The records of the past can be studied variously. Events can be arranged in the order of their occurrence: this is chronology or annals; in addition to this, their connections and mutual relations as cause and effect may be shown: this is historical science; or, thirdly, from a general view of trains of related events some abstract aim as their final cause may be theoretically deduced and confirmed by experience: this is the philosophy of history. The doctrine of final causes, in its old form as the argumentum de appetitu, has been superseded. Function is not purpose; desire comes from the experience of pleasure, and realizes its dreams, if at all, by the slow development of capacity. The wish carries no warrant of gratification with it. No “argument from design” can be adduced from the region where the laws of physical necessity prevail. Those laws are not designed for an end.

When, however, in the unfolding of mind we reach the stage of notions, we observe a growing power to accomplish desire, not only by altering the individual or race organism, but also by bringing external objects into unison with the desire, reversing the process common in the life of sensation. This spectacle, however, is confined to man alone, and man as guided by prospective volition, that is, by an object ahead.

When some such object is common to a nation or race, it exercises a wide influence on its destiny, and is the key to much that otherwise would be inexplicable in its actions. What we call national hopes, ambitions and ideals are such objects. Sometimes they are distinctly recognized by the nation, sometimes they are pursued almost unconsciously. They do not correspond to things as they are, but as they are wished to be. Hence there is nothing in them to insure their realization. They are like an appetite, which may and may not develope the function which can gratify it. They have been called “historic ideas,” and their consideration is a leading topic in modern historical science.

Reason claims the power of criticizing such ideas, and of distinguishing in them between what is true and therefore obtainable, and what is false and therefore chimerical or even destructive. This is the province of the philosophy of history. It guides itself by those general principles for the pursuit of truth which have been noticed in brief in the earlier pages of this book. Looking before as well as after, it aspires in the united light of experience and the laws of mind, to construct for the race an ideal within the reach of its capacities, yet which will develope them to the fullest extent, a pole-star to which it can trust in this night teeming with will-o’-the wisps.

The opinion that the history of mind is a progress whose end will be worth more than was its beginning, may not prove true in fact—the concrete expression never wholly covers the abstract requirements—but it is undoubtedly true in theory. The progress, so far, has been by no means a lineal one—each son a better man than his father—nor even, as some would have it, a spiral one—periodical recurrences to the same historical ideas, but each recurrence a nearer approach to the philosophical idea—but it has been far more complex and irregular than any geometrical figure will illustrate. These facile generalizations do not express it.

Following the natural laws of thought man has erred infinitely, and his errors have worked their sure result—they have destroyed him. There is no “relish of salvation” in an error; otherwise than that it is sure to kill him who obstructs the light by harboring it. There is no sort of convertability of the false into the true, as shallow thinkers of the day teach.

Man has only escaped death when at first by a lucky chance, and then by personal and inherited experience, his thoughts drifted or were forced into conformity with the logical laws of thought.

A historic idea is a complex product formed of numerous conceptions, some true and others false. Its permanency and efficacy are in direct proportion to the number and clearness of the former it embraces. When it is purging itself of the latter, the nation is progressive; when the false are retained, their poison spreads and the nation decays.

The periodical recurrence of historic ideas is one of their most striking features. The explanations offered for it have been various. The ancient doctrines of an exact repetition of events in the cycles of nature, and of the transmigration of souls, drew much support from it; and the modern modification of the latter theory as set forth by Wordsworth and Lessing, are distinctly derived from the same source. Rightly elucidated, the philosophical historian will find in it an invaluable clue to the unravelment of the tangled skein of human endeavor.

Historic periodicity is on the one side an organic law of memory, dependent upon the revival of transmitted ancestral impressions. A prevailing idea though over-cultivation exhausts its organic correlate, and leads to defective nutrition of that part in the offspring. Hence they do not pursue the same idea as their fathers, but revert to a remoter ancestral historic idea, the organic correlate of which has lain fallow, thus gained strength. It is brought forth as new, receives additions by contiguity and similarity, is ardently pursued, over-cultivated, and in time supplanted by another revival.

But this material side corresponds to an all-important mental one. As an organic process only, the history of periodic ideas is thus satisfactorily explained, but he who holds this explanation to be exhaustive sees but half the problem.

The permanence of a historic idea, I have stated, is in direct proportion to the number of true ideas in its composition; the impression it makes on the organic substrata of memory is in turn in proportion to its permanence. The element of decay is the destructive effects of natural trains of thought out of accord with the logically true trains. These cause defective cerebral nutrition, which is thus seen to arise, so far as influenced by the operations of the memory, from relations of truth and error. There is a physiological tendency in the former to preserve and maintain in activity; in the latter to disappear. The percentage of true concepts which makes up the complexity of a historic idea gives the principal factor towards calculating its probable recurrence. Of course, a second factor is the physiological one of nutrition itself.

The next important distinction in discussing historic ideas is between those which are held consciously, and those which operate unconsciously. The former are always found to be more active, and more amenable to correction. An unconscious idea is a product of the natural, not the logical laws of mind, and is therefore very apt to be largely false. It is always displaced with advantage by a conscious aim.

One of the superficial fallacies of the day, which pass under the name of philosophy, is to maintain that any such historic idea is the best possible one for the time and place in which it is found. I am led to refer to this by the false light it has thrown on religious history. Herbert Spencer remarks in one of his essays:236-1 “All religious creeds, during the eras in which they are severally held, are the best that could be held.” “All are good for their times and places.” So far from this being the case, there never has been a religion but that an improvement in it would have straightway exerted a beneficent effect. Man, no matter what his condition, can always derive immediate good from higher conceptions of Deity than he himself has elaborated. Nor is the highest conception possible an idealization of self, as I have sufficiently shown in a previous chapter, but is one drawn wholly from the realm of the abstract. Moreover, as a matter of history, we know that in abundant instances, the decay of nations can be traced largely to the base teachings of their religious instructors. To maintain that such religions were “the best possible ones” for the time and place is the absurdest optimism. In what a religion shares of the abstractly true it is beneficent; in what it partakes of the untrue it is deleterious. This, and no other canon, must be our guide.

The ideas of religious history obey the same laws as other historic ideas. They grow, decay, are supplanted and revive again in varying guises, in accordance with the processes of organic nutrition as influenced by the truth or falsity of their component ideas. Their tendency to personification is stronger, because of the much greater nearness they have to the individual desire. The one aspiration of a high-spirited people when subjugated will be freedom; and in the lower stages of culture they will be very certain to fabricate a myth of a deliverer to come.

