The most serious errors in the philosophical and religious domains are generally found to be nothing but the exaggeration, or the minimising, of a truth, very much as evil, physical and moral, is often the privation of a corresponding good, the absence of something which ought to be present. Year by year the vast majority of religionists in this Western world are seriously engaged in the commemoration of a transcendent mystery, the humanisation, or incarnation, of the Deity in the person of the Prophet of Nazara. As might be expected, the upholders of this belief are by no means all agreed as to the manner in which this momentous event came about, and, while there are many prepared to speak of "Our Lord Jesus Christ"—and we certainly feel no difficulty in so speaking of an elevated and saintly spirit such as he—all are not prepared to subscribe to the precise formulation of the mystery as given in an Athanasian creed, or a homily of a fourth century father. Beyond admitting in a general and rather vague way that Jesus is "Divine," many people are not prepared to go. They would shrink from saying that he was the Infinite and Eternal, from whom all things derive their being; they see no necessity for believing in the story of his miracles, or the legendary account of his appearance in this world; above all, his virginal conception and birth they often repudiate in terms. They are coming to see—these open-minded men and women of the Anglican body—that the pre-eminence of Jesus must rest, not upon miracles, but on morals; that it is not his mystic offices, but his moral grandeur, which makes him to be so great a figure in history. In a word, that it is not his miracles which prove his teaching, but his teaching must authenticate his miracles.

Now, all this is, of course, very hopeful, and makes directly for that reconstruction of religion on an ethical basis which we conceive it our duty to press upon the attention of our age. Venerable to us is the memory and teaching of the last of the noble line of Jewish seers. Not one of the masters of the Church ethical, whom we obediently follow, but has exhausted, one might say, the possibilities of speech in their reverence and admiration for the great spirit of Jesus. When Immanuel Kant published the Critique of the Practical Reason, old men and thinkers of the Fatherland were moved to tears at the thought that the great deliverance had come at last, that a man had at length arisen who had penetrated to the core the significance of the great prophet's teaching. The only true commentator on Jesus and his religion is Immanuel Kant. Heretofore, men have followed Paul, Athanasius and Augustine; it is high time the ethics of Kant were substituted in colleges and seminaries of the clergy, and our ministers of religion taught to interpret the Gospel from the standpoint of the moral law instead of the imaginary dogmatics of Paul, and the dialectics of Athanasius and Augustine.

But the doctrine of incarnation unquestionably embodies a great element of truth, which it were our very serious loss to overlook. It supplies us with an admirable illustration of what was asserted in the beginning, namely, that an error is but a truth misstated, either by excess or defect. The Christian, or rather the ancient, orthodox presentation of the dogma errs in both ways. By excess, because it proclaims a man to be the personal Deity, that the flesh and blood of a mortal being is adorable, as is the highest Being, with the supreme offices of religion. It proclaims that Jesus was not a human individual or person at all, but a Divine being energising in two natures, the Divine and the human, so that when he used the pronoun "I," it was the Deity himself, not a man, who spoke. I say this is a gross misstatement by exaggeration, unknown to the prophet himself, unknown to his followers and biographers, and unknown to many Christian writers before the fatal epoch of Athanasius, who emphatically assert that Jesus is not to be worshipped as the Father.[1] The doctrine errs also by defect, because it fails to recognise the divinity of all the sons of the Supreme. Jesus is made to be exclusively Divine, the sole possessor of Divine sonship, and only through him are others put in the way of attaining to the same privilege. "But as many as received him," says the Alexandrian rhapsodist who wrote the prologue to the fourth gospel, "he gave them the power or the faculty to be made the sons of God, as many as believe in his name."

