Jules Remy( 1826-1893)
Journey to Great Salt Lake City
(London: W. Jeffs, 1861 -- English translation)
Volume One:  Intro.  |  Book 1  |  Book 2
  • Vol. 1:  Preface   Contents   Introduction
  • Bk. 1 Ch. 1  From Sacramento to Carson Valley
  • Bk. 1 Ch. 2  From Carson Valley to Haws's Ranch
  • Bk. 1 Ch. 3  From Haws's Ranch to New Jerusalem
  • Bk. 1 Ch. 4  The New Jerusalem
  • Bk. 2 Ch. 1  Life of the Prophet up to 1830
  • Bk. 2 Ch. 2  The Mormon Church Until 1839
  • Bk. 2 Ch. 3  Nauvoo, From 1839 to 1844
  • Bk. 2 Ch. 4  From Brigham Young to 1851

    •

    Go to:  Volume Two of the Set (under construction)

     






    A  JOURNEY

    TO

    GREAT-SALT-LAKE CITY.


    BY


    JULES  REMY  AND  JULIUS  BRENCHLEY, M.A.

    WITH  A  SKETCH  OF  THE

    HISTORY, RELIGION, AND CUSTOMS OF THE MORMONS,

    AND AN INTRODUCTION ON

    THE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES.


    BY  JULES  REMY.



    IN  TWO  VOLUMES.

    VOL. I.


    With Ten Steel Engravings and a Map.


    LONDON:

    W. JEFFS, 15 BURLINGTON ARCADE,
    Foreign Bookseller to the Royal Family.

    MDCCCLXI.

    Translation reserved.


     

    [ ii ]







    PRINTED BY

    JOHN  EDWARD  TAYLOR.  LITTLE  QUEEN  STREET,

    LINCOLN'S  INN  FIELDS.








     



    [ iii ]





    P R E F A C E.



    AFTER ten years spent in travelling for a purely scientific purpose, I returned for a short time to my native country, to take a little rest, and prepare for other enterprises which I had yet to accomplish. The time thus at my disposal was too short to make it possible for me to publish a full and elaborate work. The arrangement of the materials I had collected relating to Polynesia alone, to confine myself to one point only of my investigations, would have required more leisure than I could afford.

    I was unwilling, however, to leave Europe without rendering an account of at least one portion of my distant wanderings. I had adundance to choose from, and my choice was soon made. The works published on Mormonism and the Mormons are so overloaded with inaccuracies, or rather with misrepresentations, that I thought it a good subject to



     



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    treat, especially as it was one I could approach with a confidence all the greater from my having had the opportunity of studying, in their very homes, these new religionists, whose singular principles have attracted so much attention of late years, in spite of the important events which have occurred on this side of the Atlantic, and so much engrossed public attention.

    It is the portion I now propose to publish. Science, so justly fastidious, will perhaps find in it but little worthy of notice, and the moralist may regret that the history of this singular people should not have been written by a more experienced hand. It occurred to me, however, that the naturalist might not disdain to give a passing glance at a sketch, which is scrupulously correct, of places which were yet unexplored, or only imperfectly examined; and that the man whose pleasure it is to look on the drama of human affairs, will not see without interest the scene of a political and religious society which, once Christian and free, has broken away from Christianity and liberty, to make an experiment of living under new and radically different conditions of social existence.

    The greater part of the matter contained in the following work, was written from day to day, often in the open air, upon the slopes or the crests of mountains, in the heart of



     



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    deserts, amid the occupations and frequently the perils which are the necessary accompaniments of so long a journey, and must no doubt bear traces of the prculiar circumstances under which it was jotted down. It will therefore, I fear, be devoid of that literary finish on which so just a value is placed; but it struck me that, however defective it may be in form, this will be fully compensated for by its accuracy.

    The truth, so often perverted, will be vindicated in this work. Of those who have written on the Mormons, by far the greater number have derived their information from sources little to be relied on. The historians and travellers who have been their guides, have either never inspected the facts on the spot, or have looked at them from the point of view of their own foregone opinions, and too often of their passions. I have had the advantage of seeing with my own eyes, and my readers, I hope, will be sensible of it. Free, moreover, as far as I am aware, from all prejudice, I am able to affirm that I have contemplated the moral side of the picture with the same eye and the same impartiality as I have the physical side. The good and the bad have been exhibited; but if I correct erroroneous opinions, I am far from offering myself as an apologist. It is the consciousness of this sincerity and impartiality which has



     



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    inspired me with some confidence, and imparted to me the desire of presenting myself before the public. With serious and earnest men, truth is always the first of considerations, and it is for such I write.

    Paris, August, 1860.





     



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    C O N T E N T S.

    OF  THE  FIRST  VOLUME.



    iii  PREFACE

    ix  INTRODUCTION. -- On the Religious Movement in
         the United States.


    BOOK  THE  FIRST.

    JOURNEY  FROM  CALIFORNIA  TO  UTAH.

    003  I. Route From Sacramento to Carson Valley.

    039  II. From Carson Valley to Haws's Ranch.

    152  III. From Haws's Ranch to the New Jerusalem.

    189  IV. The New Jerusalem.


    BOOK  THE  SECOND.

    I. PONTIFICATE  OF  JOSEPH  SMITH.

    225  I. Life of the Prophet up to the Period of the
            Establishment of his Religion, 1805-1830.


     



    viii-b                                       C O N T E N T S.                                      



    270  II. The Mormon Church until the Foundation of Nauvoo, 1830-1839.

    336  III. From the Foundation of Nauvoo to the Death of the Prophet, 1839-1844.


    II. PONTIFICATE  OF  BRIGHAM  YOUNG.

    407  IV. From the Accession of Brigham Young to the Organization of the Territorial Government of Utah, 1844-1851.

    453  V. From the Organization of the Territory of Utah to the Present Day, 1851-1859.


    PLATES  IN  THE  FIRST  VOLUME.

    Frnt.  Portrait of Brigham Young.

    146  Portrait of Sokopits.

    194  Temple of Great Salt Lake City.

    244  Characters on the Plates of the Book of Mormon.

    268  Bronze Plates of Illinois.

    Map.

     

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    I N T R O D U C T I O N.



    ON THE  RELIGIOUS  MOVEMENT  IN
    THE  UNITED  STATES.

    THE course of my travels having led me, a few years since, into a sort of proximity to the Mormons, I could not resist the temptation of making a push for the country of this singular people, in which I expected to find myself face to face with a religion at the very moment of its birth, and to surprise one of the great secrets of Nature, as it were, on the spot. A religious creed suddenly jetting forth in the midst of a great society, and appearing above the horizon like a new isle on the bosom of the ocean, seemed to me to be a sufficient reason for giving oneself a little trouble, and deviating from the direct track of one’s journey. To deny myself the pleasure of such a spectacle was more than I was capable of; or, to express myself more accurately, I should have thought it wrong to do so, the opportunity being present, and there being scarcely more than a thousand miles of desert to cross. Had I been called upon




     



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    to justify to my own mind the interruption which such a journey must cause to my pursuits as a naturalist, -- not much of an interruption, after all, -- I should doubtless have pleaded that it could be hardly time lost to examine on the very spot of its appearance, a phenomenon rare in any age, and especially rare in our own. Certain it is that had I heard in California, where I then was, of the appearance of a new island in the Pacific Ocean, I should not have hesitated to have altered my course for the purpose of seeing it. When then should I do less with respect to Mormonism? Why should the moral be less attractive than the geological phenomenon?

    But what still more attracted me, independently of the spectacle itself, was, that the phenomenon in question seemed to me to have a character completely special, and to bear no resemblance to any other among the phenomena of the same class recorded in history. It presented itself to me not as a variety merely, but as a curiosity of species, a rarity if not an anomaly; like to certain plants I had met with at the Equator: as the Rhizophora, (for instance,) whose seeds germinate in its fruit, and exhibit complete individuals, perfectly formed, at the moment when they detach themselves from the parent plant and fall to the ground. Seen at a distance, it struck me, after what I had heard and known of Mormonism, that there might be some difficulty in classify8ing it; and yet I felt a strong objection to regard it as an anomaly; for if monstrosities displease us in the




     



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    physical world, they are still more revolting in the moral world. I wished to put myself quite at ease with regard to this singular phenomenon, this morel Rhizophora, if I may so express myself, which, first brought into existence in those regions where the Niagara send forth its eternal thunders, ought, it appears to me, to have perished in its germ on the very spot of its birth; but which, on the contrary, had, in the desert to which it was transplanted, grown, developed, and overspread with its branches an already powerful society. I desired to ascertain in a positive way, as an eye-witness, if the religion of Joseph Smith were really a novelty, or if ignorance or passion had deceived itself, or had deceived the public with respect to it. The founder of Mormonism, was he, as generally asserted, an impostor? This, when tested by the idea I had formed to myself of the genesis of religions, appeared to me to present a difficulty; and I felt anxious, were there really a divergence from what up to this moment I considered a general law, to verify the deviation.

    I.

    All religions, whatever may be the opinion we entertain of their intrinsic truth, are the spontaneous products of the human soul. They respond to primitive instincts, to powerful wants impossible to ignore. There is not a human creature who does not carry their germs in the depths of his reason, his imagination, and his heart; for there is


     



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    no one who does not entertain, vaguely at first, more clearly in the end, a sense of the infinite; who has not a glimpse, more or less luminous, of the divine ideal; and who is not disquieted or tormented by the mystery which hovers over his destiny.

