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LECTURE II.

THAT a new and nobler conception of God has been common among men since Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed his religion, it seems quite impossible to doubt; and that such change and ele. vation of thought on this supreme theme have been radically due to his sovereign instruction, and his efficacious and undecaying influence, appears equally evident. But certainly, if this be admitted as true, it cannot be dismissed as of trivial importance. It must be conceded to be of a really royal significance.

No greater intellectual or spiritual gain can be conceived for a man than that which is implied in a more vivid, just, and inspiring conception of Him from whom his nature came, and with whom he stands, by reason of that nature, in essential relations. No object can be conceived more worthy the aim of a Divine revelation than to give men precisely this uplift and advancement in the knowledge of their Creator. It has to do with their mental progress, in power and in culture. It is intimately connected with the training of conscience, and of the sweetest and noblest affections. It concerns the regulation, and the fine inspiration, of the voluntary force. There is in fact no element in our energetic and complex nature which should not take beauty and blessing upon it from a clearer and larger apprehension of God. As the tides are lifted beneath the unseen pull of the moon, so human aspiration must be exalted when the vision of the infinite Author of the Universe rises above it in majestic distinctness. As flowers and trees respond with blooms brilliant and fragrant to the kiss of the sunshine when spring replaces the icy winter, so whatever is noblest in man, and whatever is most delicate, must answer the appeal of a radiant dis covery of that presiding Personal Glory, from which order and life, power and love, incessantly proceed

Undoubtedly, also, whatever noxious forces there are in one's moral nature, of rebellious desire, or of a defiant and passionate will, these may be quickened to ranker development, or stirred to a more impetuous swing, by such a revelation; as the poison is ripened, no less than the rose, by the play of the sunlight; as the storm is pushed to a fury more destructive by the force radiated from satellite and sun. But the normal effect of the more ample discovery of God, on the finite intelligence, must be to exalt, clarify, and ennoble it. And so men have always sought for this, precisely as they have been sensitive and reflective. They who have missed it have sadly deplored the absence of it. They who have had it have felt in the depth of their responsive and stimulated being that no other privilege was so august, no other knowledge so life-giving. The supreme energy, in the sphere of moral life, in Christendom or outside it, must always be this which descends from the heights of the creative and kingly Authority which resides in the heavens.

That a richer impression of God has been prevalent and illustrious in the world, since Jesus taught in it, appears, as I have said, beyond dispute; and the more closely we examine, in its particulars, this essentially new conception of God, the more palpable will the contrast of it appear with whatever preceded it; the more, it seems to me, shall we inwardly feel that not by human means alone-long tried before without success-but by a transcendent Divine revelation, was such a change, so intimate and immense, accomplished for man.

No thoughtful person will speak without tenderness of any ancient religious scheme which, in the absence of ampler light, has drawn to itself the trust and hope of human souls, and has been their means, however imperfect, for ascending to nearer intercourse with God. More majestic in proportions, more significant often in particulars of detail, than any renowned architecture of temples, are some of these religions; more pathetic are they than any tragedy, when we really touch the solemn consciousness and the timid aspiration which lie beneath them; musical sometimes, with sad deprecation or with diffident praise, beyond the melody of secular poems; picturesque, even, with a vivid and varied beauty surpassing that of spectacular pageants.

As simple historical monuments they appeal to a profounder study than obelisks, palaces, or civil legislations. As systemis illustrating human feeling, they touch our hearts. We may never forget that souls like our own have sung their hymns, have builded upon them their tremulous hopes, have left them baptized with their irrepressible passionate tears. But it is necessary carefully to trace the influence of such religions, pursuing them to their effects as these had certainly been realized in society when Jesus came, to understand the work accomplished by him, the prodigious revolution which, through the Christianity that claims him for its Head, has in this direction been wrought in the earth.

That man has an innate sense of God,-implied in his constant consciousness of dependence, and also of obligation, both pointing to a Power above him, and in his vague but real intuition of an Infinite beyond his measurement or sight,—this seems demonstrably certain; almost, in fact, an axiom in religion. The old etymology of the Greek word 'Anthropos,' which made it represent "the one who looks upward," may or may not have been the correct one; but the characteristic mark which it gives of the human person is justly descriptive: and nothing is more apparent in history than the search which man has made after God, in all places and times, if haply he might find Him. The great teachers, the Orphic brotherhoods, more vaguely, yet really, the common multitudes, have alike been eager in this quest for the Power which they had to assume as the ultimate source of order and of life.