This account of the matter we conceive to be immeasurably below the truth. No mediator is needed between the soul and the Soul of our souls; no intercessor or redeemer. This perverse conception originated in the supposition that man was, and is, a fallen and a falling being, owing to the fatal legacy bequeathed by our presumptive parent, Adam; but Genesis being wholly and avowedly mythical in its opening chapters, the Pauline dialectic in the fifth chapter of the Romans falls to the ground, and with it the laborious argumentations of the epistle to the Hebrews, which essays to prove that the most sternly anti-sacerdotal prophet who ever lived was a full-fledged priest; the man who never conducted a ritualistic service in his life set forth as "a high priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedech," the only and eternal redeemer of humanity from the consequences of the misdeeds of an aboriginal parent who had no existence. No; before Agamemnon men were brave, before Aristides they were just, before Jesus they were in their innermost selves divine, and this in essence is the doctrine of the "Over-soul," associated, as far as this expression goes, with the name of the latest of the prophets of ethics, Emerson.

We are all incarnations, flesh-takings, of the infinite. Not only so, but the very unconscious universe, the silent, but ever-living nature is but the garment which clothes the Invisible, and in clothing reveals him; the beauty of nature is the veil, growing slenderer with every fresh access of knowledge, which scarce conceals the Great Presence. Vanini was thrust into the dungeons of the Inquisition at Naples on a charge of atheism. "Atheism!" contemptuously retorted the wretched captive, "I could prove God from that straw," picking up with his feet a fragment of the bed on which he lay in fetters. For the universal Life was in the straw. The life in that slender ear is one with the mighty pulsations of the ocean, the growth of the forest, and of the world of men, and the illimitable stars beyond. The being is one, the life is one, and above all, the mind, the exclusive endowment of man, is one too—one in us, one in the Supreme; we share it, for "we also are his offspring". There is only one Soul—the Divine, and the souls of the sons of men are, not so much images of that, made in its likeness, as it itself, in essence one, yet, participately, in every human being. "I have said, ye are gods, and sons of the Most High, every one," quoted Jesus with approval. So says Emerson, and this is his doctrine of the "Over-soul".

After thus indicating in general outline the essential features of this culminating teaching of ethical religion, it may be well to trace its historical development. It will be found to be, not an original speculation of our own teacher, but a precious belief held by elect souls in all ages to embody the truth of the relations between what is called the Divine and the human. I say "called" because this doctrine annihilates the distinction. As the electricity in the atmosphere may annihilate space by enabling us to flash a thought instantaneously even to a world whose distance is measured in millions of miles, so does this sublime conception of the great Oneness shatter the foundations on which all outside redemptions, priests, sacrifices, formalisms, rituals, sacraments, devilry, hell fire, and the rest repose, by showing every man that he is his own priest and sacrificer. No anointing or ordering can make him more than he is in himself (not through Christ or any man), the true-born son of God, one in nature with whatsoever is Highest in existence. Boldly does Emerson fling out his challenge—

Draw it thou canst the mystic line,
Rightly severing his from thine,
Which is human, which Divine.

We cannot. In our innermost selves we are Divine. We may say with Emerson, on the heights of the holy mount, when we have by long thought realised the truth, and by living the life which is alone worthy of such a conception, "I the imperfect adore my own Perfect". We seek to pray, we would fain worship. Then look no more into the skies; there is nought but vapour there and the silent worlds that shine eternally. Look not in the churches and the temples, for they are made by men's hands, empty of the Divine Presence as a mausoleum is of life. Let us look into ourselves for the true Shekinah, the true manifestation of the Divine, nay, the truly Divine is there. The Good in man, that is God; that alone is worthy of our adoration and our love.

I do not think it can be questioned that this is a noble conception of man and God and their mutual relations, and as far as one can judge of the trend of modern thought, it would appear that only on some such grounds is the intelligence of the age prepared to recognise theism as a possible belief. The conception of the Deity as a Being anterior to creation in existence, eternally dissevered from it in being, an external object, so to speak, of admiration, reverence and fear, seems incomprehensible to the modern mind. It certainly did to the whole idealist school of Germany, to such thinkers as Hegel, Schelling and Fichte, to deeply religious spirits like Coleridge and Wordsworth, to Emerson in America, and Carlyle in England. The "immeasurable clergyman" [2] view of the Deity, seated somewhere in the skies, and listening all day and night to the Hallelujah Chorus, is now wholly and absolutely impossible outside little Bethel and Bibliolatry.