    I am far from wishing to cast a slur on the philosophy of the eighteenth century; but it does surprise me that men of intelligence, some of them men of the highest intelligence, should have treated the loftiest aspirations of the soul as hallucinations and chimeras, and gravely asserted that religions are nothing more than human inventions, creations of policy and imposture. There is far higher philosophy in these lines of Milton, which exhibit Adam to us, on the very day of his birth, profoundly intent upon this great enigma, and addressing himself to the whole of nature for its solution:--

    "But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
    Knew not; to speak I tried, and forthwith spake;
    My tongue obeyed, and readily could name
    Whate’er I saw. 'Thou Sun,' said I, 'fair light,
    And thou enlightened Earth, so fresh and gay,
    Ye Hills and Dales, ye Rivers, Woods, and Plains,
    And ye that live and move, fair Creatures, tell,
    Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here?
    Not of myself: by some great Maker, then,
    In goodness and in power pre-eminent;
    Tell me how may I know him, how adore,
    From whom I have that thus I move and live
    And feel that I am happier than I know.'"*     __________
    * Paradise Lost, viii. 270-282.



     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             xiii


    The study of the human mind justifies the poet as against the philosophers. Since the days of Descartes it has ceased to be warrantable, though, as we have just seen, it has been often done and perhaps may be occasionally done again, to affirm that it is possible to invent God. There is no escape from the fact: if God did not exist, he could not be invented; if the eternal axiom, as it has been called, were not in every man’s thoughts, who would be able to group its characteristics, and to devise its formula? No amount of characteristics, and to devise its formula? No amount of goodwill whatever could effect it. God does not proceed from the soul of man, as the fruit does from the flower; to suppose this would be merely to suggest the same impiety in a different form, and to truck atheism against pantheism; but the idea of God, the sentiment of the ideal and of the divine, as well as of religion, which is nothing more than their external manifestation, their necessary form, do proceed from it as naturally as the flower from the bud, the fruit from the flower. Man does not invent God: he finds him; he grasps him by virtue of an internal revelation which it does not depend upon him either to listen to or to ignore. Religion, of whatever kind, is but the echo, more or less faithful, more or less responsive, of this deep-seated revelation.

    Buddhism, which M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire has, in some sort, lately revealed to us, is not an argument against the existence of the divine in the human soul. The word God does not exist in the languages of the people subject to




     



    xiv                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    this strange religion, which is the negation of the principle of all religion, and which consequently seems to be without any reason for existing; but it does not necessarily follow from this, that the idea of the infinite does not exist in their minds. The consciousness of human imperfection and of the wretchedness of our condition, which forms the groundwork of Buddhism, comprises within itself the conception of perfection; and whether God be named or not, the mere fact that man searches for the solution of the problem of his destiny, that he tries to shake off the yoke of his misery, and aspires to a better state, is evidence that in the depths of his soul there is a ray of divine light. The idea of God may be obscured in human consciousness by deep shadows; it may for ages remain in a state of embryo among the inferior races of human society; but this is not a sufficient reason for concluding against its universality. Voltaire said, in opposition to Bayle, who insisted on the possibility of there being atheistical nations, "These nations neither deny nor affirm God, they have never heard him spoken of. To pretend that they are atheists is an imputation much like that of saying they are Anti-Cartesians. They are neither for nor against Descartes; they are absolute children. But a child is neither atheist nor deist; he is nothing." Voltaire has here seen, with a sagacity approaching to profundity, the truth; and we may apply his argument to Buddhism. The nations which profess this religion are still in their infancy, and the idea of God in them is what it is in children,




     



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    -- in children without intelligence and imagination, -- something confused, cloudy, dense, if I may say so, which has need of education to disentangle, to enlighten, and to develop itself.

    History and knowledge, unless I much mistake, tender on this point their support to philosophy. Criticism has been able to indicate what there is of human in religious forms; but it has never pretended that the groundwork might not be divine; it has not confounded the gold with the quartz in which it is imbedded; and of these religious forms themselves, it has never said that they were not the spontaneous products of our nature. All that has been done by the new German school of Biblical criticism, and by that of French criticism, which, following in its path, has reflected back on its predecessor a purer and certainly more engaging light, has demonstrated the spontaneousness of religions, and consequently their sincerity. There is much intelligence, grace, joyousness, piquancy even, as well as many things singularly human, in the mythological fables of Greece: are we therefore to conclude that the gods we see there disporting and frolicking, have been developed from the poet's brain? And, even were it so, what evidence would this be against the sincerity of those who invented them? But, in point of fact, they really proceed from the national imagination; they are the fruits of the commerce of the primitive men with the world around them, of their communion with Nature. They are dreams,




     



    xvi                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    if you will, they are impressions rather than creeds, fancies rather than truths, sensations rather than feelings. True; but putting aside the question of determining whether at the bottom of these dreams, impressions, or fancies, the divine does not present itself, it is, at least, impossible to doubt their reality, or to refuse to acknowledge their spontaneousness. They are dreams which have been taken for realities: but these dreams have rally had an existence; they have, as it were, lived; they have agitated, have made the heart of the child-man throb; and so deep has been their impression, that he has retained far beyond the period of his infancy a long and profound recollection of them. M. Renan has taken cognizance of this early and powerful impression upon man, and has admirably depicted its influence in the formation of primitive religions. "The primitive man," he says in his admirable work, "saw Nature with the eyes of a child. Now the child projects over everything around him the marvellousness which lies hidden within him. That first fresh consciousness of life which with its sweet intoxication makes his brain spin, causes him to see the world through a gently tinted vapour; and casting a joyous and inquisitive look on all around him, he smiles on everything and everything smiles on him. We, disenchanted by long experience, cease to expect anything very astonishing from the infinite combination of things. But the child cannot conjecture what is to result from the next throw of the dice that are rattling around him; he the




     



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    more believes in the possible, the less he is acquainted with the real. Hence his joys and his terrors. He constructs for himself a fantastic world, which enchants and appals him by turns. He realizes his dreams; he has not yet that roughness of analysis which at an age of reflection places us as cold observers, face to face with reality. Such was the primitive man. Scarce separated from Nature, he conversed with her, addressed her, and listened to her voice. This great mother with whom he was still connected by his arteries, appeared to him alive and animated. At the sight of the phenomena of the physical world he experienced divers impressions, which, reveiving form and substance from his imagination, became gods; he adored his sensations, or rather the vague and unknown object of his sensations, for not being able yet to separate the object from the subject, the world was himself and he himself the world." *

    Whoever has lived among savages, that is to say, with primitive men, with those who are still children-men, and especially with those races of Oceania, so simple, so natural, so credulous, so infantine, is compelled to acknowledge that this exquisite sketch is an exact expression of the truth. To those beings who are still “sucklings at the breast of Nature,” and in perpetual communion with her, there is life everywhere, a life analogous to human life on every side. All is personified and living; physical forces are moral and divine powers. Does the volcano vomit forth

    __________
    * Etudes d'Histoire religieuse, par E. Renan; 3rd edit., pp. 15, 16




     



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    its torrents of fire? It is the goddess Pele who is giving vent to her wrath, or chastising impiety. Does the thunder roar and the lightning flash? It is the god Kahekili who grows wrathful in the sky. Is the sea tossed by the tempest? It is the monster Uhumakaikai who lashes the waves. It must be remarked also, that this primitive religion is so natural, and in such perfect keeping with the childhood of humanity, for which it has so much which is charming and seductive, that the difficulty of completely superseding it is extreme. Hence the well-established fact, that the savages of the Pacific, even when they fancy they are converts, whether to Catholicism or Protestantism, continue, at the bottom of their hearts, idolaters. They are unable entirely to break the charm, and dissipate the fumes of their intoxication. The worship of Nature maintains itself, whatever the outward appearances may be, and continues persistently to exist beneath the forms of a superior religion, which has done during more than skim over the surface. Nothing would be easier than to prove the want of steadfastness in the new man, and to lay bare the old man. I could cite numberless facts which would place this assertion beyond all doubt. I will confine myself to mentioning one or two, but which, unless I much mistake, are decidedly characteristic.

    One occurred in the Great Hawaii. I had taken up my quarters on the edge of the crater of Kilauea, whence it was easy for me to diverge in all directions for the purpose


     



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    of exploring the volcanoes o this region, which are the largest in the world. One day, on my descending from the crater of Mokuaweoweo, situated about ten thousand feet above that of Kilauea, some native travellers, converts to Catholicism, came towards nightfall, and took up their quarters in my hut. The difficult feat I had just accomplished was the subject of our conversation throughout the evening. I related to the islanders the different incidents of my ascent, explained to them the phenomena I had observed, and while trying to make them comprehend the theory of volcanoes, I told them that I foresaw an impending eruption. Judging by their expression, it seemed to me that they took little interest in what I had been saying, of which, indeed, I soon ascertained that they had comprehended absolutely nothing. On my ceasing to speak, they inquired if I hand never met the spirit of the volcanoes, the goddess Pele, under the form of an old woman. The unexpected question suggested to me the idea of amusing them by telling them a story in accordance with their taste. I pretended I had seen the goddess Pele, in the midst of the sulphurous vapours, and I painted her in the most fantastic colours which my imagination could supply. It so happened that my description was accurate enough, save in one point: I had represented Pele as an old woman excessively emaciated and sickly, whereas, according to their traditions, she was a strapping virago. This, however, did not prevent my auditors from receiving my fable


     