In like manner, every member of a community shares with his fellow members some wish, hope or ambition dependent on unknown control and therefore religious in character, which will become the “formative idea” of the national religious development.

Of the various ideas in religious history there are three which, through their permanence and frequent revival, we may justly suppose in accordance with the above-mentioned canons to contain a large measure of truth, and yet to be far from wholly true. They may be considered as leading moments in religious growth, yet withal lacking something or other essential to the satisfaction of the religious sentiment. The first of these is the idea of the perfected individual; the second the idea of the perfected commonwealth; the third, that of personal survival. These have been the formative ideas (Ideen der Gestaltung) in the prayers, myths, rites and religious institutions of many nations at widely separated times.

Of the two first mentioned it may be said that every extended faith has accepted them to some degree. They are the secret of the alliances of religion with art, with government, with ethics, with science, education and sentiment.

These alliances have often been taken by historians to contain the vital elements of religion itself, and many explanations based on one or another assumption of the kind have been proffered. Religion, while it may embrace any of them, is independent of them all. Its relations to them have been transitory, and the more so as their aims have been local and material. The brief duration of the subjection of religion to such incongenial ties was well compared by Lord Herbert of Cherbury to the early maturity of brutes, who attain their full growth in a year or two, while man needs a quarter of a century.239-1 The inferior aims of the religious sentiment were discarded one after another to make way for higher ones, which were slowly dawning upon it. In this progress it was guided largely by the three ideas I have mentioned, which have been in many forms leading stimuli of the religious thought of the race.

First, of the idea of the perfected individual.

Many writers have supposed that the contemplation of Power in nature first stirred religious thought in man. Though this is not the view taken in this book, no one will question that the leading trait in the gods of barbarism is physical strength. The naive anthropomorphism of the savage makes his a god of a mighty arm, a giant in stature, puissant and terrible. He hurls the thunderbolt, and piles up the mountains in sport. His name is often The Strong One, as in the Allah, Eloah of the Semitic tongues. Hercules, Chon, Melkarth, Dorsanes, Thor and others were of the most ancient divinities in Greece, Egypt, Phoenicia, India, and Scandinavia, and were all embodiments of physical force. Such, too, was largely the character of the Algonkin Messou, who scooped out the great lakes with his hands and tore up the largest trees by the roots. The huge boulders from the glacial epoch which are scattered over their country are the pebbles he tossed in play or in anger. The cleft in the Andes, through which flows the river Funha, was opened by a single blow of Nemqueteba, chief god of the Muyscas. In all such and a hundred similar legends, easy to quote, we see the notion of strength, brute force, muscular power, was that deemed most appropriate to divinity, and that which he who would be godlike must most sedulously seek. When filled with the god, the votary felt a surpassing vigor. The Berserker fury was found in the wilds of America and Africa, as well as among the Fiords. Sickness and weakness, on the contrary, were signs that the gods were against him. Therefore, in all early stages of culture, the office of priest and physician was one. Conciliation of the gods was the catholicon.

Such deities were fearful to behold. They are represented as mighty of stature and terrible of mien, calculated to appal, not attract, to inspire fear, not to kindle love. In tropical America, in Egypt, in Thibet, almost where you will, there is little to please the eye in the pictures and statues of deities.

In Greece alone, a national temperament, marvellously sensitive to symmetry, developed the combination of maximum strength with perfect form in the sun-god, Apollo, and of grace with beauty in Aphrodite. The Greeks were the apostles of the religion of beauty. Their philosophic thought saw the permanent in the Form, which outlives strength, and is that alone in which the race has being. In its transmission love is the agent, and Aphrodite, unmatched in beauty and mother of love, was a creation worthy of their devotion. Thus with them the religious sentiment still sought its satisfaction in the individual, not indeed in the muscle, but in the feature and expression.

When the old gods fell, the Christian fathers taught their flocks to abhor the beautiful as one with the sensual. St. Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian describe Christ as ugly of visage and undersized, a sort of Socrates in appearance.241-1 Christian art was long in getting recognition. The heathens were the first to represent in picture and statues Christ and the apostles, and for long the fathers of the church opposed the multiplication of such images, saying that the inward beauty was alone desirable. Christian art reached its highest inspiration under the influence of Greek culture after the fall of Constantinople. In the very year, however, that Rafaello Sanzio met his premature death, Luther burned the decretals of the pope in the market-place of Wittenberg, and preached a doctrine as hostile to art as was that of Eusebius and Chrysostom. There was no longer any hope for the religion of beauty.

Nevertheless, under the influence of the revival of ancient art which arose with Winckelmann towards the close of the last century, a gospel of esthetics was preached. Its apostles were chiefly Germans, and among them Schiller and Goethe are not inconspicuous names. The latter, before his long life was closed, began to see the emptiness of such teachings, and the violence perpetrated on the mind by forcing on the religious sentiment the food fit only for the esthetic emotions.

The highest conception of individual perfection is reached in a character whose physical and mental powers are symmetrically trained, and always directed by conscious reason to their appropriate ends. Self-government, founded on self-knowledge, wards off the pangs of disappointment by limiting ambition to the attainable. The affections and emotions, and the pleasures of sensation as well, are indulged in or abstained from, but never to the darkening of the intellect. All the talents are placed at usury; every power exercised systematically and fruitfully with a consecration to a noble purpose.

This is the religion of culture. None other ranks among its adherents so many great minds; men, as Carlyle expresses it, of much religiosity, if of little religion. The ideal is a taking one. Such utter self-reliance, not from ignorance, but from the perfection of knowledge, was that which Buddha held up to his followers: “Self is the God of self; who else should be the God?” In this century Goethe, Wordsworth, beyond all others Wilhelm von Humboldt, have set forth this ideal. Less strongly intellectual natures, as Maine de Biran, De Senancourt, and Matthew Arnold, listen with admiration, but feel how unknown to the mass of human kind must remain the tongue these masters speak.