But the truth must be confessed that in refusing to acknowledge what one may call an outside deity, an "absentee god," who pays periodical visits to his creation and acts only at the instant request of prayer, we are reverting to religious ideals that had their home in the land of the Indus and the Ganges, a thousand years before Christianity was heard of. It is the knowledge of this fact that fills one with stupefaction when we think of Exeter Hall and the type of Christian missioner who goes out to assail the venerable beliefs of Hindooism, when our cultivated men, our Emersons, Coleridges, Carlyles and Wordsworths, are positively reverting to the ideals of ancient India. The doctrine of the Over-soul, essentially shared in by all men; the belief that man is not in name, but in reality, not through the vicarious intercessions of another, but by his own nature, a Divine son, is in essence a form of Hindoo thought, and the recent translations of their sacred books enable us to read that truth there.

The Jewish conception of the Deity was utterly opposed to this. In that theology the Supreme Being was ever transcendent, and probably Jesus, a son of Israel, was not greatly removed from this belief. "Salvation is of the Jews," he proclaimed. Certainly there are no indications in the three earlier gospels of any such teaching as that of Emerson, though it is found, in suggestion at least, in the fourth gospel. Christ is made to say in one of those lengthy speeches at the close of the book, "If any man will keep my words, I will come to him and my Father will come to him, and we will take up our abode with him;" and again, "I and the Father are one". Here is a suggestion, faint enough, of the teaching that the Divine is present in the hearts of the just, of the ethically good, but there is a world of difference between that and the essential Divinity of every human soul, because part of the Over-soul, which is one in all men. No; Jesus was a son of Israel, and his ideals were those of his race. The few words quoted from the fourth gospel are in the spirit of the larger belief, but they are Neo-Platonic in their origin, as is the whole Johannine gospel, and cannot be taken as fairly representing the mind of the greatest of the Jewish seers. If we would see the Eastern teaching in the West, we must search, not the Old or New Testament, but the pages of the Alexandrian School, of Philo, and above all, of Plotinus, who believed that the supreme truths were learnt, not by study, nor by revelation from without, but in an ecstasy of the soul, losing itself in the contemplation of the Divine—in the "flight of the alone to the Alone".

Now, that which Plotinus considered an extraordinary occurrence, an experience perhaps only possible to elect spirits, men at length began to look upon as the truth of the normal relations between their Maker and themselves. Of course, so stupendous a change took centuries in evolution, and, naturally, the Christian Church and its clergymen gave it no sort of encouragement. It would never do to preach abroad that every man was his own priest, and so we wade through the whole of mediaevalism without finding any recognition of the great teaching. It is only when we are in the comparatively modern epoch of the fourteenth century that we find it in Eckhart, the German mystic. "There is," he writes, "something in the soul which is above the soul. . . . It is absolute and free from all names and forms, as God is free and absolute in himself. It is higher than knowledge, higher than love, for in these there is distinction. . . . I have called it a power, sometimes a light. . . . This light is satisfied only with the super-essential essence." It is ever entering "into that unity where no man dwelleth," where there are no distinctions, "neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost". It is the plain of the Great Silence, the centre of the immovable peace, an Inner Sea whose still waters are nevertheless bounded by no shores. It is the sense, rather it is the reality, of the Infinite in man, that of which all seers have dreamed under many diverse forms. I take it to be the Nirvana of Buddha, the eternal silence that follows when the last of the avenues of sense has been passed, and the soul enters at length into the possession of itself, that is, into the recognition of its infinitude. It is what Jesus means when he speaks of the faithful ones—they who have endured even to the end—entering "into the joy of their Lord". It is the apostle's unspeakable peace, "the peace of God, which passeth all understanding".