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    to the very letter, and they took upon themselves to put me in harmony with the Hawaiian mythology, by explaining that the emaciation I had ascribed to the goddess, was the result of the long fast she had undergone since Christianity had overthrown her altars. "It is clear," they said, "that Pele is dying of hunger; so long is it since we carried her any food!" Then, recollecting that I had spoken to them of an eruption about to take place, they exclaimed, "Alas! Where are you, people of Hawaii? The goddess has wasted away, in consequence of the distress in which we have suffered her to fall; and behold! in revenge for our ingratitude, she is preparing to overwhelm us with her wrath. Without loss of time we must atone our fault, and carry her offerings of food." The next morning, the islanders, after taking leave of me, went forth on their way. I thought no more of them; but towards evening, I saw a priest of the goddess Pele ascending to the crater, escorted by natives, both Catholic and Protestant, bearing all sorts of eatables. Though they had taken the most minute precautions to conceal the object of their pilgrimage from me, and had, in order the more completely to cover their purpose, offered me a part of the presents which they brought, I succeeded in eluding their vigilance, and assisting, without being seen, at the expiatory ceremony. I saw the faithful cast down their offerings into the glowing lava of Kilauea, while the priest, accompanying his words with a thousand incomprehensible gestures, supplicated the goddess


     



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    to forgive the Hawaiians the impiety they had committed in deserting her worship for that of the strange God. I had afterwards the opportunity of relating, amid the different tribes of the Archipelago, my adventures on Mokuaweoweo, and the meeting I had had with Pele; and never did I find any of them indisposed to believe, but always met with the same state of feeling, and a similar contrition. It even happened, on one of these occasions, that some Christians, without in the least heeding the missionary who overheard them, began at the end of my recital to cry out that Pele was about to avenge the native divinities by vomiting her fire upon the Hawaiians, who under the influence of an impious pride had turned aside to the God of the stranger. Alarmed at the consequences of my fiction, the poor missionary, whose naïve simplicity I honestly admired, besought me to regard this apparition, which he himself accepted as a fact, as a contrivance of hell, an artifice of Satan, who, by appearing to me under the form of a pagan divinity, was endeavouring to rob him of his flock, and to lure me into idolatry. But neither his reiterated injunctions, nor my retractations of my own story, could succeed in obliterating the remembrance of their ancient gods; for more than once, while the minister of the Gospel was administering the last rites to a dying Christian, it has happened to me to surprise some of them in the act of sacrificing white hens to the god Milu, at the dying man’s own request.


     



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    I remember, also, a fact of a similar nature which occurred in the Marquesas during my stay in these islands. A young girl of the country, converted to Christianity, had, while crossing a wood, been slightly grazed by a small stone, dislodged in all probability by some bird taking wing from a neighbouring height. Without endeavouring to account naturally for so simple a circumstance, the girl fancied that the god of the rock, irritated at her having abandoned her faith, had thrown the stone as a warning that he doomed her to death. In the simplicity of her faith, she believed herself condemned without appeal, fell sick, and soon after died, invoking at the same time the God of the Christians and her island deities.

    It is thus that these child-like races, whom the zeal of our pious missionaries deludes itself into supposing it has emancipated from the worship of their false gods, preserve the indelible imprint of their primitive creeds, and see even in the most familiar events the personification of intervention of divine agents.

    Be this as it may, the belief in a superior essence is neither less natural nor less spontaneous than that which confounds man with nature. On its first appearance, as well as at its ultimate point of development, it exhibits nothing that implies a foregone conclusion, nothing that is factitious. Monotheism, the belief in one God separated from the world, springs up as spontaneously in the deserts of Arabia, as does pantheism or polytheism on the banks of


     



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    the Ganges or the seaboard of Greece. It is an established fact in science, that certain races, like certain individuals, are less seduced by the splendour of the external world, less affected by that potency of life which circulates throughout all nature, than are some others; and that such races and individuals are, on the other hand, attracted and profoundly acted on by the spectacle and the movement of internal life; whence it naturally follows that in these races, - which may be styled privileged, and which in this respect are so, - the religious sentiment must assume a particular form, an original character, and engender a divine idea of an entirely different stamp. In this case, giving himself up to a continual contemplation of his own being, of his ego, man is strongly impressed with the conviction of his oneness; and this oneness, which he finds only within himself, he instinctively, by a natural action of his thought, by a law of his reason, transfers beyond the bounds of nature to a power superior to nature and himself. This is the source from which monotheism takes its rise. The soul, concentrated within itself, discovers the infinite in its depths, and marks it with characters that it has recognized in itself. What wonder that at a later period, even possibly at their outset, some man should arise from the midst of these races to formulate their creed, to become, not its discoverer, but its legislator and interpreter? That he should find, whether in his own imagination or in the primitive habits of those about him, the means of manifesting his faith and that of


     



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    his fellows, of impressing upon it some outward sign, of establishing a correspondence, as it were, with the supreme God, placed beyond the world in an inaccessible solitude, has nothing in it to surprise us. In an advanced state of civilization, man may possibly content himself with thinking of the infinite, may abstain from defining, may, to use an expression of M. Renan, decline to express the ineffable. But such are not the primitive instincts of man. Abstract religious thought is not sufficient for him. If he do not give a form to God, he is at least obliged to confine himself within the compass of a ceremonial worship, to establish eternal means of communication with heaven. To be able to think of his is not enough; he desires to see him, speak to him, hear him; for man is not merely a spirit, he has a heart, he has an imagination, and monotheism, when separating him from nature, deprives him neither of the one nor the other.

    This characteristic of spontaneousness in monotheism, and in the worship which attaches to it, is not anywhere negatived in history. There is no one nowadays who sees an impostor in Moses or Christ. Such a view, if by chance it is met with, belongs exclusively to the lowest range of science. Critical inquiry has no doubt torn off many a veil, dissipated many an illusion, scattered many a halo. But not only has it not sanctioned opinions which degrade humanity in the persons of its greatest interpreters, but it has, on the contrary, brought into full daylight the


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             xxv


    high morality both of the primitive creeds of humanity and also of their founders.

    Mohammed himself, whom in the last century Voltaire exhibited as a politician and impostor, and over whose back, so to speak, he endeavoured to lash all religions, does not present an exception, or at all events, not a complete one. Though nearer to us in point of time, and detached from those clouds of supernaturalism, which concealed his predecessors, he appears to us environed with the same halo of faith, and of good faith; and though we may see nothing but man in him, he does not therefore seem less worthy, as respects the sources of his faith, if not of the homage, at least of the esteem of the world. The imposture of Mohammed, considered as a positive and unquestionable fact, could be admitted in the twelfth or even in the eighteenth century, -- which shows how easily extremes will sometimes meet in a common error; but it can be no longer credited in these days, now that inquiry has carried its torch into the origin of Islamism, as into that of all other things of a like nature, and has brought them forth into the broad day. At the beginning of his mission, Mohammed sincerely believed that he was the elect of God, that he was summoned by him to reveal his word, a new and regenerated word, to the people of Arabia. If, at a later period, when his original conviction became weaker, he gave himself up at times to transcendental fancies, in which he no longer believed, these were but the accidents of his life, a sort of tribute paid to


     



    xxvi                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    human nature. The legends which, like so much brilliant embroidery, spread over the solid tissue of his history, to visions, the miracles attributed to him, do not proceed from him, and he is in no way accountable for them; they were neither affirmed by him nor known to him. The miraculous communications of Mohammed with the Angel Gabriel do, at the first blush, raise a presumption against him, and may furnish an argument in favor of the opinion of Voltaire and others; but, in sober criticism, the argument is not absolutely decisive. The visions of Joan of Arc, her communications with the Holy Virgin, are not more worthy of belief; and yet, who is there that discredits the good faith of Joan of Arc? Like our great heroine and many others, the Arabian Prophet, in the first fire of his youth and religious enthusiasm, believed himself charged with a divine mission. If occasionally we meet with facts in his life which seem to contradict this opinion, and which a severe criticism finds it difficult to conciliate with the morality of the man, this is not a real ground for warranting us to doubt the sincerity of the Prophet’s conviction. When sitting in judgment upon history, it is necessary to be on our guard against the prejudices of race and civilization, and to avoid transporting our ideas there, where thy have no business to be. M. Renan is in the right when he says, "it is hardly possible for us to conceive the extent to which among Mussulmans conscientious conviction, and even nobleness of character, can enter into fellowship with a certain


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             xxvii


    degree of imposture." * In the creation of religious ideas, morality does not determine the human mind any more than logic; it is quite a different force which generates them. If the divine and the moral meet together at the maturity of religions, they do not always come into contact at their outset. An unalloyed and unblemished morality is no more necessary than a consistent logic to the purity of a creed taken at its source; and where it fails, the spontaneousness of the first conception is not on that account necessarily to be called in question. Certainly in the life of Mohammed there are facts which betray the politician and impostor; but these facts belong to his mature age, to the second part of his career; they in no way cast a stain on his original inspiration; and we are constrained to acknowledge, what impartial criticism admits, that in the first period of his mission, in the first manifestations of his apostleship, his enthusiasm was sincere and free from all alloy; and it was only later, in the period of resistance and strife, that personal feeling began to mingle with the work, to soil it with its tints, and to interfere with its primitive spotlessness. But the work had already been accomplished, or at all events placed on a solid basis, and it was really faith that had laid it first stone.

    The same principle of faith, of sincerity and spontaneousness, is to be met with in religions the most opposed to each other. It is impossible to conceive my one thing less resembling

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    * Etudes d’Histoire religieuse, par E. Renan; pp. 255, 256.