Thus did the religious sentiment seek its satisfaction in the idealization, first of physical force, then of form, and last of mental force, but in each case turned away unsatisfied. Wherein did these ideals fail? The first mentioned in exalting power over principle, might over right. As was well said by the philosophical Novalis: “The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of physical strength, of the most vigorous life. Through it man is transformed into a reasoning beast, whose brutal cleverness has a fascination for weak minds.”243-1 The religion of beauty failed in that it addressed the esthetic emotions, not the reasoning power. Art does not promote the good; it owes no fealty to either utility or ethics: in itself, it must be, in the negative sense of the words, at once useless and immoral. “Nature is not its standard, nor is truth its chief end.”244-1 Its spirit is repose, “the perfect form in perfect rest;” whereas the spirit of religion is action because of imperfection. Even the gods must know of suffering, and partake, in incarnations, of the miseries of men.

In the religion of culture what can we blame? That it is lacking in the impulses of action through the isolation it fosters; that it is and must be limited to a few, for it provides no defense for the weaknesses the many inherit; that its tendency is antagonistic to religion, as it cuts away the feeling of dependence, and the trust in the unknown; that it allows too little to enthusiasm ever to become a power.

On the other hand, what momenta of true religious thought have these ideals embraced? Each presents some. Physical vigor, regarded as a sign of complete nutrition, is an indispensable preliminary to the highest religion. Correct thought cannot be, without sufficient and appropriate food. If the nourishment is inadequate, defective energy of the brain will be transmitted, and the offspring will revert ancestrally to a lower plane of thought. “It thus happens that the minds of persons of high religious culture by ancestral descent, and the intermarriage of religious families, so strangely end in the production of children totally devoid of moral sense and religious sentiment—moral imbeciles in short.”245-1 From such considerations of the necessity of physical vigor to elevated thought, Descartes predicted that if the human race ever attain perfection it will be chiefly through the art of medicine. Not alone from emotions of sympathy did the eminent religious teachers of past ages maintain that the alleviation and prevention of suffering is the first practical duty of man; but it was from a perhaps unconscious perception of the antagonism of bodily degeneration to mental progress.

So, too, the religion of beauty and art contains an indefeasible germ of true religious thought. Art sees the universal in the isolated fact; it redeemed the coarse symbol of earlier days by associating it with the emotions of joy, instead of fear; commencing with an exaltation of the love to sex, it etherealized and ennobled passion; it taught man to look elsewhere than to material things for his highest pleasure, for the work of art always has its fortune in the imagination and not in the senses of the observer; conceptions of order and harmony are familiar to it; its best efforts seek to bring all the affairs of life under unity and system;246-1 and thus it strengthens the sentiment of moral government, which is the first postulate of religion.

The symmetry of the individual, as understood in the religion of culture, is likewise a cherished article of true religion. Thus only can it protect personality against the pitfalls of self-negation and absorption, which communism and pantheism dig for it. The integrity and permanence of the person is the keystone to religion, as it is to philosophy and ethics. None but a false teacher would measure our duty to our neighbor by a higher standard than our love to ourselves. The love of God alone is worthy to obscure it.

Professor Steinthal has said: “Every people has its own religion. The national temperament hears the tidings and interprets them as it can.”246-2 On the other hand, Humboldt—perhaps the profoundest thinker on these subjects of his generation—doubted whether religions can be measured in reference to nations and sects, because “religion is altogether subjective, and rests solely on the conceptive powers of the individual.”247-1 Whatever the creed, a pure mind will attach itself to its better elements, a base one to its brutal and narrow doctrines. A national religion can only be regarded as an average, applicable to the majority, not entirely correct of the belief of any one individual, wholly incorrect as to a few. Yet it is indubitable that the national temperament creates the ideal which gives the essence of religion. Races like the Tartar Mongols, who, as we are informed by the AbbÉ Huc, not unfrequently move their tents several times a day, out of simple restlessness, cannot desire the same stability that is sought by other races, who have the beaver’s instinct for building and colonizing, such as the Romans. Buddhism, which sets up the ideal of the individual, is an acceptable theory to the former, while the latter, from earliest ages, fostered religious views which taught the subordination of the individual to the community, in other words, the idea of the perfected commonwealth.

This is the conception at the base of all theocracies, forms of government whose statutes are identified with the precepts of religion. Instead of a constitution there is the Law, given and sanctioned by God as a rule of action.

The Law is at first the Myth applied. Its object is as much to propitiate the gods as to preserve social order. It is absolute because it is inspired. Many of its ordinances as drawn from the myth are inapplicable to man, and are unjust or frivolous. Yet such as it is, it rules the conduct of the commonwealth and expresses the ideal of its perfected condition.

All the oldest codes of laws are religious, and are alleged revelations. The Pentateuch, the Avesta, the Laws of Manu, the Twelve Tables, the Laws of Seleucus, all carry the endorsement, “And God said.” Their real intention is to teach the relation of man to God, rather than the relations of man to man. On practical points—on the rights of property, on succession and wills, on contracts, on the adoption of neighbors, and on the treatment of enemies—they often violate the plainest dictates of natural justice, of common humanity, even of family affection. Their precepts are frequently frivolous, sometimes grossly immoral. But if these laws are compared with the earliest myths and cults, and the opinions then entertained of the gods, and how to propitiate them, it becomes easy to see how the precepts of the law flowed from these inchoate imaginings of the religious sentiment.249-1

The improvement of civil statutes did not come through religion. Experience, observation and free thought taught man justice, and his kindlier emotions were educated by the desire to cherish and preserve which arose from family and social ties. As these came to be recognized as necessary relations of society, religion appropriated them, incorporated them into her ideal, and even claimed them as her revelations. History largely invalidates this claim. The moral progress of mankind has been mainly apart from dogmatic teachings, often in conflict with them. An established rule of faith may enforce obedience to its statutes, but can never develop morals. “True virtue is independent of every religion, and incompatible with any which is accepted on authority.”249-2

Yet thinkers, even the best of them, appear to have had difficulty in discerning any nobler arena for the religious sentiment than the social one. “Religion,” says Matthew Arnold, “is conduct.” It is the power “which makes for righteousness.” “As civil law,” said Voltaire, “enforces morality in public, so the use of religion is to compel it in private life.” “A complete morality,” observes a contemporary Christian writer, “meets all the practical ends of religion.”250-1 In such expressions man’s social relations, his duty to his neighbor, are taken to exhaust religion. It is still the idea of the commonwealth, the religion of morality, the submission to a law recognized as divine. Whether the law is a code of ethics, the decision of a general council, or the ten commandments, it is alike held to be written by the finger of God, and imperative. Good works are the demands of such religion.