Another of the school of Eckhart, Tauler, gives his own experience, and it is not dissimilar. He finds his soul "so grounded in God that it is dissolved in the inmost of the Divine nature". No man, he says, can distinguish between the sunshine and the air. How much less the light of the created and the uncreated Spirit! We are lost in the abyss which is our source. "From the place whence the rivers of waters go forth, thither do they return." [3] Those words always haunt one with a sense of the mysterious. They seem to say that the beginning and the end of all are the same—the abyss of the Infinite. Emerson believes that man came forth thence, is there now, and abides there for ever. And surely Tennyson's lines must occur to the memory of every one:—

When that which drew from out the boundless deep,
Turns again home.

To begin to think at all, is to be brought, at length, to thoughts such as these—the thought of the Inner Sea, on whose still and boundless waters all is silence, peace, God.

After two centuries the teaching reappears, not in the pages of professional divines, or the denizens of the cloister, but in the philosophy of modern Germany. Schelling carries it still farther by pronouncing that there is but one reason, one mind, the human and the Divine being identical. The lines of Paracelsus are inevitably suggested:—

O God, Thou art Mind!
Crush not my mind, O God!

Fichte, in his Characteristics of the Present Age, pronounces the individual to be but "a single ray of the one universal and necessary thought". "There is but One Life, one animating power, one Living Reason . . . of which all that seems to us to exist and live is but a modification, definition, variety and form." And, finally, he goes so far as to say that it is only by, and to, mere earthly and finite perception, that this one and homogeneous life of reason is broken up and divided into separate individual persons. What a piercing thought! Surely it is almost past believing that the eternal Life is itself in us, nay, that it is we; that in very literal truth we may say, "I and the Infinite are One". Only one who could speak in tongues of men and angels is fit to hold discourse on thoughts so sublime, but it is difficult to discern a flaw in the arguments of these prophetic souls who have dared to believe and to preach to men, "Ye are gods, and sons of the Most High, every one".

It is a doctrine we learn only from the new masters. Nothing half so fair, so radiant, did we hear in days of old, so rich in promise, so full of inspiration and helpfulness. "You are an adopted son of God," it was said. There is but one natural son, the Messiah and Logos, Jesus Christ. Through him alone we have access to the Divine, apart from him we are children of wrath; only in him are we "light in the Lord". "He that believeth not the Son hath not life, but the wrath of God abideth with him." To this hour do they say these things, but we who have been privileged to hear wiser words, diviner voices, know that nothing can come between our lonely spirits and the Great Alone—no Church, no Book, no Messiah, or Saviour. We are greater than all that, for the eternal soul of man is within us, heir-at-law divine of the promises, and in its own right a natural son of God.

But to continue. The scattered rays of this wonderful gospel are focussed in the transcendental teaching of the last of the ethical prophets, Waldo Emerson. In him the truth shines forth as the sun. We have seen the germ of the doctrine in the fourteenth and fifteenth century mystics, its resurrection in the noble school of German idealism which grew out of the teaching of the great master himself, Immanuel Kant. The man who introduced it to England, the link, so to speak, between Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and Emerson, was Coleridge, for whom there is but one reason, shared in by all intelligent beings, which is in itself the universal soul. To this profoundly reverent thinker reason is not a faculty, much less a property of the human mind. Man cannot be said so much to possess reason as to partake of it. He in whom reason dwells can as little appropriate it as his own possession, as he can claim ownership in the breathing air or take in the canopy of heaven.

