The Radical

no authority of the sort designated as "supernatural" can ever go behind this, supplant it, or supply its defects. Neither the Bible, the Church, the word of Jesus, nor the alleged Miracles, can of themselves prove any doctrine true. They are themselves to be tested by the Spiritual Nature, and stand or fall according as they do or do not fulfill its organic demands. Moreover, the representative of the Spiritual Nature in each person is the state of his religious consciousness, the condition of light or darkness, good or evil therein. It is always this, not Bible, Church, or Miracle that determines his belief. When he thinks he is judging by their authority, he is really judging by this, and its authority. It is idle to talk of infallible revelations, of supernatural proofs, when there stands behind all teachers, a judge within us, who decides for us what every doctrine shall mean. this authority, and cannot help it. The way to reach Truth, thereWe rely on fore, is not to go to Bible, Church, or Miracle to see what is true, but to fit the mind and the conscience for the natural discerning of truth. The first step is to be thoroughly free and thoroughly in earnest; it is to put away once and forever all enslavement to outward authority, and all the selfish aims and passions that distort and pervert the vision of truth.

The Constitution of the Soul is our living Bible. The endeavor to

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learn and meet its real needs is the way of salvation. The Presence of God therein is our Saviour. The life that flows through its channels into our lives is our Inspiration.

The Word of God is in every one of us; nigh unto us, in our very mouths. We need not go afar to a chosen race, to an exceptional Age or Person. We shall only be sent home again to our natural faculties, to our simple moral and spiritual needs. We may as well We cannot walk with admit it. We cannot see with infallible eyes. supernatural feet. We must see with our human eyes. We must It is idle to be querying what walk with the feet that are given us. grounds we have for trusting them. We have of course no other than this, that we are so made that to trust them is the condition of all normal sight and locomotion.

We cannot get any other founLet the Abanas and Pharpars go. dation for the earth than the present sustaining Power of God. We may put a tortoise under the layers and say it stands on that; and then an elephant under the tortoise, and then a sphynx under the elephant; and so on down and down; but after all, we come to the same heavenly spaces, where no visible foundation is, and end our earth-propping there, as we might have done at the first. And so we may put our supernatural "Christ" under the natural faculties because they are so unreliable, and under him the infallible Bible or Tradition, and under that the chosen Hebrew Race. And as we lay them one under the other we may say solemnly, "Other foundation hath no man laid";— and, "Behold the Rock of Ages"; and, "This is the way, the truth, the life; no man cometh to God but by this." Yet where are we at last, but staking the whole upon those very faculties What can sustain the new foundawe had doubted and despised? tions but that in which the first was laid, the spiritual nature that is in every one, and read by him according as he is? Tortoise, elephant, sphynx, brought us no nearer the resting place for our faith than we were when we stood on the green Earth, and looked straight up into the blue deeps of the divine mystery that holds us every instant in its arms; aye no nearer than when we devoutly marked how a little leaf was growing or how a drop of dew reflects the sky.

We must rely on our Nature, through which we see God, enough to believe that it is quick and stanch with His Goodness and His Order, and that our consciousness, rightly treated, will teach us more and more of these. This, then, is the Philosophy of Faith. Implicitly trust the Natural Constitution of the Soul as the foundation of all spiritual knowledge. If it is unreliable or inadequate, there is nothing for us to trust, since we cannot get outside of it, nor beyond it. Find

God in it, then, by devoutly studying and following its laws. No creed that disparages any faculty can be right. No enslavement to authority, to imagined infallibility at the expense of Reason and Nature, can save. It is putting out our own eyes, and cutting off our own feet. All possible light of science, all possible love of freedom, truth and good, are needed to bring clearly out the Revelation of God in the Spiritual Constitution of Man. When that revelation is exhausted or hopelessly disabled, you may pray for another and a better; or you might do so, were it not impossible that there should then remain within you either any desire to receive it, or any divinity to which it could appeal. To regard Jesus as the sign that human nature had become thus disabled, so as to need the supplementing of natural religion by "revealed," is to forget that recuperative energy which is its simplest law; it is to argue its degradation from its very divineness, and its beggary from the very splendor of its resource. What, then, is this Voice of Nature? tive? Is its witness, as history and experience report it, adequate to Is its import clear and positeach and guarantee our best solutions of the momentous questions of life?

In a recent admirable work on "Ancient Law," I find it stated that contrary to the general impression, the stable part of our mental, moral, and physical nature is the largest part of it." Such recognitions, from a purely practical point of view, are signs of healthful reaction on the sensationalism which has boldly denied, and the supernaturalism which has disparaged, the immutable element in human belief. The report of nature on certain matters has been uniform from the beginning; and these are precisely the most vital of all. That the special meanings attached to such words as Deity and Duty should alter, is a condition of growth, to which all conceivable revelation is subject. But the changing shapes are all born and fed from certain constant intuitions; and the whole succession of religious beliefs does but evolve the divine purport of these, by natural law. This is the fact of facts. These are the root words of man's eternal speech; on these let the emphasis fall. Wherever you find Man, there you find the irresistible instinct of worship. In whatever rude way he may express the need, he must and will find some object of religious awe and trust. Nor has there ever been a rational person who did not practically, if not consciously, confess the authority of a Moral Law. This is but another form of belief in a God, and will serve to prove to one who imagines himself an Atheist, that after all he is no such moral and intellectual monstrosity as that. of spiritual need and the nature of moral choice and right purpose So the fact

are the same in all; if we can but get deep enough and look simply and freely enough to see it.

Nor is the quality of belief so different in different ages and races as is generally supposed. It is all one Tree of Life, and the stress of one structural law is everywhere, from its first cotyledon to the grand sweep of its latest foliage. Wherever the earliest stages are passed, there is always in the conception of Deity some sense of Omnipotence, of Imperishableness, of Justice, of Providential Care. So the multiplicity of the ancient gods always involved a vague unity for the mind of the worshipper. It was assuredly one thing, divineness, that he found in all of them. In the oldest Veda they all mean essentially the same, and are mutually interchangeable. The moment man began to be self-conscious, he began to infer a divine unity from his own individuality, and he has never forgotten it. Sometimes the whole was believed to be God, as All in all. This was the Pantheistic idea of Divine Unity. Sometimes different forces of Nature, physical and moral, were taken as diverse manifestations of Deity. This was the Polytheistic sense of Divine Unity; and however obscure in the general mind, it found expression in those who penetrated to the substance of their own belief. The learned argument of Cudworth in proof that Monotheism is at the root of all ancient theology, is but the expansion into volumes, of what the great masters of ancient thought have simply affirmed. It is indeed only by degrees that the conception of Deity, compend of all human passions, has reached moral unity; in other words, has come to be based on certain great moral principles as universal in the divine government. The best minds in the Hebrew race do not seem to have reached it any earlier than those of the Hindu, Persian, Greek. But men instinctively act upon the presumption of moral immutability long before they distinctly conceive the idea of Law. Nor could any person of simple and consistent character have found it unnatural to shape the many deities of his traditional faith or the single God of his peculiar enlightenment, into the image of the moral unity organized within him. All the great Religions, Oriental, Greek, Roman, brought forth in some sort, as seeds folded in their thought of God, the Infinite as Spirit, as Sovereign, as Judge, as Father; leaving no holy Name for Christianity to invent. And all our root words of prayer and praise are of immemorial antiquity, the earliest Aryan and the latest American their common heirs.

And let us remember that there must be certain moral postulates, forever indisputable, to make religion, social ethics, or indeed social union in any form possible. The Greek tragedians sang of these

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The Radical, Bind 1