     



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    another than the religions that have originated from Mosaism as contrasted with that of Buddha; since the principle and object of the latter are absolute extinction, while, on the contrary, in the former we set out from God, and aspire to a superior state of existence. At its source, however, Buddhism is as pure as our own creeds. The solution of the problem is different, but it has been sought for in the same spirit and with the same good faith. In point of fact, it may be said that in this system less than in any other is there room for mere fancy or calculated purpose. Nothing short of conviction could have given birth to this frightful doctrine, which offers man, for this whole consolation, death; for his whole happiness, eternal rest on the sombre and icy banks of annihilation. In those religions which cover life with laughing tints, and exhibits the future through the prism of hope, it is just possible to comprehend the hypothesis of invention. Their founders presenting something seductive to the imagination, it might be conceived that they desired to seduce. But nothing of the kind is admissible with respect to the religion of Buddha. Moreover, the character of its founder excludes all suspicion, and all possibility of imposture. "With the exception of Christ only," says M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, "there is not among the founders of religions a figure more pure or touching than that of Buddha. His life is without spot. His persistent heroism equals his conviction; and if the theory he preaches be false, the personal example he


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             xxix


    sets is irreproachable. He is the finished model of all the virtue he enjoins; his self-denial, his charity, his unconquerable gentleness are never for a single instant at fault. At the age of twenty-nine he leaves the court of the king his father, to become a friar as it were and a mendicant. He silently prepares his doctrine for the space of six years in retirement and meditation; he propagates it by the sole power of his speech and persuasiveness for mere than half a century; and when he dies in the arms of his disciples, it is with the serenity of a sage who has done good throughout his life, and who is confident he has discovered the truth. The people who received his faith never dreamt of making a god of him, for the notion of God was as foreign to them as to him; but they have made of him an ideal which they try to imitate; and Buddhism has been able to mould some fine minds worthy of figuring among those which humanity admires and reveres." *

    And what is true of the founders of religions, is equally so of those who have merely aspired to play the part of reformers. Many are the leaders of heresy who have made use of error for the gratification of their own passions or interests; but those who have left a trace in the memory and imagination of men, those who have founded anything, though they may have deserved anathemas, have never merited contempt; impartial history has never branded their foreheads with the mark of infamy which

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    * Le Bouddha et sa Religion: par Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire.


     



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    is due only to imposture. For conviction and sincerity, nothing can compare with such man as Luther, Calvin, and Zuinglius. But to confine ourselves to those who have lived and acted in the same atmosphere as Joseph Smith, and only to the most celebrated among these, where are we to look for a more burning faith than in George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, and in Ann Lee, the holy woman who founded that sect so singular but of such unimpeachable purity, the Shakers? * Their whole career is marked by acts of high virtue or pious self-devotion; and it appears as difficult to doubt their sincerity as their sanctity, or rather, as to doubt their existence or their very history.

    The founder of Mormonism, as far at least as we can see, constitutes the single exception. Mormonism has not the character of spontaneousness distinguishing primitive religions; that of course. Neither has it the simplicity of the religions which followed them, nor yet the sincerity of the religious revolutions or reforms which in later ages history records.

    The series of facts which belong to the life of Joseph Smith will prove, by evidence as clear as day, that he was, to the whole extent of the word, a cheat and impostor. There was nothing in his earliest conception natural, nothing spontaneous, no trace whatever of sentiment and religious enthusiasm. True, we see around the cradle of

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    * See Note XIX. at the end of the work.


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             xxxi


    Mormonism, as around those of other religions, visions, prophecies, miracles, legends even; we have the same external circumstances, the same modes of striking the imagination and the soul, but we do not find the same spirit, the same divine afflatus which agitates the heart of the new revealer. Mormonism is nothing more than the product of calculation, or, to speak out plainly, of speculation. In this respect, it is impossible to conceive of anything more American than this new creed. One fine day it occured to Joseph that it might be a capital affair to construct a new temple, that the curiosity of the thing, and the originality of such an enterprise, were likely to bring in much better returns than his vulgar occupation of money-digger, which, up to that time, had not been very successful. This idea once in his head, he began to work it out with the same conscientious self-approval and the same serenity of mind with which he would have founded a grog-shop or collected a cargo of salt pork from Europe. The thirst for gold, the need of acquiring wealth, which is so powerful a spring in the commercial and industrial activity of the United States, -- this was the first and fecundating inspiration of Smith's religious schemes. Nowhere else have we to seek his angel Gabriel or his nymph Egeria. Under the Prophet is the Yankeel under the pastor of men, the greedy speculator without conscience, and without shame. Mournful certainly it is for the honour of humanity to say this, but it must be said from respect for truth. Still this does not


     



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    suffice as an explanation of Mormonism, either as regards its origin or its success. If its originating idea had been the only one to act, it might be considered an effect without a cause, and it would be the greatest prodigy that ever occurred. But, we may dependupon it, the spirit of speculation and gain was only what set it first in motion; its real causes are elsewhere than in the narrow personal views of the founder, powerful as his influence may have been: they are to be found in the moral and religious condition of North America. To ascertain them, we must transport ourselves to the scene where the facts were actually accomplished. It is only by a near and close study of the tendencies and religious movement of the great democracy, that we comprehend how a creed, inferior to those whoch surround it, without root even in the heart and conscience of the founder, was able to surge up in the midst of the others, just as in a fertile and carefully cultivated field the most worthless plants will occasionally spring up amid the most precious and the most salutary.


    II.

    It is an empression extensively spread throughout our official Churches that faith is wearing out among men, that the religious sentiment is becoming extinct, and that the world is verging, as it were, to a gradual cooling down of our purest and loftiest convictions. I cannot, as far as I am concerned, conceive of anything less well-founded than this

     

                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           xxxiii


    opinion. If we accept it with reference to those countries in which it finds favour, where man is not placed in the conditions necessary to his normal expansion, we cannot admit it to be possible in quite different countries and under different conditions. Here, in a more favourable medium, screened from the influences which impede and trammel the free play of its operations, the human mind is inexhaustible fecundity. It must be received as certain (and I hope there is nothing humiliating in this to our species) that, by the nature of things, death is merely the appearance, life the reality. Thus, to confine ourselves to things which are more closely connected with our subject, the creeds which crumble away are soon replaced by others. There are never complete ruins, or ruins that last long; it may be even said that there are no such things as ruins, there are only changes, successions, transformations. It is with the moral as with the physical world. In crossing the vast forests of the New World, the traveller perceives, clustering around the enormous Sequoias and Tulip-trees overthrown by the tempest or by time, shoots already vigorous, and suckers yet tender, trailing on the ground. Here is the image of the moral world. Around ancient forms of faith, by the side of ancient institutions which are vanishing away, spring up new ones which are born either of them or of their fragments. Ordinary or timid minds are struck only by the aspect of the ruins; they do not see that which germinates beneath, or is already


     



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    sprouting forth from them; and they shrink with affright from the spectacle of apparent death which environs them. But the man who is habituated to reflection and to the more extended spectacle of history, finds in all this nothing to astonish nor sadden him. If his heart be moved at the cruel sufferings of those who, as they see solitude encroach upon their temples, and the chill of death benumbing the very limbs of their deities, look forward with humor to the void that seems to open upon them in the religious future of humanity, the mere fact itself leaves him calm and perfectly unmoved. He knows that the laws of nature are irresistible

    "Ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos,
    Prima cadunt: ita verborum vetus interit aetas
    Et juvenum ritu florent modo nata, vigentque."     He is aware that if forms fall like the leaves of the forest at the close of the year, if word shave their inevitable vicissitudes, ideas remain, and partake of the unchangeableness of the Creator.

    This truth, of which the development and proof may be traced in history, is to be found living and palpable, so to speak, in the moral and religious condition of America; and here, within a comparatively restricted compass, we may personally witness the thorough manifestation of tone of the great laws of humanity. On setting foot for the first time in that country, we are, at the first glance, bewildered, as it were, by the noise that surrounds us; one


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           xxxv


    would naturally suppose that the religious world was splitting up in all directions, and what we expect is to see it yawning down to the lowest abysses. As we gaze on the infinite division of its sects, their collisions, their unceasing dissensions, their meetings, their revivals, the Gospel daily ground to dust, Christianity in a permanent state of crisis and decomposition, we naturally apprehend that darkness was about to overspread these vast regions, and annihilation to swallow up life. But, God be praised, there is no pretence for it; the sun shines there as it does elsewhere, perhaps even with a stronger light and livelier brilliancy. It would appear that in proportion as the divine seed of the Gospel is subtle, so has it the greater fecundity and power of life. It is, at all events, certain, that the active fermentation which causes decomposition, and is also its result, is not a consuming fire. It is the condition, as well as the sign, of new vegetation and energetic life.