Now, this is essentially what Emerson means by the Over-soul. It is the universal mind, the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. It is one and identical in all men, even as the sun in the high heavens is one and the same for every dweller in the solar system. Yea, more than this, we cannot shrink from the consequences of our affirmation, the mind in man is not conceivably other than the Mind which is self-subsistent and infinite. After what manner shall we conceive of the intelligence which laid down the foundations of the world, traced the pathway of the stars, fixed the laws which nature has immutably obeyed from the eternal past even to this hour, if we conceive it not after the manner of the mind in us which has at length discovered these laws? How can we hold one intelligence to know and another to originate them? As truth is one and identical for all minds, so must be the intelligences which know and originate that truth. Hence, you will see that for thinkers[4] such as these agnosticism is the plainest of paradoxes—a bald contradiction in terms. It affects to be unable to discern Mind in the cosmos when it is exercising that very mind in formulating its doubts. It is as though a man should go hunting his house for a light with a candle burning in his hand. What on earth can we be searching for when the "candle of the Lord," as Locke called it, is the very illuminant we must employ in our search? "Tell me," Emerson would ask, "the truths your sciences establish, the principle of your philosophies, are they valid for all intelligences or only some?" Surely, for all intelligences, you will reply. "Then, I will urge, these truths must be one and identical if all intelligences admit them." Certainly. "How, then, can there be any doubt but that intelligence itself, mind itself, is one and identic in all men, since all think alike of the cosmos, and one and identic also in that everlasting Cause of the cosmos whence, you yourselves admit, all things derive their being?"

Are we asked for the supreme object of religion? Here it is, unveiled so far as mind and speech of man may discover the great reality. It is the God, not "who dwelleth in inaccessible light, who is enthroned on the floors of the heavens," or "walks on the wings of the winds"; it is the God who is "not very far from any one of us," for he is in us, in very deed and truth; he is the mind, the intelligence; he is the soul of man, and yet the "Over-soul," the soul of all souls, and we are not so much made in his image, as it was taught of old, but we are he, we are the Divine, there is no line of division 'twixt us and him; the light in man, the good in man is God.

Pray no more, then, we urge, to the skies, nor in a holy city or consecrated shrine, a temple, though it were of gold. Like the angels that stood by the open, empty grave of the Christ and said, "he is not here," your souls cry aloud that therein alone is the infinite Soul whose truth and being alone can satisfy your own. This is the temple not made with hands of man, in which alone the Supreme can be enshrined and worshipped, "Foolish doctor, foolish doctor," says Carlyle of Johnson, who went tapping for ghosts in Cock Lane, "thou thyself art a ghost!" Foolish and superstitious beyond bounds, we may say, is the man that thinketh to find the light of life in a church when it cannot be found within himself.

He who has steeped his soul in this teaching will need no more to commune with an imagination in the heavens, an anthropomorphic deity in the skies—it is a merciful thing we see no more of these painful profanities upon the canvases of our artists—nor will he need that his soul should rise on wings of fasting and prayer "to pierce the clouds" with his importunings and entreaties. No, his communings will be with himself, his worship of the silent sort, for he knows now that there is no God anywhere who is not within him. He will need no Chrishna, Buddha or Christ to "make intercession with the Father" for him, no god-babe in a manger or deity walking the earth in sorrow or expiring in shame, for lo! the Divinity is also every son of God, and suffering humanity is ever with us, the repression of the flesh is an unceasing sacrifice which we offer up in the temple of our bodies out of reverence for the Divinity within them.

NOTE.—The best account of Emerson's ethical and speculative teaching is to be found in Cooke's Life of Emerson, obtainable through Green & Co., Essex Hall, Strand. I am indebted to it for much of the expository portion of this chapter.

[1] The fact that Petavius, a Jesuit theologian, felt it his duty to condemn several ante-Nicene writers as heretical, though honest, offenders against orthodoxy, is evidence enough that Athanasianism is a spurious development unknown to the earlier ages.

[2] Tennyson's description of the "average Englishman's" theology.

[3] Ecclesiastes i. 7.

[4] And, we add, for ninety-nine out of every hundred philosophers of repute.

*****

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