100 that this same ball-and-chain inveterate imbecility of the human bosom has come to be universally regarded by our professional religionists as an ornamental appendage of their personality, which makes it a comparatively easy thing to carry; but to the honest, unadulterate common sense of mankind, religion implies a profound quarrel on God's part with human nature, and consecrates its votary to the Divine favor, only in so far as it first utterly desecrates his private or personal sanctity. In short, the total scope of our religious experience has been to exhaust the subjective element in consciousness our private personal claim to God's consideration validity, and give us peace only in so far as we renounce our rampant egotism, and find our individual title to God's favor solely in His work of universal mercy to the race. of all All this, of course, is flat treason and blasphemy to the speculative interests which the Radical is expected to maintain; but it is, in my opinion, extremely friendly to the practical issues it has at heart. So far as I understand the intellectual position of those whom the Radical aims to represent, it is one of sheer Naturalism, making the relation between man and God to be naturally accordant; and therefore stigmatizing as frivolous the old ecclesiastical tradition on that subject, which makes their accord purely spiritual, as contingent upon an actual Divine redemption of man, wrought I need hardly say, after what has passed, in the depths of his own nature. that I dissent, in toto, from this intellectual judgment on the part of our current religious naturalism; but I cannot help seeing all the while that this fierce rude Naturalism is not only a palpable advance upon the flippant insincere Unitarianism of which it is the lineal but unfilial offspring, but also stands practically much better affected to the future of human hope to the interests of our providential destiny — than the doting and debauched Orthodoxy of which it is the impassioned enemy. - For if, as we have seen, the living spirit of religion - the one sole spirit which under all its literal forms religion has sought to nourish and promote upon earth is the social spirit, a spirit of the broadest society or fellowship among men, then it is clear that any doctrine animated by that spirit, is far more really, even if not nominally, religious in the best meaning of that word, than all other doctrines put together, which, however nominally religious, yet persistently blink out of sight the total spiritual contents of religion. Now our current religious Naturalism, however imperfect it is and even worthless as a speculative theology, is yet practically full of cordial good-will to every man in his lowest estate; and our current religious spiritualism on the other hand, however faultless it prove as a speculative theology, is yet in heart utterly indifferent to human welfare save in so far as it can be compressed into sectarian channels. There can be no doubt, accordingly, upon which cause the Divine smile rests. There can be no doubt that our so-called Naturalism—in the divine judgment or separation which is now taking place between the sheep and the goats-occupies the right hand place, or place of honor; and our so-called Spiritualism the left hand place, or place of dishonor. For while the latter incessantly vociferates Lord! Lord! with all its lungs, or pays the Divine name even exces sive and ridiculous ritual homage, it is utterly dead to its spiritual quality, and heaps remorseless outrage upon it whenever it comes into chance collision with its own carnal pretensions. And while the former utterly ignores the Lord's name in any literal sense, or even disputes its claim to special ritual remembrance, it spiritually recognizes the profoundly human or universal quality of that name, and seeks livingly to fulfil or reproduce its blameless requisitions. In short, the new Naturalism is a doctrine whose bare existence is inexplicable upon any other hypothesis than the accomplishment of that very work of God in our nature, which Orthodoxy has always literally affirmed and spiritually denied. If the SOCIAL sentiment - the sentiment of a universal society, fellowship, equality among men, as alone consistent with the creative perfection-had not got broadly established in men's respect: if the supremacy of society to all organized interests upon earth, whether sacerdotal or political, had not got the divinest ratification to men's consciences everywhere: Naturalism, as a religious doctrine, would still be unheard of. For this doctrine is instinct (though, as it seems to me, far from intelligent) with the fundamental truth of Christianity, which is the truth of God's NATURAL humanity, or of His living presence and power, not only in the good, but above all, in the evil things of our nature; not only in its highest or most individualized mental forms, but also, and above all, in its lowest, most abject, or universal forms: and therefore with all the poor spunk I can muster, I bid it a cheerful God-speed! It fills me indeed with an inmost anguish to hear any pontiff of the new dispensation commend (as they are so apt to do) to our reverent spiritual appreciation, some shining literary notability in whose bosom a serene unconscious egotism does duty for the Holy Ghost; but I know all the while that this is my private infirmity ; that it comes of my