    We have, I am aware, and cannot too often repeat it, great difficulty in this Europe of ours, with all our prejudices in favor of official churches, in forming to ourselves an idea of the potency and reality of these new manifestations of the religious sentiment; and we easily bring ourselves to believe, with the scepticism of well-bred people, that the religious sap of humanity is exhausted. And it can hardly happen otherwise. How is it possible that we should not misapprehend the character of the resources of the human


     



    xxxvi                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    mind in the matter of religious creation? Are we living under the conditions necessary to their being conceived, elaborated, and produced? I perfectly comprehend the general opinion o this point, pretty much as I comprehend the astonishment of unlettered opinion, on learning that the palm-tree, when isolated and deprived of the impregnating dust, remains barren. The palm-tree has need of free air and space, but it requires also that the winds should discharge those fertilizing duties towards it which nature has imposed upon them; and it is on this condition only that it can bear fruit. But this condition being fulfilled, it soon presents a vigorous fructification to the sun. So is it with the human mind. The contact of souls is as necessary to the generation of ideas as the contact of bodies is to the generation of a different order of being. Where there is no free communication between minds, there can be no spiritual creation. Isolation arrests the jets, if I may so speak, and the growth of the soul, or, to borrow the language of Plato, prevents its pinions from developing and enlarging. This is true of all our sentiments, all our aspirations, of the religious sentiment as well as of every other. It is especially true of religious worship, which is the free manifestation of this sentiment, and the outspread of it to the light of day. But we cannot too frequently remark, that when free air and free communication are restored to the human mind, if it so happen that hereditary creeds should contrive to give it the slip, it loses no time


     



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    in finding new ones for itself; it becomes restless, it gives itself no repose until it succeeds. Are we prechance to suppose that human nature ever undergoes a fundamental change, and that its primitive instincts disappear together with the forms under which they have appeared? Yet nothing short of this must happen, that is to say, nothing short of a deviation from the laws of nature, before the possibility of such an occurrence as its remaining indifferent to the great questions with which that faith was allied can happen. Indifference, as is well known, may for a moment overlay the mind, may become a permanent condition indeed of certain minds, but it cannot be the mental condition of the masses, that is to say, of the whole human race, which requires a very different resting-place for its head.

    Absolute liberty, such as it exists in America, in religious matters, is often enough the source of severe shocks to our feelings. The infinite multitude of sects saddens when it does not shake us, and it often does shake us, and cause the very base to tremble on which the whole edifice of our faith reposes. In the agitated medium which is the effect of liberty, received creeds are constantly bending under the violence of opposing winds, and we have often reason to be alarmed lest the frail flower should be bruised and perish for ever. But, besides that its germ is immortal, whereever liberty is present the remedy is at the side of the evil. In societies existing under another regime, the crumbling


     



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    away of ruling creeds does not the less take place because it is invisible, and there no reconstruction is ever attempted. With liberty, on the contrary, side by side with the process which engenders doubt there takes place one of an opposite kind, arising out of the sheer necessity of having something to believe. Analysis is not alone at work; synthesis makes itself master of the scattered elements, and condenses them. If multiplicity of sects engenders multiplicity of sects, it also engenders, as a natural consequence, the desir eof escaping from the confusion and disorder which are the results. Minds that have been sundered soon tend to re-unite, and the broken unity labours at its own reconstruction. America offers us remarkable examples of these attempts under different forms and by different means. There are three especially which appear worthy of our attention, because they represent all the forms under which the religious sentiment can manifest itself in the world, can disengage and cause itself to be accepted by the crowd; in a word, every variety of system employed in the act of religious creation or formation.

    It is evident, when we have once broken off from the stem of positive religions, whether official or otherwise, that if we contrive to avoid indifference or absolute independence, if in default of creeds we have preserved the want of having a creed, we can only arrive at a new faith by the inspirations of individual reason, that is to say, by recurring


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           xxxix


    to the source of all religion, or by the reform of that which exists, or by a religious system which is nothing more than the product of calculation and imposture. There is no other way in which religious yearnings can be satisfied. We ask leave to dwell for a moment upon this point. To break completely with an existing religion, unreservedly to shake off its authority, to believe only in ourselves, and exclusively to seek in our reason and conscience the support we can no longer derive from without; in a word, to admit no other revelation than an internal revelation, such is the first method that presents itself to the mind, or rather the first system. Here it may so happen that there will at first be no religious form; but there will be, independently of a considerable moral power capable of imparting a substantial nourishment to the soul not to be found elsewhere, a real religion, real at least in its principle and in its germ; and, in any society in which the religious conviction meets with no impediments, it will soon happen that by an invisible but persistent and irresistible movement, this germ will develop itself, will manifest itself outwardly, and that there will be in the new idea a stronger and stronger tendency to formulate itself, to constitute itself a religious worship, to establish a link, in some sort material, between minds already united by the spiritual link of a common creed. And it must indeed be observed in passing, that it is by the spectacle of this personal revelation we can figure to ourselves that of the parturition of religions,


     



    xl                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    and lay hold of them almost in their state of embryo, in the first movements succeeding their birth.

    In the second system, while in the very act of breaking away in all essential points from the existing religion, we may lay our corner-stone even on its own ground, accepting more or less either of its moral scheme or the historical facts on which it rests. This is the most usual state of things. For it is a mighty difficulty for the human mind completely and thoroughly to repudiate the creeds transmitted to it. The idea of a radical revolution revolts it; that of a reform is more agreeable, and responds, without at all compromising it, to its secret instinct of independence. Hence great religious crises are modifications and transformations rather than real revolutions. The human mind has need of transitions, of compromises between the need of independence and the necessity of belief. Hence the reason for the existence of such numerous sects in countries where intelligence is not kept under by some considerable power, by the weight of general opinion, and the yoke of authority whether political or religious. In a system, of this kind which adapts itself to every movement of the mind, there is room for the most opposite opinions, from the most exalted mysticism down to the severest nationalism, and in it the common religion may be brought to so low a point as to disappear in its essence and to present nothing more than an empty appearance.

    Finally, in the last and the third system an entirely new


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             xli


    form is given to the old religious sentiment. It is no longer a modification of an ancient faith; it is no longer an antique and primitive revelation transformed or changed; it is a special revelation. Whatever be the links which still connect to with the previous one, it is a new manifestation of the Divine Spirit, under a sensible form, at a certain point of time and space. Here, too, there has not been an absolute breach with tradition; for that is not agreeable to Nature, which never acts per saltum. Every effort, on the contrary, has been made to renew the connection with the old, to solder itself, it one may say so, on to that. But it is not the less on this account a novelty, a creation, if not original, at all events diverse; in a word, it is a new religion. This religion may very possibly be inferior to that it supplants. No matter; it has, at all events, in the medium in which it is developed, an advantage over the other, since it imparts the faith which the other was incapable of imparting, since it hives to minds a bias they could derive from no other source, since it is full of life where the other was no better than a corpse.

    Such, then, are the three systems through the one or the other of which the religious spirit acts when once it has shaken off the yoke of existing official religions: either it separates itself root and branch, and rests everything upon personal revelation; or it selects from the old religion some important article of faith, and, after profoundly modifying it, make it the basis of a new superstructure; or, finally,


     



    xlii                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    it constructs a new religion, or, at all events, one which, if not entirely new in all its respects, rests on a new ground, on a special Divine revelation, such as is to be found in some shape or other at the bottom of all religions.

    In the religious movement now proceeding in the United States, and which, we may be quite assured, is by no means coming to a close, these three systems of religious renovation are more especially represented by three men eminent on different grounds, -- Emerson, Channing, and Joseph Smith. Here unquestionably are minds and characters in very many respects differing from each other, particularly if we compare the latter with the two former; but they have this in common, they personify in the first half of this century the religious genius of the great American democracy as respects its tendency to break Christianity, and they present illustrations of the independent action of the human mind in its religious creations. It is in virtue of this common feature that it is permissible to approximate them, and to place by the side of names so respectable as those of the two first that of the founder of Mormonism.
     

    III.

    Emerson appears to us to possess in an eminent degree all the characteristics of a man born to be the founder of a religion, though in fact only a philosopher, and professing to be nothing more than a free-thinker. There is in him a combination of the Prophet and the Seer. He has a

     

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    sense of religion, consciousness of individual power, love of the divine, enthusiasm for truth, contempt for tradition and authority in an extraordinary degree. Emerson, as has been justly remarked, is a moralist and a philosopher. But he is more than this; if he does not give himself out as a privileged revealer of the Divinity, he has all that is requisite for being so; and in another medium, under other conditions, he could in perfect good faith have presented himself as such, and his mission would in all sincerity have been accepted. At all events, it is impossible to have a nearer view than we have in him of the internal travail of the soul which is initiated itself into the knowledge of God, and which desires to initiate others, -- which is endeavouring to penetrate into that common substratum from which all religions draw their materials, in which they are sometimes completely buried, but from which also they occasionally surge upwards, one day to appear in the form of religious creeds and to acquire a mastery over the imaginations of men.

    The feature that is common to all the great founders of religions, is a deep-seated and energetic feeling of the infinite. To them God is everywhere, and at all times; a voice, incessantly murmuring in their ears; a hand, of which at every moment they feel the pressure, and, as it were, the thrill. So is it with Emerson. It may be said of him as of Spinosa, that he is drunk with God. They who question the presence and the idea of the Divine in the human soul,


     



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    must feel themselves ill at ease with him, and run great risk of not comprehending him. There is no one who has the religious sense in a higher degree, and who more willingly listens to that internal voice which is, as it were, the echo of God in the soul, and, most certainly, the primary condition of all revelations. One should hear him speak of the presence of what he styles the Over-soul in the human soul, of what the Gospel calls the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Descartes, too, had caught a glimpse of this light, through the shadows of our imperfection; and it may be said, to his eternal glory, that no one has more completely disengaged it from the darkness which accompanies its revelation when first made known to the consciousness of imperfect beings; but it seems that the mere philosopher * was not receptive of its vivifying warmth, and that it fell upon him only as a cold abstraction. In Emerson, as in all souls truly religious, the sense of the Divine is inseparable from the conception of the Infinite. It would seem as if, after the manner of mystics, he feels the afflatus, and, as it were, the touch of the Divinity. "From within, or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide." † And in

    __________
    * By calling Descartes to mind, it is possible to get a good idea of the difference which distinguishes the philosopher from the religious man.

    † Essays, Lectures, and Orations, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 141.


