. Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not
himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to
fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on
terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unwearable
endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, and the angel is
shown. But these are heights that we can scarce remember and look up to,
without contrition and shame. Let us thank God that such things exist.
And now let us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering, nigh quenched
fire on the altar. The evils of the Church that now is are manifest. The
question returns, what shall we do? I confess, all attempts to project and
establish a Cultus with new rites and forms seem to me in vain. Faith makes
us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a
system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess
of Reason, - today, pasteboard and filigree, and ending tomorrow in madness,
and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the
forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they shall
become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is, first, Soul, and
second, Soul, and evermore, Soul. A whole popedom of forms one pulsation of
virtue can uplift and vivify.
Two inestimable advantages Christianity has given us: first, the Sabbath,
the jubilee of the whole world; whose light dawns welcome alike into the
closet of the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into prison cells, and
everywhere suggests, even to the vile, the dignity of spiritual being. Let it
stand forevermore a temple, which new love, new faith, new sight shall restore
to more than its first splendor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of
preaching, - the speech of man to men, - essentially the most flexible of all
organs, of all forms. What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in
lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the invitation of men or your
own occasions lead you, you spoke the very truth, as your life and conscience
teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new
revelation?
I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty which ravished the souls of
those Eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke
oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also. The Hebrew and Greek
Scriptures contain immortal sentences that have been bread of life to
millions. But they have no epical integrity; are fragmentary; are not shown in
their order to the intellect. I look for the new Teacher, that shall follow so
far those shining laws, that he shall see them come full circle; shall see
their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the
soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of heart;
and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with
Beauty, and with Joy.
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