Catholicism, which is altogether theocratic and authoritative, which pictures the church as an ideal commonwealth, has always most flourished in those countries where the Roman colonies left their more important traces. The reformation of Protestantism was a reversion to the ideal of the individual, which was that of ancient Teutonic faith. In more recent times Catholicism itself has modified the rigidity of its teachings in favor of the religion of sentiment, as it has been called, inaugurated by Chateaubriand, and which is that attractive form seen in the writings of Madame Swetchine and the La Ferronnais. These elevated souls throw a charm around the immolation of self, which the egotism of the Protestant rarely matches.

Thus the ideal of the commonwealth is found in those creeds which give prominence to law, to ethics, and to sentiment, the altruistic elements of mind. It fails, because its authority is antagonistic to morality in that it impedes the search for the true. Neither is morality religion, for it deals with the relative, while religion should guide itself by the absolute. Every great religious teacher has violated the morality of his day. Even sentiment, attractive as it is, is no ground on which to build a church. It is, at best, one of the lower emotional planes of action. Love itself, which must be the kernel of every true religion, is not in earthly relations an altruistic sentiment. The measure and the source of all such love, is self-love. The creed which rejects this as its corner stone will build in vain.

While, therefore, the advantages of organization and action are on the side of the faiths which see in religion a form of government, they present fewer momenta of religious thought than those which encourage the greater individuality. All forms and reforms, remarks Machiavelli, in one of his notes to Livy, have been brought about by the exertions of one man.251-1 Religious reforms, especially, never have originated in majorities. The reformatory decrees of the Council of Trent are due to Martin Luther.

Either ideal, raised to its maximum, not only fails to satisfy the religious sentiment, but puts upon it a forced meaning, and is therefore not what this sentiment asks. This may be illustrated by comparing two remarkable works, which, by a singular coincidence, were published in the same year, and which better than any others present these ideals pushed to their extreme. It is characteristic of them that neither professes to treat of religion, but of politics. The one is entitled, “An Attempt to define the limits of Government,” and is by Wilhelm von Humboldt; the other is the better known work of Auguste Comte, his “System of Positive Polity.”252-1

The first lays down the principle that the highest end of man is the utmost symmetrical education of his own powers in their individual peculiarities. To accomplish this, he must enjoy the largest freedom of thought and action consistent with the recognition of the same right in others. In regard to religion, the state should have nothing to do with aiding it, but should protect the individual in his opposition to any authoritative form of it. As a wholly personal and subjective matter, social relations do not concern it. In fine, the aim of both government and education should be the development of an individualism in which an enlightened intellect controls and directs all the powers toward an exalted self-cultivation.

Comte reverses this picture. His fundamental principle is to subordinate the sum total of our existence to our social relations; real life is to live in others; not the individual but humanity is the only worthy object of effort. Social polity therefore includes the whole of development; the intellect should have no other end but to subserve the needs of the race, and always be second to the altruistic sentiments. Love toward others should absorb self-love. “Il est encore meilleur d’aimer que d’Être aimÉ.”

Such is the contrast between the ideal of the individual as exhibited by the Religion of Culture, and the ideal of the commonwealth as portrayed in the Religion of Humanity.

The whole duty of man, says the one school, is to live for others; nay, says the other, it is to live intelligently for himself; the intellect, says the former, should always be subordinated to society, and be led by the emotions; intellect, says the latter, should ever be in the ascendant, and absolutely control and direct the emotions; the theoretical object of government, says the former, is to enable the affections and thoughts to pass into action; not so, says the latter, its only use is to give the individual secure leisure to develope his own affections and thoughts. Mutual relation is the key note of the former, independence of the latter; the former is the apotheosis of love, the latter of reason.

Strictly and literally the apotheosis. For, differing as they do on such vital points, they both agree in dispensing with the ideas of God and immortality as conceptions superfluous in the realization of the theoretical perfection they contemplate. Not that either scheme omits the religious sentiment. On the contrary, it is especially prominent in one, and very well marked in the other. Both assume its growing prominence, never its extinction. Both speak of it as an integral part of man’s highest nature.

Comte and Humboldt were thinkers too profound to be caught by the facile fallacy that the rapid changes in religious thought betoken the early abrogation of all creeds. Lessing, the philosophers of the French revolution, James Mill, Schopenhauer and others fell into this error. They were not wiser than the clown of Horace, who seated himself by the rushing stream, thinking it must soon run itself out—

Expectat rusticus dum defluat amnis; at ille
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis Ævum.Vain is the dream that man will ever reach the point when he will think no more of the gods. Dogmas may disappear, but religion will flourish; destroy the temple and sow it with salt, in a few days it rises again built for aye on the solid ground of man’s nature.

So long as the race is upon earth, just so long will the religious sentiment continue to crave its appropriate food, and this at last is recognized even by those who estimate it at the lowest. “To yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction,” observes Professor Tyndall in one of his best known addresses, “is the problem of problems at the present hour. It is vain to oppose it with a view to its extirpation.” The “general thaw of theological creeds,” which Spencer remarks upon, is no sign of the loss of interest in religious subjects, but the reverse. Coldness and languor are the premonitions of death, not strife and defence.

But as the two moments of religious thought which I have now discussed have both reached their culmination in a substantial repudiation of religion, that which stimulates the religious sentiment to-day must be something different from either. This I take to be the idea of personal survival after physical death, or, as it is generally called, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

This is the main dogma in the leading religions of the world to-day. “A God,” remarks Sir William Hamilton, speaking for the enlightened Christians of his generation, “is to us of practical interest, only inasmuch as he is the condition of our immortality.”256-1 In his attractive work, La Vie Eternelle, whose large popularity shows it to express the prevailing views of modern Protestant thought, Ernest Naville takes pains to distinguish that Christianity is not a means of living a holy life so much as one of gaining a blessed hereafter. The promises of a life after death are numerous and distinct in the New Testament. Most of the recommendations of action and suffering in this world are based on the doctrine of compensation in the world to come.