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           xlv


    another place he says, "We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. *... Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of a new truth or the performance of a great action. † ... Always, I believe, by the necessity of our constitution, a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s .consciousness of that Divine presence ... Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rapture of the Moravian and Quietist; the opening of the internal sense of the word, in the language of the New Jerusalem Church; the revival of the Calvinistic Churches; the experiences of the Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul." ‡

    To speak thus, is it not necessary to feel the divine thrill, and to possess that mystic sense which is here ascribed to others?

    Emerson, like all revealers and seers, sees God everywhere. He is as it were enveloped by Him on every side; his mind, his feelings, his inclinations flow from Him as from their source; his soul is incessantly full of Him. "Man

    __________
    * Essays, etc., by Emerson, p. 147.

    † Ibid.

    ‡Ibid., p. 148.


     



    xlvi                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    is a stream whose source is hidden. *... When I watch that flowing river which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner, -- not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water. † ... There is a soul at the centre of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe. It has so infused its strong enchantment into nature, that we prosper when we accept its advice; and when we struggle to wound its creatures, our hands are glued to our sides, or they beat our own breasts.‡... For you there is a reality, a fit place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life; place yourself in the full centre of that flood; then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.... All reform aims, in some one great particular, to let the great soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.... We know that all spiritual being is in the man. A wise old proverb says, 'God comes to see us without bell;' that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so there is no bar or wall in the soul, where man the effect ceases, and God the cause begins. The walls are taken away, we lie open on all sides to the deeps of spiritual nature, to all the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, love, freedom, power. These natures no man ever got above, but always they tower over

    __________
    * Essays, etc., by Emerson, p. 140.

    † Ibid., p. 79.

    ‡ Ibid., pp. 73, 74.


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           xlvii


    us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them." *

    In this overflow of the religious sentiment, there is, as has already been remarked, the breath, and, as it were, the intoxication of pantheism. But the fact is not to be overlooked, that this condition of mind constantly recurs in all men who hold a leading and eminent position in the religious history of humanity. What are those endless incarnations to be met with at the beginning of almost all creeds, those interventions of gods, angels, or genii, those mysterious voices, those inspirations of the Holy Spirit which abound in the histories of all religions, if they be not pantheistic impressions, not to say pantheistic ideas? I do not say that, criticized from a strictly logical point of view, there would be much difficulty in convicting Emerson of pantheism. But there are many others besides him who would not be better proof against such a test. St. Paul himself is not much removed from the precipice, it seems to me, when he says that it is in God we live and move and have our being; and if he has avoided falling over it, it must have required nothing short of a special act of grace to preserve him from it. I will say nothing of Malebranche; but Fenelon, if judged by the same standard as Emerson, would with difficulty escape from the same accusation. Is there any wide interval between the thoughts of the American mystic and his, when he says,

    __________
    * Essays, etc., by Emerson, p. 142.


     



    xlviii                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    "What do I see throughout all nature? God, God everywhere, and still God alone. When I reflect, Lord, that all being is in you, you exhaust and you engulf, O abyss of truth! My whole thought; I know not what becomes of me; all that is not you disappears; there hardly remains behind enough to enable me to be conscious of myself." Nevertheless, is Fenelon ranked with the company of pantheists? Is he a pantheist because he says, when speaking of inanimate creatures, that God does all in them; and of man, that each of us touches God, as with his hand; that he is near us and in every one of us? We must not scatter about too carelessly these words, pantheist and pantheism. The doctrine of grace itself, which plays so conspicuous a part in Christianity, especially in Calvinism, might it not, if submitted to a criticism which I will call refining and adventurous, be, with a very little straining, referred to pantheism as an effect to a cause? But indeed, it matters very little whether to the eye of that logic which makes a point of being consistent, Emerson may or may not appear to be a pantheist; all we desire to establish her is, that the idea of the Divine in him, whether or not ill comprehended and carried to excess, holds a considerable place in him, and that he is, through it, linked with all the leading religious minds, the founders of the great creeds of humanity.

    A consequence of this predominance of the Divine in the mind is the powerful consciousness it has of its own


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           xlix


    personality. It would seem at first as if there were here a contradiction, and that the individual, face to face with the immensity which is so vividly present to him, ought to disappear, and vanish into nothing. But in fact there is none whatever; and it may be easily conceived, indeed, that confidence in ourselves will be in proportion to the impress of the Divine within us. If it be God who is in me, if it be his voice that I hear in the depths of my conscience, if it be he who directs my sentiments and thoughts, or rather, if it be he who feels and thinks in me, how can I avoid believing in myself? what higher authority, or one more worthy of commanding or of being obeyed, can I imagine? what other authority would not be impotent compared with this? All the founders of religion and philosophy who exhibit the stamp of religious inspiration, come before us with this assurance, with this entire confidence in themselves; so that, if with one hand they prostrate man, and cast him at the feet of God, with the other they lift him up, and place him in the proudest attitude. All religious minds discourse on this point, like the Gospel and like Pascal. Feeling themselves to be powerful individualities, because, in fact, they are such, and taking themselves for types, often unconsciously, they enlarge humanity to their own stature; they believe that in every man there is the divine flame which they are sensible of within themselves, and they make the individual the foundation-stone of the edifice. They all say with Emerson, "Trust thyself, every


     



    l                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    heart vibrates to that iron string;" and then, applying the principle, he says, "Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for you; the society of contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves, child-like, to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and, not pinched in a corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious aspirants to be noble clay plastic under the Almighty effort, let us advance and advance on chaos and the dark." *

    It follows of course -- and this is another feature in the character of the founders of a new religion or philosophy -- that Emerson has the most disdainful scorn for custom and tradition. "I appeal from your customs," he is constantly saying. "I must be myself; I cannot break myself any longer for you. †... What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? ‡... The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead to you, is that it scatters your force, it loses your time, and blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead Church, contribute to a dead Bible Society, vote with a great party either for the Government or against it,

    __________
    * Essays, etc., by Emerson, pp. 24, 25.

    † Ibid., p. 39.

    ‡ Ibid., p. 26.


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             li


    spread your table like base housekeepers,under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are.... We must walk alone." *

    Of course, no men will be esteemed great by him, save on the condition of their having this high confidence in themselves, and the most supreme contempt for tradition. "The highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plate, and Milton, is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. †.... Ah! then, exclaimed the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be understood. Misunderstood! it is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood." ‡

    No manner of external authority therefore has any pretence to be sufficient; and there is no other revelation than that which is internal. Such is and such must be the persuasion of all religious revealers and reformers, as well as of those who set themselves about effecting revolutions in philosophy. For these there is but one direct way of communicating with the Deity, and the internal sentiment it is alone which is the channel of communication. How make a breach in existing revelations, unless by its intstrumentality?

    __________
    * Essays, etc., by Emerson, p. 28.

    † Ibid., p. 23.

    ‡ Ibid., pp. 30, 31.


     



    lii                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    What other authority to oppose to their authority, unless it be that which speaks from the depths of personal conscience? Emerson, like all men of the same stamp, could not be made to comprehend that the source from which previous revelations had issued could be dried up, and that it had gushed forth only at a certain moment, and at a certain point of space, to seal itself up for ever. He could not comprehend the necessity of a special favour, and still less of an intermediary between man and God. Every intermediary must appear to him not only useless, but fatally mischievous, an obstacle interposing itself between the light and the eye. God reveals himself to us only through ourselves when we are fact to face with him, and place ourselves in the very centre of the current which proceeds from him to us. The Divine presence never makes itself felt in the midst of the crowd of teachers. It is necessary "to have broken our god of tradition, and have ceased from our god of rhetoric, in order that God may fire our heart with his presence." * If man "would know what the great God speaketh, he must go into his closet and shut the door, as Jesus said. †... He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all the accents of other men’s devotions. ‡... When I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can Calvin or Swedenborg say? §... The faith that stands

    __________
    * Essays, etc., by Emerson, p. 154.

    † Ibid., p. 155.

    ‡ Ibid.

    § Ibid.


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             liii


    on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. *... The relations of the soul to the Divine spirit are so pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. †... When the mind is simple and received a Divine wisdom, then old things pass away, -- means, texts, teachers, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. ‡... If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you back to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation, in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of soul.... Where the soul is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.... Man is timid and apologetic. He is not upright. Man dares not say, 'I think,' 'I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. §

    The love of truth is not to be met with in religious

    __________
    * Essays, etc., by Emerson.

    † Ibid., p. 35.

    ‡ Ibid., pp. 35, 36.

    § Ibid., p. 36.


