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MARCH, 1868.

THE UNITY AND UNIVERSALITY OF THE RELIGIOUS

THE

IDEAS.

HE old definition of Catholic Truth was, "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus," what has been believed in all imes, in all places, by all men.

It would be easy to catalogue the diversities of the religious coneptions, the moral practices of different times, different places, differnt nations, and to emphasize the contradictions, until it might seem, s some believe, that there is no truth attainable by man, nothing but otions and opinions, fancies, errors and superstitions, perpetually hanging, and alike futile. Till it might seem, as many believe, that othing but a miraculous intervention from heaven could at last reveal e truth and the way, and bring any order out of this chaos. I do ot believe either of these conclusions. And it is my undertaking in is lecture, to show a unity and universality of truth existing in spite I all these diversities, and in them all; to show the elements of uth, existing under all errors and superstitions. I take the errors ad superstitions not to refute, but to bear testimony to, the reality of e truth they so poorly, yet so really represented. These are the tnesses. Superstition declares an impulse in man to religion. Idolaestablishes the inborn need of worship. Polytheism reveals the tive instinct in man to conceive of mysterious power above man d nature. These are the rude beginnings, the imperfect, sometimes onstrous, growths. But where there was all this smoke, there must ve been some fire; where there was all this manifestation, there was nething seeking expression. That something was Religion: Man's tive sense of somewhat within him and beyond him other than the ible; the sense of the unseen and infinite and perfect, haunting 1, perhaps in incoherent dreams, perhaps in clearer vision; but

from which he could not free himself. He tried to name it, and he stammered. He tried to reach it, and he stumbled. But still it stirred within him and would not let him alone. Still it shone before him and beckoned him on. That in spite of all unintelligible and absurd dogmas, in spite of all burdensome and monstrous and cruel practices, in spite of all tyrannies of priestcraft and church authority, all nations of men have remained religious, is to me a most striking proof of the reality and indestructibility of the religious element in man's nature.

Do you talk of idols what put it into men's minds to make them; not in one country, but in many diverse and separated?

Do you talk of polytheisms, gods of the earth, the air, the sky, the sea, the rivers, the groves; what made men think of anything in the air but the air, in the sea but the sea; what led them to believe in the reality of beings they had never seen?

Do you talk of priests; How did they get just this kind of power over men? what had priests to start from, to appeal to, to build upon? I answer, the religious sense, the religious element in man's nature. Talk of variations: variations upon what; what is the theme? The religious idea in man.

We must keep in mind the distinction between essence and form, between a ground idea and the outward conception in which it shapes itself.

The conception varies, as the idea works itself out in more or less clearness and force.

The diversities however great, need not disturb our faith in unities of idea. But the diversities have been much exaggerated. The unity is found again and again, not merely in the underlying idea, but in the very expression of the truth.

The great religious ideas are these: God, Duty, Benevolence, Immortality. And these are universal ideas. They have been believed in all times, in all places, by all peoples. You cannot travel so wide but you will find temples, or the ruins of temples, altars, worships. You cannot read so far back into the history of men, but you will find men thinking of God, praying to Him, trying to do right, loving their kind, looking beyond death to follow the souls of the friends into an unseen world. The forms which these ideas have taken have differed, and do differ; depending upon national character, upon race, climate, degree of civilization; sometimes buried under superstitions, sometimes coming out in simple forms and clear thought; clothed in one form of words in the imaginative and dreamy East, in another in the

rant.

practical West. In all ages, too, and peoples, the more enlightened have held the popular faith under a different aspect from the ignoIn all ages and peoples there have been individual men who have been above the level of their time, superior to the limitations of their race in a degree, though never entirely free from these; men of fuller humanity and therefore fuller of divinity; of finer organization, wiser mind, more sensitive spiritual perception, keener moral instincts; lofty and saintly souls, who have striven to draw men away from superstition to truth, from baseness to virtue, to awaken them to a more living faith in God, duty, immortality. These men have been reverenced as prophets, have counted themselves sent of God. They have been looked upon as his special messengers. About them generally after their death, the reverence of men and the imaginations and marvellousness of men, have gathered legends and miracles, have attributed to them supernatural birth and supernatural powers; have believed them incarnations of a descended God, or have raised them to demi-gods, and worshipped them.

I.

The first great religious idea is the idea of God. It is the idea of a mysterious Power superior to man; Creator, Ruler, Benefactor, Judge. With this idea the mind of man has always been haunted and possessed; and growing intelligence has not destroyed it, but only modified and elevated the forms of it. The idea is germinal and native to in the Reason of man; but his Understanding, Sentiment, and fancy, have embodied it in many varying conceptions. We trace its presence and unfolding through the forms of Fetichism or Idolatry, Sabeism or Nature-worship, Polytheism, Monotheism, to pure Theism, the conception of one universal infinite Spirit, whose immanent Life is the perpetual Creator of all things, whose infinite Personality includes and inspires all persons, while it transcends them: the "one God and Father of all, who is above all, through all, and in us all."