Mohammed taught the same tenet with equal or even greater emphasis. In one sura he says: “To whatever is evil may they be likened who believe not in a future life;” and elsewhere: “As for the blessed ones—their place is Paradise. There shall they dwell so long as the heavens and the earth endure, enjoying the imperishable bounties of God. But as for those who shall be consigned to misery, their place is the Fire. There shall they abide so long as the heavens and the earth shall last, unless God wills it otherwise.”256-2

In Buddhism, as generally understood, the doctrine of a future life is just as clear. Not only does the soul wander from one to another animal body, but when it has completed its peregrinations and reaches its final abode, it revels in all sorts of bliss. For the condition of Nirvana, understood by philosophical Buddhists as that of the extinction of desires even to the desire of life, and of the complete enlightenment of the mind even to the recognition that existence itself is an illusion, has no such meaning to the millions who profess themselves the followers of the sage of Kapilavastu. They take it to be a material Paradise with pleasures as real as those painted by Mohammed, wherein they will dwell beyond all time, a reward for their devotions and faith in this life.

These three religions embrace three-fourths of the human race and all its civilized nations, with trifling exceptions. They displaced and extinguished the older creeds and in a few centuries controlled the earth; but as against each other their strife has been of little avail. The reason is, they share the same momentum of religious thought, differing in its interpretation not more among themselves than do orthodox members of either faith in their own fold. Many enlightened Muslims and Christians, for example, consider the descriptions of Paradise given in the Koran and the Apocalypse to convey wholly spiritual meanings.

There has been so much to surprise in the rapid extension of these faiths that the votaries of each claim manifest miraculous interposition. The religious idea of an after life is a sufficient moment to account for the phenomenon. I say the religious idea, for, with one or two exceptions, however distinct had been the belief in a hereafter, that belief had not a religious coloring until they gave it such. This distinction is an important one.

Students of religions have hitherto attributed too much weight to the primitive notion of an existence after death. It is common enough, but it rarely has anything at all to do with the simpler manifestations of the religious sentiment. These are directed to the immediate desires of the individual or the community, and do not look beyond the present life. The doctrine of compensation hereafter is foreign to them. I have shown this at length so far as the religions of America were concerned. “Neither the delights of a heaven on the one hand, nor the terrors of a hell on the other were ever held out by priests or sages as an incentive to well doing, or a warning to the evil disposed.”258-1 The same is true of the classical religions of Greece and Rome, of Carthage and Assyria. Even in Egypt the manner of death and the rites of interment had much more to do with the fate of the soul, than had its thoughts and deeds in the flesh. The opinions of Socrates and Plato on the soul as something which always existed and whose after life is affected by its experiences here, struck the Athenians as novel and innovating.

On the other hand, the ancient Germans had a most lively faith in the life hereafter. Money was loaned in this world to be repaid in the next. But with them also, as with the Aztecs, the future was dependent on the character or mode of death rather than the conduct of life. He who died the “straw-death” on the couch of sickness looked for little joy in the hereafter; but he who met the “spear-death” on the field of battle went at once to Odin, to the hall of Valhalla, where the heroes of all time assembled to fight, eat boar’s fat and drink beer. Even this rude belief gave them such an ascendancy over the materialistic Romans, that these distinctly felt that in the long run they must succumb to a bravery which rested on such a mighty moment as this.259-1

The Israelites do not seem to have entertained any general opinion on an existence after death. No promise in the Old Testament refers to a future life. The religion there taught nowhere looks beyond the grave. It is materialistic to the fullest extent. Hence, a large body of orthodox Jewish philosophers, the Sadducees, denied the existence of the soul apart from the body.

The central doctrine of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the leading impulse which he gave to the religious thought of his age, was that the thinking part of man survives his physical death, and that its condition does not depend on the rites of interment, as other religions then taught,260-1 but on the character of its thoughts during life here. Filled with this new and sublime idea, he developed it in its numerous applications, and drew from it those startling inferences, which, to this day, stagger his followers, and have been in turn, the terror and derision of his foes. This he saw, that against a mind inwardly penetrated with the full conviction of a life hereafter, obtainable under known conditions, the powers of this world are utterly futile, and its pleasures hollow phantoms.

The practical energy of this doctrine was immensely strengthened by another, which is found very obscurely, if at all, stated in his own words, but which was made the central point of their teaching by his immediate followers. The Christianity they preached was not a philosophical scheme for improving the race, but rested on the historical fact of a transaction between God and man, and while they conceded everlasting existence to all men, all would pass it in the utmost conceivable misery, except those who had learned of these historical events, and understood them as the church prescribed.

As the ancient world placed truth in ideas and not in facts, no teaching could well have been more radically contrary to its modes of thought; and the doctrine once accepted, the spirit of proselytizing came with it.

I have called this idea a new one to the first century of our era, and so it was in Europe and Syria. But in India, Sakyamuni, probably five hundred years before, had laid down in sententious maxims the philosophical principle which underlies the higher religious doctrine of a future life. These are his words, and if through the efforts of reasoning we ever reach a demonstration of the immortality of the soul, we shall do it by pursuing the argument here indicated: “Right thought is the path to life everlasting. Those who think do not die.”262-1

Truth alone contains the elements of indefinite continuity; and truth is found only in the idea, in correct thought.

Error in the intellectual processes corresponds to pain in sensation; it is the premonition of waning life, of threatened annihilation; it contains the seed of cessation of action or death. False reasoning is self-destructive. The man who believes himself invulnerable will scarcely survive his first combat. A man’s true ideas are the most he can hope, and all that he should wish, to carry with him to a life hereafter. Falsehood, sin, is the efficient agent of death. As Bishop Hall says: “There is a kind of not-being in sin; for sin is not an existence of somewhat that is, but a deficiency of that rectitude which should be; it is a privation, as blindness is a privation of sight.”

While the religious doctrine of personal survival has thus a position defensible on grounds of reason as being that of the inherent permanence of self-conscious truth, it also calls to its aid and indefinitely elevates the most powerful of all the emotions, love. This, as I have shown in the second chapter, is the sentiment which is characteristic of preservative acts. Self-love, which is prominent in the idea of the perfected individual, sex-love, which is the spirit of the multiform religious symbolism of the reproductive act, and the love of race, which is the chief motor in the religion of humanity, are purified of their grosser demands and assigned each its meet post in the labor of uniting the conceptions of the true under the relation of personality.