being, as yet, so unreconciled to the gospel of God's redemption, which shows Him henceforward setting up whatever men have most despised, and pulling down whatever they have most esteemed. It is all owing, in other words, to the fact, that while reflectively I am full of goodwill, I yet am spiritually or spontaneously disaffected, to that supreme manhood, which once in human annals lifted every basest, most reprobate son of earth into such living contact and unison with the infinite Divine holiness, as forever to shame out of all regard — save to the mind of determined unbelief— the thenceforth futile and frivolous pretension either of an absolute good, or an absolute evil, in human character. I patiently agonize, therefore, for a truer sympathy with this peerless heart of manhood in my race; and meanwhile do my best to stifle or benumb every emotion with which my rebellious bosom heaves, when I see God's eternal love and wisdom vindicating themselves to a spiritual regard, only by abasing all that my natural heart fondly pronounces good; only by falsifying all that my natural understanding loudly proclaims as true. H. J. TH MR. SEARS ON MODERN NATURALISM. HE remarkable Address of Mr. Sears to the Cambridge Alumni, has already been noticed in these pages. It merits, though only by its demerit, a further consideration. Mr. Sears is a very able writer, but much less able as a thinker. His thought has indeed a kind of wide, swift, and sweeping movement, which is not only pleasing, but fascinating; while the same gives him such an air of easy and lofty mastery over his subject, that one is inclined to fall into his train, throw up the cap and huzza, as one is to dance when sweet and spirited music tugs at his heels. This effect is enhanced by the extreme charm of his style, for he is an accomplished rhetorician; he writes with great freshness, felicity, and vigor; and the words seem to have flown to his thought like iron filings to a magnetic bar. Nevertheless, when one compels himself to disregard his manner and attend strictly to matter, there is found to be, with all this movement, no progress. You are magnificently piloted to the land of Nowhere. His thought is a chaos disguised by learning, rhetoric and self-confidence. The paper above mentioned is more throughly destructive than any other we have seen of late years; for, not content with attempting the life of every theory within reach, it ends by destroying itself. It is a piece of splendid suicide. Mr. Sears is more unkind to himself than to any other, for he cuts up his own belief by the roots; he sets one hand at stabbing at the other; all that he would say, he succeeds in unsaying. We have no intention of making these assertions without duly sustaining them; we put forward our accusation at the outset that it may recoil upon our own heads if imperfectly supported. Let us come at once to the point. After showing that modern science has broken through the shell of "the old supernaturalism," which can no more be pieced together; after showing, again, that science, having destroyed the old belief remains barren, impotent to produce spiritual children; after accepting Kant fully in the statement made by that hard-headed thinker of the limitations which appertain "to the speculative reason," that is, to the logical understanding, posited in space and time; Mr. Sears arrives at this result Natural science is atheistic; "the speculative reason is hemmed in helplessly within the walls of the finite; it is impossible to climb, by logical process, from World to God — impossible to arrive at a single absolute truth by any word on which the understanding, setting out from data furnished by our natural experience, is able to journey. The argument of "natural religion" is a solecism. Paley's Evidences are waste paper. We say not nay to all this. Herbert Spencer has indeed shown that the action of the understanding perpetually implicates a reality which it can never explain. It asserts its own partiality. It ever says, "There is more beyond." But this is its utmost achievement in that direction; and this surely is not enough. It is to be said also, that Swedenborg struck out, and Wilkinson has folfowed, upon a higher path, which, we may perhaps say, does lead from finite to infinite, from World to God. But this is a road on which only imaginative reason can journey. It is a turnpike, at whose gate the understanding is arrested for want of ability to pay the required toll. It may, indeed, go through, but only, like a horse, as the driven, not the driver. However, the statement of Mr. Sears must be substantially admitted. The understanding as defined by Kant, is indeed enclosed helplessly within the limits of the finite, while that which Kant calls reason (Vernunft) is itself the enclosing wall. Modern science, and the philosophy which works exclusively by its methods, are limited as the understanding is limited. So far we freely confess that Mr. Sears' "Naturism" cannot legitimate a single religious truth. Having gone on victoriously so far, our knight errant, warring in behalf of the distressed damsel of traditionalism, prepares to encounter a last foe, and to sweep the field of man's natural experience, outward or inward, sensational or spiritual, clear of all right to believe, or reason for believing. Aware that he has now come to his critical conflict, he braces his nerve, and dashes on