     



    liv                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    minds only, I mean in minds in which the religious feeling exceeds the ordinary proportions: it is the common inheritance of human nature, as it is one of its greatest glories. But I know not if this passion do not burn in the former with a brighter glow, if the possession of the truth, or that which they take for the truth, does not fill them with a more penetrating and a profounder joy than it does other men. Not only is their conviction so firm as to be incapable of being shaken, -- for what room can there be for doubt in him who believes himself to be in direct communication with the very source of truth? -- but as they feel it flow downwards into them, as theyreceive the influx of its divine stream, as they undergo, as it were, the immediate impression and touch of him who is truth itself, and who inspires truth, they must, as soon as they are first conscious of it, be, like the Pythoness on her tripod, in a state of indescribable rapture and transport, rejoicing even in the violence with which it affects them; and their language must bear the impress of these extraordinary influences.      "Cui talia fanti
    Ante fores, subito non voltus, non color unus,
    Non comptae mansere comae: sed pectus anhelum,
    Et rabie fera corda tument; majorque videri,
    Nec mortale sonans; afflata est numina quando
    Jam propiore Dei."     Be this as it may, Emerson is one of those rare men who are animated with an ardent passion for truth. According


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             lv


    to him, man is born for truth, cannot do without it, cannot detach himself from it without the death of his true life. It is therefore his duty to seek it without pause and without repose, and to sacrifice everything for it. As to Emerson himself, we feel, when reading him, that he is convinced of his possessing the truth, or rather that he is possessed by it, and we see enthusiasm pouring forth its tide into his style as into his soul. "Truth is our element.... Man must worship truth, forego all things for that and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure and thought is thereby augumented.... God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please: you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates ever. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets, -- most likely his father’s. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates, will keep himself aloof from all moorings and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion; but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.... The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes, to find the man who can yield him truth. He shall then know that there is somewhat more great and blessed


     



    lvi                              I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             


    in hearing than in speaking. Happy is the hearing man, unhappy the speaking man. As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful element, and am not conscious of any limits to my nature. The suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters of the great deep have ingress to, and egress from my soul." *

    Never did man speak with more enthusiasm for truth, and with more of the love that is its due. We feel that Emerson is profoundly convinced, and that for him the revelation of truth is, as he himself elsewhere says, the highest event in nature. It is easy to collect from what precedes that the philosophical and religious movement of which Emerson is the embodiment, constitutes a genuine reaction against Calvinism. Independently of his starting-point, almost all the principles of Emerson are the antitheses of those of the Puritans. While according to Calvin there is nothing but sin and forfeiture in humanity, Emerson sees in man the masterpiece of creation, a privileged being, summoned to the happiest destiny. Calvin divides men into two categories essentially distinct, the elect and the reprobate; the former incapable of sin; the former destined to eternal happiness, the latter, without the power of saving themselves, condemned throughout all eternity, and composing the immense majority. Emerson opens up the same career to all, and represents salvation

    __________
    * Essays, etc., by Emerson, pp. 177-179.


     



                                 I N T R O D U C T I O N.                             lvii


    and perfection as the reward of free effort and free thought. Calvinism, in spite of its violent opposition to Catholicism, and the continual imputations of paganism that it casts upon it, is not in itself, in point of fact, entirely free from that mechanism which it reproachfully ascribes to the Roman Church. Without the pomp and poetical grandeur of Catholicism, it has itself also transformed religion into art, -- at all events, up to a certain point, -- and reduced it to the formality of a recipe. Thus, it has its sermons, which are to be heard on a given day; it has its certain predetermined posture for receiving the Communion; it has other ceremonies still of the same kind; in fact, it is a system, an infallible catechism, from which no deviation is ever permissible, which consequently stifles the divine spirit, which clips the wings of free thought, and in which to say everything in one word, individuality is impossible. All this, it will be easily understood, in incompatible with Emerson’s views. There is, indeed, between him and Calvin something in common, and this is the principle that everything which proceeds from man is bad. But this community of opinion is merely on the surface; there are fundamental differences in the interpretation of the principle itself which restore and maintain the antagonism. With Calvin, for instance, internal revelation does not suffice to determine, amid the tumult of facts which constitute human life, the share in them of God, and that of man; so that we can never know to what category we


     



    lviii                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    belong, not even if we are in the way of reprobation or salvation.

    With Emerson the internal voice is infallible; it never has deceived itself, and can never deceive us; it is enough to listen to it in order to know if we are or are not with God.

    Emerson, unless I mistake him, exhibits all the essential features of a reformer: religious feeling in an eminent degree, scorn for tradition and opinion, confidence in himself and in the revelations of conscience, love of truth, -- in a word, an ardent and enthusiastic faith. Hence we have a right to believe that we have here discovered, in their most hidden and deeply seated origin, the instincts and the germs, if I may say so, which, by their development, constitute religions. It will be perhaps objected that from these instincts and germs, which are to be found in almost all men, with more or less difference, or rather shades of difference, to the establishment of a firm and compact religion, existing on a grand scale, extending its dominion over a great number of minds, there is a wide stride; that it is, at best, a nebulous condition of things, and that the question is to find in it a fixed star. We do not dispute this. Still we must take care not to suffer ourselves to be deceived by the illusions of the perspective, or rather, of the medium in which we are. Among us, Emerson could only be a moralist and a philosopher. In the United States of America he is each of these also; but he might


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           lix


    very well become something more, he might become a religious reformer, a pontiff, the head of a church. We shall never be able, on this side of the Atlantic, in these days, to appreciate the facility with which sects, which may be considered as religions in embryo, are formed, wherever religious thought can develop itself with perfect freedom. To those who have visited America, and have seen with their own eyes the prolific power of the religious feeling which exists in this vast and free country, it would seem hardly doubtful but that it would be easy to evolve a form of religious worship out of the moral and mystic data that are to be found in Emerson. It would be enough to draw from them what the Quakers have drawn from analogous dogmas. The Quakers have a religious worship, very simple, very unobtrusive, almost imperceptible; but at all events they have one; nor did it cost them any great trouble to form it. They had only to attend to their own principle, which is that of Emerson, “that it is necessary above all things, to listen to the internal voice, to let God speak.” This principle lent itself without difficulty, and, as it were, of its own accord, to external forms, to baptism, to a communion, a priesthood. Whit them baptism is the self-renunciation of the believer, who denies himself in order to give himself up entirely to the God whom conscience and the Gospel have revealed to him; communion is the state of the soul at the moment it partakes of the Divine nature, while raising itself to God and remaining


     



    lx                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    absorbed in him; worship is the state of concentrated repose which by its silence permits the inward voice to speak; priesthood is the inspiration of the whole body of the faithful, who repeat whatever this voice dictates. In these are comprised all their rites, all their sacraments, and all their worship. At their meeting-houses there is nothing which suggests a church, much less a catholic church; benches and a pulpit, nothing else. But for all this it is not the less a real worship than it is a real religion; and I know not where it would be possible to find beings more religious, moral, and pure. In very many countries of Europe, where we are accustomed to see religion surrounded by pompous ceremonies, we can hardly figure to ourselves that she can possibly proceed on her way without such accompaniments. But this is the misapprehension which is completely dissipated by what we find in America. Forms -- and this applies to all races of men -- are less necessary to ideas than is supposed. This is especially true in democratic countries, a fact which has not escaped the notice of M. de Tocqueville in his admirable work upon America. "I have shown," he says, in reference to the philosophical method of the Americans, "that nothing is more revolting to the human mind, wherever equality prevails, than the idea of being bound by forms. Men who live in such a phase with difficulty tolerate symbols, which appear to them to be puerile artifices resorted to either to veil from, or render agreeable to, their eyes,


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           lxi


    truths which it would be more natural to exhibit wholly unveiled, and in broad daylight; they remain cold at the sight of ceremonies, and are naturally inclined to attach but a secondary importance to details of religious worship."

    A religion like that which exists in the mind of Emerson, preached by a man of action, who with faith should combine the ambition of spreading his ideas, and who, to the enthusiasm of a profoundly religious mind, should super-add the fanaticism of a sectary, would have a great chance of establishing his influence, especially among the well-informed classes in North America. What appears to me to be the great difficulty, I mean the institution of a religious worship, would come, as it were, of itself, and soon spring up spontaneously from the soil. Give Emerson the rough ambition of Calvin, the power of influencing the masses of Luther, the proselytizing spirit of George Fox, or the persistency of Joseph Smith, and a religious renovation might be accomplished, -- not in some minds only, but in the multitude, -- and a new faith added to those that exist. But in truth it signifies little; whether quickened by him or by others, there still remains the fact that there is in him a powerful germ of religious creativeness, the germ of a religion which I would willingly call natural, if all religions were not equally natural. And it is fair to suppose that with the peculiar genius of America, and the facility with which it constructs a church for the service


     



    lxii                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    of a religious idea, this germ will not be unproductive. We have been in a position to satisfy ourselves of the progress that has taken place in the direction of this personal religion, and it is now several years since an American authoress, Margaret Fuller, wrote these words, in which allusion is made to the religion of the future: -- "Emerson’s influence does not yet extend over a great area; he is too much beyond his country and his time to be at once and wholly comprehended; but his philosophy is sinking deeply into the intellect, and every year enlarges its sphere. Emerson is the prophet of better days. One day or other a commanding influence will be his."

    But more than this, I do not hesitate to say that the germ of religious creation so perceptible in Emerson has not remained barren. Already has the plant not only shown itself above the ground, but it is beginning to spring up and put forth foliage. There is no ignoring the fact: an actual religion, as actual as any other, resting on conscientious convictions, on argumentative data, on facts, feelings, ideas, and the primitive impressions of human nature, exists at this very moment! Natural religion, hitherto admitted as a brilliant abstraction only by the learned, regarded merely as a chimera by others, classed among insoluble problems, such as squaring the circle or perpetual motion, is decidedly a fact, a palpable, remarkable fact which strikes the eye and ear like the mid-day sun or the brawling of the ocean when lashed by an


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           lxiii


    equinoctial tempest. There is at the present moment a religious community in Boston which has completely broken with Christianity, and settled itself upon a basis which is entirely new; which, resting exclusivelyn on the inward thoughts and feelings of each individual, moves on unassisted, with a step as firm as that of other religious communities that surround it; which prays, preaches, controverts, lives, as they do, and only differs from them in this one particular, namely, that they are losing, while it is gaining ground, -- not certainly a sign of impotence, much less of impossibility; at least, so it seems to me. We must look twice before declaring a thing to be impossible, and it is difficult to dissent from Theodore Parker when he says, -- "It is not for me to say there is no limit to the possible attainments of man’s religious or other faculties. I will not dogmatize where I do not know. But history shows that the Hercules' Pillars of one age are sailed through in the next, and a wide ocean entered on, which in due time is found rich with islands of its own, and washing a vast continent not dreamed of by such as slept within their temples old, while it sent to their very coasts its curious joints of unwonted cane, its seeds of many an unknown tree, and even elaborate boats, wherein lay the starved bodies of strange-featured men, with golden jewels in their ears." * It is not for m an to trace an impassable circle round the nature of things. Milton exhibits God to

    __________
    * Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister, p. 53.


     



    lxiv                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    us in the act of creation, fixing the boundaries of the universe:--

    "Then stayed the fervid wheels, and in his hand
    He took the golden compasses, prepared
    In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe
    The universe, and all created things.
    One foot he centered, and the other turned
    Round through the vast profundity obscure,
    And said: 'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
    This be thy just circumference, O world!'" *     The Author of all things, it is natural to suppose, knows where each of them should stop, but it is equally natural to suppose that he has kept the secret to himself, and I am not sure that there is not some impiety in pretending either that he has revealed, or that man has discovered, it.