The highest development of which such love is capable arises through the contemplation of those verities which are abstract and eternal, and which thus set forth, to the extent the individual mind is capable of receiving it, the completed notion of diuturnity. This highest love is the “love of God.” A Supreme Intelligence, one to which all truth is perfect, must forever dwell in such contemplation. Therefore the deeper minds of Christianity define man’s love of God, as God’s love to himself. “Eternal life,” says Ernest Naville, “is in its principle the union with God and the joy that results from that union.”263-1 The pious William Law wrote: “No man can reach God with his love, or have union with Him by it, but he who is inspired with that one same spirit of love, with which God loved himself from all eternity, before there was any creation.”264-1

Attractive as the idea of personal survival is in itself, and potent as it has been as a moment of religious thought, it must be ranked among those that are past. While the immortality of the soul retains its interest as a speculative inquiry, I venture to believe that as an idea in religious history, it is nigh inoperative; that as an element in devotional life it is of not much weight; and that it will gradually become less so, as the real meaning of religion reaches clearer interpretations.

Its decay has been progressive, and common to all the creeds which taught it as a cardinal doctrine, though most marked in Christianity. A century ago Gibbon wrote: “The ancient Christians were animated by a contempt for their present existence, and by a just confidence of immortality, of which the doubtful but imperfect faith of modern ages cannot give us any adequate notion.”264-2 How true this is can be appreciated only by those who study this doctrine in the lives and writings of the martyrs and fathers of the primitive church.

The breach which Gibbon remarked has been indefinitely widened since his time. What has brought this about, and what new moment in religious thought seems about to supply its place, will form an appropriate close to the present series of studies. In its examination, I shall speak only of Christian thought, since it leads the way which other systems will ultimately follow.

In depicting the influences which have led and are daily leading with augmented force to the devitalizing of the doctrine of immortality, I may with propriety confine myself to those which are themselves strictly religious. For the change I refer to is not one brought about by the opponents of religion, by materialistic doctrines, but is owing to the development of the religious sentiment itself. Instead of tending to an abrogation of that sentiment, it may be expected to ennoble its emotional manifestations and elevate its intellectual conceptions.

Some of these influences are historical, as the repeated disappointments in the second coming of Christ, and the interest of proselytizing churches to interpret this event allegorically. Those which I deem of more importance, however, are such as are efficient to-day, and probably will continue to be the main agents in the immediate future of religious development. They are:

(1.) The recognition of the grounds of ethics.

(2.) The recognition of the cosmical relations.

(3.) The clearer defining of life.

(4.) The growing immateriality of religious thought.

(1.) The authority of the Law was assumed in the course of time by most Christian churches, and the interests of morality and religion were claimed to be identical. The Roman church with its developed casuistry is ready to prescribe the proper course of conduct in every emergency; and if we turn to many theological writers of other churches, Dick’s Philosophy of Religion for instance, we find moral conduct regarded as the important aim of the Christian life. Morality without religion, works without faith, are pronounced to be of no avail in a religious, and of very questionable value in a social sense. Some go so far as to deny that a person indifferent to the prevailing tenets of religion can lead a pure and moral life. Do away with the belief in a hereafter of rewards and punishments, say these, and there is nothing left to restrain men from the worst excesses, or at least from private sin.

Now, however, the world is growing to perceive that morality is separable from religion; that it arose independently, from a gradual study of the relations of man to man, from principles of equity inherent in the laws of thought, and from considerations of expediency which deprive its precepts of the character of universality. Religion is subjective, and that in which it exerts an influence on morality is not its contents, but the reception of them peculiar to the individual. Experience alone has taught man morals; pain and pleasure are the forms of its admonitions; and each generation sees more clearly that the principles of ethics are based on immutable physical laws. Moreover, it has been shown to be dangerous to rest morality on the doctrine of a future life; for apart from the small effect the terrors of a hereafter have on many sinners, as that doctrine is frequently rejected, social interests suffer. And, finally, it is debasing and hurtful to religion to make it a substitute for police magistracy.267-1

The highest religion would certainly enforce the purest morality; but it is equally true that such a religion would enjoin much not approved by the current opinions of the day. The spirit of the reform inaugurated by Luther was a protest against the subjection of the religious sentiment to a moral code. With the independence thus achieved, it came to be recognized that to the full extent that morality is essential to religion, it can be reached as well or better without a system of rewards and punishments after death, than with one. Both religion and morality stand higher, when a conception of an after life for this purpose is dropped.

(2.) The recognition of the cosmical relations has also modified the views of personal survival. The expansion of the notions of space and time by the sciences of geology and astronomy has, as I before remarked, done away with the ancient belief that the culminating catastrophe of the universe will be the destruction of this world. An insignificant satellite of a third rate sun, which, with the far grander suns whose light we dimly discern at night, may all be swept away in some flurry of “cosmical weather,” that the formation or the dissolution of such a body would be an event of any beyond the most insignificant importance, is now known to be almost ridiculous. To assert that at the end of a few or a few thousand years, on account of events transpiring on the surface of this planet, the whole relationship of the universe will be altered, a new heaven and a new earth be formed, and all therein be made subservient to the joys of man, becomes an indication of an arrogance which deserves to be called a symptom of insanity. Thus, much of the teleology both of the individual and the race taught by the primitive and medieval church undergoes serious alterations. The literal meaning of the millennium, the New Jerusalem, and the reign of God on earth has been practically discarded.

With the disappearance of the ancient opinion that the universe was created for man, the sun to light him by day and the stars by night, disappeared also the later thesis that the happiness or the education of man was the aim of the Order in Things. The extent and duration of matter, if they indicate any purpose at all, suggest one incomparably vaster than this; while the laws of mind, which alone distinctly point to purpose, reveal one in which pain and pleasure have no part or lot, and one in which man has so small a share that it seems as if it must be indifferent what his fate may be. The slightest change in the atmosphere of the globe will sweep away his species forever.

Schopenhauer classified all religions as optimisms or pessimisms. The faith of the future will be neither. What is agreeable or disagreeable to man will not be its standard of the excellence of the universe. However unwillingly, he is at last brought to confess that his comfort is not the chief nor even any visible aim of the order in things. In the course of that order it may be, nay, it is nigh certain, that the human species will pass through decadence to extinction along with so many other organisms. Neither as individuals nor as a race, neither in regard to this life nor to the next, does the idea of God, when ennobled by a contemplation of the cosmical relations, permit to man the effrontery of claiming that this universe and all that therein is was made with an eye to his wants and wishes, whether to gratify or to defeat them.