Behind all idolatries and image-worships there has always been found lurking a sense more or less recognized of an Invisible which they represented; and the more intelligent have declared them to be only symbols, a condescension to the senses and imagination. Thus an English Missionary relates that, standing with a venerable Brahmin to witness the sacred images carried in pomp and cast into the Ganges, he said: "Behold your gods; made with hands; thrown into a river." "What are they, sir," replied the Brahmin, "only dolls. That is well enough for the ignorant, but not for the wise." And he went on to quote from the ancient Hindu "Laws of Menu:"

"The world

lay in darkness, as asleep. Then He who exists for Himself, the Most High, the Almighty manifested Himself and dispelled the gloom. He whose nature is beyond our reach, whose being escapes our senses, who is invisible but eternal, He, the all-pervading Spirit, whom the mind cannot grasp, even He shone forth."

In like manner, wherever Polytheism has prevailed, there has been a vague sense of unity accompanying it and growing clearer with growing intelligence. One of the gods comes to be regarded as supreme, and the others to be but his ministers or angels. The Jehovah of the Jews appears at first to have been conceived of as not the only God, but the special God of their nation, superior to the gods of the other nations. Thus even in Homer we find a tendency to gather up into Zeus as centre and source all the functions of the other divinities. The Egyptians believed in a "first God; Being before all and alone; Fountain of all." The Aztecs of Mexico, with their more than two hundred deities, recognized one supreme Creator and Lord, whom they addressed in their prayers as "the God by whom we live," "omnipresent, that knoweth all thoughts and giveth all gifts," "without whom man is as nothing," "invisible, incorporeal; one God, of perfect perfection and purity." So the ancient Peruvians had their "Creator and Sustainer of Life;" the American Indians their Great Spirit "Master of Life;" the Scandinavians their All-father.

He

And where the forms of polytheistic mythology occupied the popular mind, the intelligent and philosophic have always regarded these as but shapes of the fancy, and taught a pure doctrine of the unity and spirituality of God. Socrates tells of the joy with which he read in a book of Anaxagoras, that the universe was the creation of Mind. And Xenophanes, as Aristotle relates, casting his eyes upward to the heavens, declared the One is God. He condemned the prevalent mythologies and the notions of gods in human figure, and severely blamed Hesiod and Homer for their scandalous tales about the gods. taught that "there is one supreme God among beings divine and human. . . . He governs all things by the power of Reason." The Pythagoreans taught the unity of God, and compared him to a circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere. "There are not different gods for different nations," wrote Plutarch, “As there is one and the same sun, moon, sky, earth, sea, for all men, though they call them by different names; so the One Spirit which governs this universe, the Universal Providence, receives among different nations different names." 198 "There is but one God, who is every

....

1 Denis Histoire des Théories et des Idées Morales. I. 7. 2 Prescott: Conquest of Mexico. I. 57.

Denis: II. 224.

where," says Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor. "God is everywhere," wrote an Aztec mother to her daughter.1 "In all this conflict of opinions," says Maximus Tyrius, "know that through all the world sounds one consenting law and idea, that there is One God, the King and Father of all, and many gods, the children of God. This both the Greek and the Barbarian teach."

The Hindu "Bhagavad Gita" speaks of "the Supreme, Universal Spirit, the Eternal Person, divine, before all gods, omnipresent. Creator and Lord of all that exists; God of gods, Lord of the Universe." 2 In a Buddhist tract we read, "There appears in the law of Buddha only one Omnipotent Being." And again "He is a Supreme Being above all others; and although there are many gods, yet there is a Supreme who is God of the gods.": Huc relates a conversation with a Thibetan Lama, who said to him, "We must not confound religious truth with the superstitions which amuse the credulity of the ignorant. There is but one sole sovereign Being who has created all things. He is without beginning, and without end: He is without body, He is a spiritual substance." 4

In the Mazdean, or Zoroastrian, belief, Ormuzd is spoken of as "omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent; formless, self-existent and eternal; pure and holy: Lord over all the creatures in the universe; the refuge of those who seek his aid."

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Upon a temple at Delphi was the inscription Et Thou art. upon this Plutarch writes, "We say to God, Thou art : giving him thus his true name, the name which belongs alone to Him. For what truly is? That which is eternal, which has never had beginning by birth, never will have end by death, that to which time brings no change. It would be wrong to say of Him who is, that he was or will be, for these words express changes and vicissitudes. God alone is: He is, not after the fashion of things measured by time, but by an immovable and unchanging Eternity. For Him there is no Before nor After, but by a single Now he fills the Forever. And, nothing truly is but He alone!

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Again, after denying the fable of the birth and education of Jove, Plutrach says: "There is nothing before Him, He is the first and most ancient of beings, the author of all things: He was from the beginning; too great to owe his existence to any other than himFrom his sight is nothing hid..... Night and slumber never

self.

1 Prescott's Mexico, III. 424.

2 Chapter X.

& Upham's Sacred Books of Ceylon, III. 13. See note at the end of this article. * Journey through Tartary, Thibet, and China, I. 121, 2. Tract on the word 'Et, by Denis: II. 225.

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