to the charge with a red rowel and a flashing blade. "Frightened," he says, "at this result," namely, this hopeless enclosure in the phenomenal or finite, "the naturalistic philosophy hastens to shift its ground. Oh, the moral nature is not phenomenal, but noumenal: it is not representative of God, but presentative. Very well: then the moral conscience is itself God, for that is what it presents: and the essential divine is transferred to the human consciousness, and God sinks and is lost in man." A consummation surely not to be wished. We are under obligations to Mr. Sears for refusing to permit the same. It were undoubtedly childish for man to think of walking in shoes so much too big for him, and profane to meditate thrusting the Eternal into shoes so much too small. Nevertheless, though the charge is so gallantly made, and apparently, his own word for it—in so good a cause, the question remains: Who is it, when the conflict is over, that lies in the dust? To our eye, the prostrate figure looks dreadfully like that of Mr. Sears himself! And moreover, we thought it his own weapon which cast him there. What else could happen, if one would run a tilt at the adamant of eternal truth? We proceed to inspection. Let any one read the passage quoted above, and say if he, or any other man, can possibly understand the writer otherwise than as maintaining that man's moral being must be one of these two, either noumenal or phenomenal, either presentative or representative. He is trying to bind the "Naturists" to this alternative, and make it a dilemma, on either horn of which they will be slain. Does he believe what he says? Is he using words sincerely? Is the alternative in his own mind merely verbal, or is it real? If verbal only, it is a piece of paltering on his part; if real, he is as much destroyed as anybody. He says presently, "Say that the moral nature gives us only phenomena, and we run dead into the abyss of atheism; say it gives us noumena, and we are clutched forthwith by an all devouring Pantheism." Well, what then, Mr. Sears? Nothing. What escape? None. Mr. Sears is nowhere; he is leading nowhither: he is a philosophic destructionist; he is the Thug of metaphysic; he has no position, no idea. What has he? Only the hope, one would say, that when all spiritual basis of belief has been made away with, and all possibility of believing by nature, right, and evidence been exploded, then men will helplessly subside, or sprawl, upon the platform of Augustinism taken in the Pickwickian sense, which would seem to be his own dependence. A hope vain indeed; for it were vainer in its fulfillment than in being disappointed. We are not denouncing Mr. Sears. Privately, we are sure, he is a most estimable man. Doubtless he is conscious of nothing but the purest intentions. Not a syllable here is designed to impugn his moral dispositions. We describe simply his attitude towards ideas. This is merely mischievous. Among ideas his chosen function is that of headsman; and he chops, chops away with a sole zeal to destroy. And if the reducing oneself to this be victory, what were defeat? But the dilemma which he has sought to constitute, with no escape for himself more than for others, is altogether forced and arbitrary, obtained by pushing words beyond their proper scope. We admit that if the moral being of man is merely phenomenal, we fall not indeed into atheism, but into no more than a negative theism, like that of Herbert Spencer. It would not indeed follow that the moral consciousness is false or meaningless were it phenomenal. It might be representative, and yet be trustworthy. A symbol is not necessarily a lie. Words are symbolic; they are not the things themselves signified; yet that words may be the instruments of truth we still believe, though fresh from reading Mr. Sears. Say that the moral consciousness is no more than a divine word, symbolic, representative only; how shall one thence infer that it represents nothing, but only presents man's subjectivity? Must a word be the thing it signifies, under pain of signifying that no thing exists? However, if the soul of man be only phenomenal, we concede that immortality goes by the board. The phenomenal changes, perishes; it is as Mr. Sears reports, ever dying, and never reappears in the same form." 66 But does it follow, if the moral nature is presentative, that it imprisons God in the consciousness of man? Not at all. Mr. Sears' assumption of this is purely gratuitous; while without this assumption his terrifying dilemma comes to nothing. Let us speak first of the moral nature in the stricter sense of the term. This is presentative we will say. But of what? Of God? Only as God is implied in Duty. Its single word is ought. It affirms absolute obligation. Absolute, observe. Its express attestation is that moral obligation is not begotten and contained within the limits of man's individuality — that it transcends these limits that it is incommensurable with aught finite or subjective. This is the sign manual of divinity upon it. - If we enlarge the term "moral nature" to include all man's spiritual being and arrive at those inward indications of a divine presence, which, we would fain believe, are not wanting to Mr. Sears more than to others (yet how know of a divine presence, if the divine is not presented?) the same characteristic remains. The divine is presented, but neither as alien from |