(3.) The closer defining of life as a result of physical force, and the recognition of mind as a connotation of organism, promise to be active in elevating religious conceptions, but at the expense of the current notions of personality. Sensation and voluntary motion are common to the fetus, the brute and the plant, as well as to man. They are not part of his “soul.” Intellect and consciousness, as I have shown, exclude sensation, and in these, if anywhere, he must look for his immortal part. Even here, error works destruction, and ignorance plants no seed of life. We are driven back to the teaching of Buddha, that true thought alone is that which does not die.

Why should we ask more? What else is worth saving? Our present personality is a train of ideas base and noble, true and false, coherent through the contiguity of organs nourished from a common center. Another personality is possible, one of true ideas coherent through conscious similarity, independent of sensation, as dealing with topics not commensurate with it. Yet were this refuge gained, it leaves not much of the dogma that every man has an indestructible conscious soul, which will endure always, no matter what his conduct or thoughts have been. Rather does it favor the opinion expressed so well by Matthew Arnold in one of his sonnets:

“He who flagged not in the earthly strife
From strength to strength advancing—only he,
His soul well knit and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.”

Not only has the received doctrine of a “soul,” as an undying something different from mind and peculiar to man, received no support from a closer study of nature,—rather objections amounting to refutation,—but it has reacted injuriously on morals, and through them on religion itself. Buddha taught that the same spark of immortality exists in man and brute, and actuated by this belief laid down the merciful rule to his disciples: “Do harm to no breathing thing.” The apostle Paul on the other hand, recognizing in the lower animals no such claim on our sympathy, asks with scorn: “Doth God care for oxen?” and actually strips from a humane provision of the old Mosaic code its spirit of charity, in order to make it subserve a point in his polemic.

(4.) As the arrogance of the race has thus met a rebuke, so has the egotism of the individual. His religion at first was a means of securing material benefits; then a way to a joyous existence beyond the tomb: the love of self all the time in the ascendant.

This egoism in the doctrine of personal survival has been repeatedly flung at it by satirists, and commented on by philosophers. The Christian who “hopes to be saved by grossly believing” has been felt on all hands to be as mean in his hope, as he is contemptible in his way of attaining it. To center all our religious efforts to the one end of getting joy—however we may define it—for our individual selves, has something repulsive in it to a deeply religious mind. Yet that such in the real significance of the doctrine of personal survival is granted by its ablest defenders. “The general expectation of future happiness can afford satisfaction only as it is a present object to the principle of self-love,” says Dr. Butler, the eminent Lord Bishop of Durham, than whom no acuter analyst has written on the religious nature of man.

Yet nothing is more certain than that the spirit of true religion wages constant war with the predominance or even presence of selfish aims. Self-love is the first and rudest form of the instinct of preservation. It is sublimed and sacrificed on the altar of holy passion. “Self,” exclaims the fervid William Law, “is both atheist and idolater; atheist, because it rejects God; idolater, because it is its own idol.” Even when this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the height of sex-love, it renounces self, and rejoices in martyrdom. “All for love, or the world well lost,” has been the motto of too many tragedies to be doubted now. By the side of the ancient Roman or the soldier of the French revolution, who through mere love of country marched joyously to certain death from which he expected no waking, does not the martyr compare unfavorably, who meets the same death, but does so because he believes that thereby he secures endless and joyous life? Is his love as real, as noble, as unselfish?

Even the resistless physical energy which the clear faith in the life hereafter has so often imparted, becomes something uncongenial to the ripened religious meditation. Such faith brings about mighty effects in the arena of man’s struggles, but it does so through a sort of mechanical action. An ulterior purpose is ahead, to wit, the salvation of the soul, and it may be regarded as one of the best established principles of human effort that every business is better done, when it is done for its own sake, out of liking for it, than for results expected from it.

Of nothing is this more just than religion. Those blossoms of spiritual perfection, the purified reason, the submissive will, the sanctifying grace of abstract ideas, find no propitious airs amid the violent toil for personal survival, whether that is to be among the mead jugs of Valhalla, the dark-eyed houris of Paradise, or the “solemn troops and sweet society” of Christian dreams. Unmindful of these, the saintly psyche looks to nothing beyond truth; it asks no definite, still less personal, end to which this truth is to be applied; to find it is to love it, and to love it is enough.

The doctrine I here broach, is no strange one to Christian thought. To be sure the exhortation, “Save your soul from Hell,” was almost the sole incentive to religion in the middle ages, and is still the burden of most sermons. But St. Paul was quickened with a holier fire, that consumed and swept away such a personal motive, when he wrote: “Yea, I could wish that I myself were cast out from Christ as accursed, for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”274-1 St. Augustine reveals the touch of the same inspiration in his passionate exclamation: “Far, O Lord, far from the heart of thy servant be it that I should rejoice in any joy whatever. The blessed life is the joy in truth alone.”274-2 And amid the pÆans to everlasting life which fill the pages of the De Imitatione Christi, the medieval monk saw something yet greater, when he puts in the mouth of God the Father, the warning: “The wise lover thinks not of the gift, but of the love of the giver. He rests not in the reward, but in Me, beyond all rewards.”275-1 The mystery of great godliness is, that he who has it is as one who seeking nothing yet finds all things, who asking naught for his own sake, neither in the life here nor yet hereafter, gains that alone which is of worth in either.

Pressed by such considerations, the pious Schleiermacher threw down the glaive on the side of religion half a century ago when he wrote: “Life to come, as popularly conceived, is the last enemy which speculative criticism has to encounter, and, if possible, to overcome.” The course he marked out, however, was not that which promises success. Recurring to the austere theses of Spinoza, he sought to bring them into accord with a religion of emotion. The result was a refined Pantheism with its usual deceptive solutions.

What recourse is left? Where are we to look for the intellectual moment of religion in the future? Let us review the situation.

The religious sentiment has been shown to be the expression of unfulfilled desire, but this desire peculiar as dependent on unknown power. Material advantages do not gratify it, nor even spiritual joy when regarded as a personal sentiment. Preservation by and through relation with absolute intelligence has appeared to be the meaning of that “love of God” which alone yields it satisfaction. Even this is severed from its received doctrinal sense by the recognition of the speculative as above the numerical unity of that intelligence, and the limitation of personality which spiritual thought demands. The eternal laws of mind guarantee perpetuity to the extent they are obeyed—and no farther. They differ from the laws of force in that they convey a message which cannot be doubted concerning the purport of the order in nature, which is itself “the will of God.” That message in its application is the same which with more or less articulate utterance every religion speaks—Seek truth: do good. Faith in that message, confidence in and willing submission to that order, this is all the religious sentiment needs to bring forth its sweetest flowers, its richest fruits.