The fact becomes startling, then, that so many of the thoughtful, in the days which remain memorable to men for the mission of Jesus, had become wholly and frankly atheistic, or had come to recognize no other God than the universe itself, which to them was the impersonal source, and the ultimate reservoir, of existence and energy. It is only to be explained by their vehement recoil from the rites of worship, immoral and debasing, which were practiced around them, and from the fictions of his torical tradition which bore these as their appropriate poisonous fruit. How immoral and how debasing these rites had become, I need hardly remind you. There had been points, in the ex

perience of various peoples, where natural religion seemed nearly if not wholly, to touch the level of revelation; where the primitive conception of God had been so comparatively worthy and high that the subsequent descent from it appears almost incred. ible: the monotheism being lost so utterly in the multitude of divinities; the adoration of contemplation, or the solemn ancestral ritual of sacrifice, giving place so completely to frivolous, licentious, or obscene customs of what was called worship. But these customs were now so established that only a radical and world-wide revolution of thought and feeling could displace them. Cicero, and Seneca, with many others, recognized and rebuked the tendency of men, instead of bringing the Divine to the human, to attribute their own sins to the gods: till such were encouraged, and seemed authorized, from on high. The testimony of Herodotus, Strabo, and others, as to the infamous usages of worship in Babylon and in Egypt, is sufficiently familiar. The voluntary sacrifice of virtue by woman was accepted as an offering dear to the gods; and a sensuality so fright ful that Christendom could not bear its story, if the veil of the ancient language were lifted, had become part of the ritual of religion on the Nile and the Euphrates.

It was said of the Greeks by Apuleius that they differed from the Egyptians in that they honored their gods by dances, which the Egyptians replaced with lamentations. The lighter and more fanciful spirit of the Greek is suggested by the remark. But in one respect they were certainly alike, in their readiness to instal the animal lusts among services of religion: so that Strabo tells us, you remember, that the wealth of Corinth proceeded largely from the foul hire of prostitution in the temples; and Athenæus records that to the prayers of the temple-courtesans, as well as to the valor of the heroes of Marathon, the Corinthians ascribed the great Persian repulse. Even statues of such courtesans had honored and eminent place in the temples. Gibbon himself—who looked at whatever was not Christianity with passionless and discerning eyes-has given the world in his Twenty-third chapter a slight but a fearfully significant sketch of the license in worship which prevailed in Antioch: where pleasure, as he says, assumed the character of religion, and

where "the lively licentiousness of the Greeks was blended with the hereditary softness of the Syrians." *

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In Roman worship, as publicly practiced, an equal licentiousness was not unknown. The Roman nature was haughty and restrained. For a hundred and seventy years after the city waз founded the gods had been worshipped without statues; and religion, with that conquering and political people, was always a vast and elaborate public art, by which to compel the services of the gods on behalf of the city. Yet Ovid and Juvenal set pictures before us of fearful significance; and Seneca complained that men uttered the most abominable prayers in the ears of the gods, so that what a man ought not to hear they did not blush to speak to the Deity: while to the general multitude of worshippers he attributed indecency, and virtual insanity, adding that only the number of such secured for them the reputation of reason. gods had come to be recognized as local. The oracle at Delphi had authorized the maxim that the best religion was that of a man's own city. The noblest of the divinities were not imagined to take any interest in human virtue. The most popular stories current about them were the frightful and depraving legends which rehearsed their furious passions and amours. The Christian Fathers, in their most passionate appeals against idol-worship, had only to repeat what was commonly accepted in the popular notion. Indeed, the most dismal superstitions were coming to take the place of any semblance of faith: as Tiberius put his trust in laurel-leaves to protect him from lightning; as the Emperor Nero, Uhlhorn reminds us, 'having become tired of the goddess Astarte, worshipped no longer any god, but an amulet which had been given him—the ruler of the world becoming the devotee of a fetish.'†

In this terrific condition of things, three controlling tendencies appeared, each of which we must recognize to bring before us the fearful arena into which the new force of Christianity entered. The first is, the increasing atheistic or pantheistic unbelief of

"Decline and Fall, etc.," London ed., 1848, Vol. III., pp. 175–7, 196. "Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism," New York ed., 1879 p. 63,

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