    For my part, before setting foot in America, it had occurred to me that natural religion, in the usual sense of the word, that is to say, a religion founded exclusively on the facts of our nature, without any dependence on, or trace of, the supernatural, might be possible in a certain medium, and under certain given conditions. It seemed to me that to realize this, the only thing requisite would be that the new religion in certain respects should prove itself superior to the supernatural religions with which it would have to struggle, that it should have the power of preaching its doctrines with a certain degree of liberty, and that its

    __________
    Paradise Lost, vii. 224-231.


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           lxv


    preacher should be a man of action. I saw no reason why it should happen, that the religions of Buddha and Mohammed, for instance, -- treated as fictions by Christianity, and in fact really such, -- should, in spite of the evident absurdities they contain, have been permitted to burst forth into life, and that the same permission, the same faculty of being born at its own proper time, should be denied to a creed not only free from the same absurdities, but satisfying the noblest sentiments and most elevated instincts of man’s nature. The opinion which makes the supernatural a condition indispensable to the existence of all religions possessing a form of religious worship, never seemed to me to have the force of an axiom, and the past was to me no argument against the future. It seemed to me that if the philosophers might believe in God without believing in miracles, the mass enlightened by these philosophers, brought in process of time to the same degree of illumination, placed under the same mental conditions, might have no more need than the philosophers themselves of illusions and wonders. The problem of religious worship, so puzzling to many, did not appear to me to be more difficult of solution than that of the religious belief itself. Worship considered in its essence being nothing else than meditation, the raising up of our thoughts toward the ideal, it cannot but be one and the same thing for the philosopher and for the mass; only while with the philosopher the action of the thought is isolated, with the mass it becomes


     



    lxvi                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    public, and from this moment it is as it were compelled to become incarnate, to find an impressive organ which shall give it outward utterance, and which, projecting it into the world, stimulates it to action and augments its power; in a word, it must find an interpreter and a minister. Here, it must be confessed, is the great difficulty with which this principle has to grapple. It often happens that the church exists morally before it finds its preacher; but we are warranted in thinking, and the history of the world furnishes more than one illustration of it, that it always ends by finding him. It is with religious as with political opinions in countries that are free: they always succeed in finding interpreters, and, if the idea be worthy of being promulgated, apostles, who lay hold of minds, and who, by the in some sort magic influence of the invisible idea working in them, group men around a visible worship, which gives them those habits of religious intercommunion whence external worship results, and which, by the effect of the common creed, gathers them into permanent associations that are actual churches. When the moment comes, when minds are prepared, when perfect liberty exists, why should not the new creed, like a steam-engine furnished with all the means of locomotion, put itself in motion, as soon as it finds an engineer to give it a first impulse and a subsequent direction?

    Theodore Parker has been the engineer of the new faith in North America. Parker did not make the engine, which


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           lxvii


    is the work of no one man, but of all, and especially of time; he has created no religious school; he simply placed himself in the current, but a current already whirled along by a strong wind, by the powerful afflatus of the ideas and inspirations which we have already indicated in Emerson. It is reasonable to suppose that at an early period of his life, and before entering upon his religious mission, Parker was in an eminent degree impressed by this brilliant and superior intellect. While still very young, Emerson appeared to him like a shining light issuing "from the clerical constellation, that stood forth alone a fixed and solitary star." At a somewhat later period of his life, he followed the movement of this star with a scrutinizing yet fascinated eye. During the time of his theological studies, and in the first years of his ministry, (which fell, as he says, "in the most interesting period of New England’s spiritual history, when a great revolution went on, so silent that few men knew it was taking place,") of all the eminent men who were more or less directly, more or less spontaneously maturing this great revolution, it was the philosopher of Massachusetts who most influenced his thoughts, and who seemed to him to be the inspiration of the present and the herald of the future. "The brilliant genius of Emerson," he says, "rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new star, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for a moment, whilst it gave also perennial inspiration,


     



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    as it led them forward along new paths and toward new hopes. America had seen no such sight before; it is not less a blessed wonder now." * Thus, without being so much involved, to all appearance, in pantheism as Emerson seems to be, Parker is not far removed from the same turn of thought, as, to confine myself to one illustration only, may be inferred from the following passage:-- "This infinitely perfect God is immanent in the World of Matter, and in the World of Spirit, the two hemispheres which to us make up the Universe; each particle thereof is inseparable from him, while he yet transcends both, is limited by neither, but in himself is complete and perfect." †

    Be this as it may, it is easy to perceive from this, without its being at all necessary to enter into a detailed exposition of his philosophical ideas, whether derived from Emerson or elsewhere, how far, as respects his metaphysical principles, Parker is removed from Christianity, and how deep is the chasm which separates them. Placed moreover on the eminence of free thought, and inspired by it alone, it was but a light matter form him in practice, in the first place to reject the supernatural birth of Christ, and the Bible as a work of special inspiration, in a word, all traditional authority, and then to bring his own doctrine to the front, to preach, as he says, “another Gospel,” not resting any longer upon an authority lost in the mists of time, vastly problematic

    __________
    * Theodore Parker's Experience, etc., pp. 22, 23.

    † Ibid., pp. 45, 46.


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           lxix


    utterly discredited, incessantly controverted by the most learned, rudely shaken therefore every moment, and in its turn violently shaking the most important truths which opinion has too often identified with its destiny; but, on the contrary, resting on a natural authority ever present in the conscience or the reason of all men, certain even to absolute certainty, lifted by its own internal evidence beyond the reach of all controversy, harmonizing with the most simple as well as with the highest truths, and imparting to them an unconquerable strength.

    Nothing can be more simple than Parker’s religious doctrine. It may be summed up in a few words, borrowed from himself:-- "1. The infinite perfection of God, which he calls “the corner-stone of all my theological and religious teachingthe foundation, perhaps, of all that is peculiar in my system.* 2. The adequacy of man for all his functions, which is the consequence of the relative perfection of man deduced by him from the infinite perfection of God. 3. Absolute or natural religion, that is to say, the normal

    __________
    * Experience, p. 44. In reference to this point, Parker observes:-- "The idea of God's imperfection has been carried out with dreadful logic in the Christian Scheme. Thus it is commonly taught, in all the great theelogies, that at the crucifixion of Jesus, the Creator of the Universe was put to death, and his own creatures were his executioners. Besides, in the ecclesiastic conception of Deity, there is a fourth person to the Godhead, namely, the Devil, an outlying member, unacknowledged, indeed, the complex of all evil, but as much a part of Deity as either Son or Holy Ghost, and far more powerful than all the rest, who seem but jackals to provide for this roaring lion, which devours what the others but create, die for, inspire, and fill." Ibid., pp. 44, 45.


     



    lxx                            I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           


    development, use, discipline, enjoyment of every part of the body, and every faculty of the spirit; the direction of all natural powers to their natural purposes."

    Nothing can be more simple assuredly than this, in spite of the multiplicity of ideas which may be evolved from these three principles. But the very simplicity of a dogma is itself a great force in an enlightened society. Whatever mixes up with the pure conception of the Deity, as it is stamped on man’s conscience, that which is foreign to it, tends only to weaken it; and it is a gross error on the part of theologians to believe that by loading the Divine image with ornamental accessories they add to its beauty and to its marvellousness, and that by placing it in a conventional light they can bring out its splendour to greater advantage; it is, on the contrary, in its inaccessible solitude, in the far distance of the immense perspective, in the shadow of the infinite in which it chooses to conceal itself, that we must contemplate it, if we desire to experience in all its intensity that which is termed its religious terror. And I add, looking from a theological point of view, that it is in this direction we must turn our thoughts in times like our own, if we desire to induce habits of religious thought in the mind. It is on this condition only that success can be assured, but then, as the example of Parker sufficiently proves, success becomes inevitable.

    The life of Parker demonstrates that religious convictions will always find interpreters worthy of them. There is nothing


     



                               I N T R O D U C T I O N.                           lxxi


    finer in the contemporary history of America than his apostleship. Never did any man put more constancy and force of mind at the service of a conviction than he has. It may be even said that he has pushed his devotedness to heroism, even to martyrdom, for he literally died at his post. It seems that he in very early years prepared himself for the mission which has been the business of his whole life. One is almost startled at the intellectual toils to which he submitted even from boyhood; literature, history, science, theology, philosophy, he had gone through all, had sifted all. On coming of age, he shrinks from no fatigue, no difficulty. We must follow him when he does battle against what he calls "the great obvious social forces in America, the organized trading power, the organized ecclesiastical power, and the organized literary power;" we must see