Such is the ample and satisfying ground which remains for the religion of the future to build upon. It is a result long foreseen by the clearer minds of Christendom. One who more than any other deserves to be classed among these writes: “Resignation to the will of God is the whole of piety. * * * Our resignation may be said to be perfect when we rest in his will as our end, as being itself most just and right and good. Neither is this at bottom anything more than faith, and honesty and fairness of mind; in a more enlarged sense, indeed, than these words are commonly used.”277-1

Goethe, who studied and reflected on religious questions more than is generally supposed, saw that in such a disposition of mind lie the native and strongest elements of religion. In one of his conversations with Chancellor MÜller, he observed: “Confidence and resignation, the sense of subjection to a higher will which rules the course of events but which we do not fully comprehend, are the fundamental principles of every better religion.”277-2

By the side of two such remarkable men, I might place the opinion of a third not less eminent than they—Blaise Pascal. In one part of his writings he sets forth the “marks of a true religion.” Sifted from its physical ingredients, the faith he defines is one which rests on love and submission to God, and a clear recognition of the nature of man.

Here I close these studies on the Religious Sentiment. They show it to be a late and probably a final development of mind. The intellect first reaches entire self-consciousness, the emotions first attain perfection of purpose, when guided by its highest manifestation. Man’s history seems largely to have been a series of efforts to give it satisfaction. This will be possible only when he rises to a practical appreciation of the identity of truth, love and life.

236-1 Essay on the use of Anthropomorphism. Mr. Spencer’s argument, in his own words, is this:—“From the inability under which we labor to conceive of a Deity save as some idealization of ourselves, it inevitably results that in each age, among each people, and to a great extent in each individual, there must arise just that conception of Deity best adapted to the needs of the case.” “All are good for their times and places.” “All were beneficent in their effects on those who held them.” It would be hard to quote from the records of theory-making an example of more complete indifference to acknowledged facts than these quotations set forth.

239-1 De Veritate, p. 216.

241-1 August Neander, Geschichte der Christlichen Religion und Kirche, Bd. i., ss. 160, 346. (Gotha, 1856.) St. Clement’s description of Christ is ??? ???? a?s????. Tertullian says: “Nec humanÆ honestatis corpus fuit, nedum celestis claritatis.”

243-1 Novalis, Schriften, B. i., s. 244.

244-1 A. Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, p. 607.

245-1 Dr. T. Laycock, On some Organic Laws of Memory, in the Journal of Mental Science, July, 1875, p. 178.

246-1 Speaking of the mission of the artist, Wilhelm von Humboldt says: “Die ganze Natur, treu und vollstÄndig beobachtet, mit sich hinÜber zu tragen, d. h. den Stoff seiner Erfahrungen dem Umfange der Welt gleich zu machen, diese ungeheure Masse einzelner und abgerissener Erscheinungen in eine l’ungetrennte Einheit und ein organisirtes Ganzes zu verwandeln; und dies durch alle die Organe zu thun, die ihm hierzu verliehen sind,—ist das letzte Ziel seines intellectuellen BemÜhen.” Ueber Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea, Ab. IV.

246-2 Zeitschrift fÜr VÖlkerpsychologie, B. I. s. 48.

247-1 Gesammelte Werke. Bd. VII., s. 63.

249-1 See this forcibly brought out and abundantly illustrated in the work of M. Coulange, La CitÉ Antique.

249-2 W. von Humboldt, Gesammelte Werke. Bd. VII., p. 72.

250-1 H. L. Liddon, Canon of St. Paul’s. Some Elements of Religion, p. 84.

251-1 The Chevalier Bunsen completed the moral estimate of the one-man-power, thus acknowledged by Machiavelli, in these words: “Alles Grosse geht aus vom Einzelnen, aber nur in dem Masse, als dieser das Ich dem Ganzen opfert.” Gott in der Geschichte, Bd. I., s. 38.

252-1 W. von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Vorsuch, die GrÄnzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen, Breslau, 1851. Auguste Comte, SystÈme de Politique Positive, Paris, 1851-4. The former was written many years before its publication.

256-1 Lectures on Metaphysics, Vol. I., p. 23.

256-2 The Koran, Suras xi., xvi.

258-1 The Myths of the New World, Chap. IX.

259-1 Jacob Grimm quite overlooked this important element in the religion of the ancient Germans. It is ably set forth by Adolf Holtzmann, Deutsche Mythologie, s. 196 sqq. (Leipzig, 1874).

260-1 The seemingly heartless reply he made to one of his disciples, who asked permission to perform the funeral rites at his father’s grave: “Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead,” is an obvious condemnation of one of the most widespread superstitions of the ancient world. So, according to an ingenious suggestion of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was the fifth commandment of Moses: “Ne parentum seriem tanquam primam aliquam causam suspicerent homines, et proinde cultum aliquem Divinum illis deferrent, qualem ex honore parentum sperare liceat benedictionem, docuit.” De Veritate, p. 231.

Herbert Spencer in his Essay on the Origin of Animal Worship, calls ancestral worship “the universal first form of religious belief.” This is very far from correct, but it is easy to see how a hasty thinker would be led into the error by the prominence of the ancient funereal ceremonies.

262-1 Dhammapada, 21.

263-1 La Vie Eternelle, p. 339.

264-1 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. I., ch. XV.

264-2 Address to the Clergy, p. 16.

267-1 “Toute religion, qu’on se permet de dÉfendre comme une croyance qu’il est utile de laisser au peuple, ne peut plus espÉrer qu’une agonie plus ou moins prolongÉe.” Condorcet, De l’Esprit Humain, Ep. V.

274-1 Romans, ch. ix., v. 3.

274-2 “Beata quippe vita est gaudium de veritate.” Augustini Confessionum, Lib. x., caps. xxii., xxiii.

275-1 “Prudens amator non tam donum amantis considerat, quam dantis amorem. Nobilis amator non quiescit in dono, sed in me super omne donum.” De Imitatione Christi, Lib. iii., cap. vi.

277-1 Fifteen Sermons by Joseph Butler, Lord Bishop of Durham. Sermon “On the love of God.”

277-2 Unterhaltungen, p. 131.