6. Enlightenments Charity Company Providence. 7. The Denial of Christ. Fred. May Holland. The Radical" and Religion. Henry James. Book Notice. John Weiss. 8. 9. 1. CONTENTS, No. III. On the Foundations of Religious Belief. - Past and Pres- 2. Saadi's Thinking. (Poetry.) John Weiss.. 3. Concerning Enemies. 4. The Lord's Supper. Daniel Bowen.. 3. Enlightenments.- Friendship Work-Idol Breaking, 6. The Humming Bird. (Poetry.) Myron B. Benton. . 7. The Old and New Religion. Henry James. 33 34 49 59 63 97 100 105 108 110 113 2. Not in Word. W. H. Furness, 126 8. England at the Grave of Palmerston. 1. D. Conway,. 146 9. Letter from James Freeman Clarke, 148 We have received from Samuel Johnson a Reply to James Freeman Clarke, which will be printed in the next Number. THE RADICAL. JANUARY, 1866. HYMN FOR THE NEW YEAR. BY J. C. L. O SOUL, begin thy mighty quest, Yet Soul, not far away He dwells He showeth clear the Truth and Way. Not outer Bond but inner Light Shall keep thee quick at Duty's call, Shall hold thee to Eternal Right, Shall lead thee to the All in All. My Soul, another year comes fleet; Weak wert thou in the race with Time, Did not the Spirit wing thy feet And bear thee on to heights sublime. O Soul, aquaint thee with thy needs, And let thy Ritual be the Deeds To bless thy Brother more and more. DISCOURSES CONCERNING THE FOUNDATIONS OF T1 RELIGIOUS BELIEF. THE FALLACIES OF SUPERNATURALISM. HE topic of the last Discourse was Religious Authority. It was shown that though we may accept a Bible, a Church, or a person as infallible, we do not thereby obtain guarantees for the truth of our Belief: since it is after all the condition of our spiritual faculties, which determines both whether we shall accept and how we shall interpret such a Guide. The possibility of certitude primarily depends on the validity of that Spiritual Constitution whereof these faculties are the more or less adequate voice. If this can be trusted as competent to perceive and recognize truth, if its testimony concerning its own needs is to be relied on, if it be in such healthful accord with the Spiritual Universe that its real demands guarantee the reality of those objects which alone can satisfy them, then indeed we can both positively know and securely believe. But if this light of Nature be darkness, then are we without pilot, compass or helm, and our Knowledge and our Faith are alike a delusion. Whatsoever then disparages this Spiritual Constitution, whatsoever suppresses, distorts or perverts its natural testimony, in so far forecloses the conditions of Religious Certainty. And the Soul can no more bear true witness concerning itself than the flat-head of the Chinook or the cramped foot of the Chinese girl can give true knowledge of Nor can an authoritative Bible, Church or the Human Form. 'Christ' help the matter at all. On the contrary they increase that artificial compression, wherein the whole disability lies. They are apt to be the very instruments by which it is effectually secured. assurance. It is not meant that the Soul can be essentially disorganized. If it could be, there were at once the end of all its authority, and all our But demoralized it can be, and that by the suppression, perversion and distortion of its natural testimony, as above stated. There are many ways in which this may be done, differing in different forms of belief and stages of social progress. The popular Theology of Christendom has its way, also, and this is what I propose to deal with in the present Discourse. It is betrayed in the current definition of the relation between Reason and Faith: a definition wherein Faith is perverted and Reason enslaved. Human Reason in this Theology is taken in the broadest possible sense, and means the free activity of the human faculties as such. It includes all that the natural human mind is capable of, whether of the intuitive or demonstrative sort. It includes the light that comes out of the natural affections and the natural aspirations. It includes common sense, common conscience or Natural Morality, and such sense of religious need as is conceded to Natural Religion. It is granted that by these activities we reach the axioms of Mathematics and a few moral and religious beliefs. But beyond, it is insisted, there is a region where this our Spiritual Constitution is utterly blind; where Reason, intuitive or demonstrative, and though speaking in the name of the conscience and the affections, has no place where truth is no longer a matter of evidence, but must come, if at all, without evidence, or even against what seems to all these human faculties to be such. And precisely in this region lie the profoundest facts and holiest relations. Here we are saved by Faith, which is not one of the natural faculties so much as the surrender of them all; and which begins just where all rational grounds for believing end. This inadequacy is systematically assumed in the use of the term "natural" as distinguished from "spiritual." This is what preachers mean by "the inability of unaided Human Reason to reach Religious Truths"- an expression which conveys an absurdity since Reason can never be unaided, and the relation of the human mind to all kinds of Truth must be essentially the same. There follows of course, from these premises, the necessity of a "Supernatural Revelation" to enforce the truth which our natural faculties cannot recognize, and of the blind acceptance thereof in the name of "Faith," as alike our duty and our safety. Now a "Supernatural Revelation," that is, a revelation under other conditions than those of the natural faculties through which all our experience comes to us, has been already shown to be impossible. So has the blind acceptance of anything, save what the actual state of these faculties, here charged with impotence, alone enables them to apprehend and alone serves to guarantee. The bridge, like the great gulf it would span, is therefore illusory. Nevertheless the illusions themselves are to the last degree mischievous, and abolish the selfrespect on which our liberty largely depends. This illusory acceptance of a "Supernatural Revelation" is practically outward compulsion and the suppression of our inward freedom. It is but another name for the consignment of the Spiritual Constitution to incompe tence and even idiocy in spiritual things. And the result is something sadder than a mere illusion. For once assume that there is a sphere, and that the most vital in human experience, in which rational evidence would be an impertinence, and Truth is positively unrecognizable as Truth, and must be taken upon an authority which forbids inquiry, while the Reason has no function but to suffer shame, - and the step is almost inevitable to that fatuity which makes Religion to consist in believing the irrational, and a doctrine to be all the more credible for being absurd. Is it then strange that we find Christians vying with each other as well as with Jews and "Heathens," in ascribing cruelty, folly, and caprice to the God in whom they are longing to find rest: that they call Him Allwise and Allgood, and yet believe Him to have appointed Labor and Death in wrath, twin curses, drawn swords waving men off from a lost Eden; to have doomed a part of His children as yet existent only in His purpose, to everlasting wo; to have punished all men for the sin of one, and then a Sinless One for the crimes of all :- that they believe the Spirit in whom we live and move dwells apart from the Order of Nature, entering it only to violate the laws on which all our reasoning is founded and all our peace depends? All this comes legitimately from their doctrine that the natural constitution of the Soul is incapable of reaching Religious Truth. If looking through its eyes at this sphere of Thought, they are bound to see wrong, then of course that belief which most perfectly contradicts what they would naturally see, must for that very reason be regarded as true. Hence Tertullian's "I believe because it is impossible." Hence the aphorism of Sir Thomas Browne:- "There are not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith." With what kind of a Spiritual Constitution did these men suppose God had endowed them? "A Christian," said Lord Bacon, "is one who believes three to be one, and one to be three; a Father not to be older than his Son; a Son to be equal with his Father, and One proceeding from both to be equal with both; a virgin to be mother of a son, and that very son to be her Maker." And elsewhere :- "The more incredible and absurd any divine mystery is, the more do we honor God in believing it, and so much the nobler the victory of faith." "This," cries Dr. Manton, "is the great mystery: Three and One, One and Three: we cannot comprehend it and therefore must admire it. O most luminous darkness! They were the more Three because One, and the more One because Three! Were there nothing to draw us to desire to be dissolved but this, it were enough!" Most assuredly so; if this is the state to which faith has reduced the moral and intel |