USA > Indiana > Vanderburgh County > Evansville > Foundation stones, of the Church of the Unity, Evansville, Indiana > Part 2
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changing the laws of the Universe in a spirit of partiality-does not make that the religious soul, does not find it a necessity to keep the heart open towards heaven reaching upwards, in its secret life with an earnest longing for a clearer consciousness of the divine presence. But to get at the soul of truth is not always easy work. It cant be learned out of a book or a creed, it is an old saying that truth lies at the bottom of a well. It comes not to the surface thinker or liver, but must be forced up out of the rich depths of an earnest manly life. To know and declare the truth, one must be true. Many, in these days amidst their contradictory opinions are asking with Pilate : "What is truth ?"-but whoever can say with Jesus: "To this end was I born and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth." Can also say in sublime sincerity: "I am the truth"-thus though in his work the preacher must unclothe the spirit of the truth : we come back to the origi- nal thought: that this must be born of moral insight; or, in other words, be the product of his own conscious life. As much as in him lies shall he preach the gospel, but no more.
Next, touching the work of the preacher; If the value of his work depends so much upon his maintaining his personal freedom, is not this of equal importance to those for whom he preaches? His work is not to make or keep their minds and hearts loyal to any particular form of thought or emotional life, but to so come to them that he may provoke them to give place to the spiritual needs of life; to so bring the light and rain and dew of heaven to bear on their moral natures, that he may help them to put forth the proper leaves, flowers and fruit of a soul that is divine in its relations and possibilities; that has within its own life a kingdom of God. Now if this be true, how false to man is that theory of life that commits him to a settled form of thought in some creed or system of doctrine; bids him seek, by faith, for imputed right- eousness, and to despise his own as filthy rags. But I thank God! 'that the religious world is waking up to see that creeds are the worst enemies of the soul's liberty and imputed right- eousness, as great a folly as imputed intelligence; that there is no heaven for any soul better than that, which fills the heart of him, who has learned to do right in his own name, from his own
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love of it; that Heaven is not surrounding, but being; that for such, no matter what the outward form of their thought or wor- ship may be, there is neither death nor hell possible; that, as Father Taylor, the old sailor-preacher, of Boston, said of Emer- son, to send such souls to hell would cause emigration at once to set in that way. To see and discern this clearly is the hope of the future. From all time this has been the brightest star in the ideal horizon of humanity. In the olden time only the greatest souls caught glimpses of it. But since the sublimest seer of the ancient proclaimed: "There is a spirit in man, and the ยท inspira- tion of the Almighty giveth them understanding," it has been steadily unfolding itself to the consciousness of all true and noble souls. Every advance movement of the race has been in a clearer perception of the truth that we are all children of God. When this is seen by all, then the full redemption and promised day of Israel will be born. The earth shall be full of the knowl- edge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea, and all shall know him, from the least to the greatest. But, standing as we do to- day in the light of this truth, do not our hearts say, how long, how long shall it be before this glory shineth for all, is seen to be " the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world ?" Do we not say with those of old: "Watchman, what of the night ? Watchman, what of the night?" And as then: "The watchman says the morning cometh and also the night." Though to many the full light of this rosy, dewy morning, fragrant with the breath of myriads of opening blossoms, grace and beauty of life cometh; for many more the night, the long, sad, weary night, remaineth. For them stand-
" Far off, too far, the hours that bring This morrow which we pine to see ; Far off they wait with folded wing."
Sorrowfully we acknowledge that even yet, at the very altars of religion, the soul of man is despised, his thought fettered and his hopes mocked, the good of the soul presented as something to be gained from without instead of developed from within. To hasten the coming of this glorious day is above all things the work of the preacher. The potency and promise of all life lies at the heart of this truth. All good ends in possession, but it is 3
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only as we possess ourselves that we can possess aught besides. There is something that seems cold and inexorable about that old saying: "There is no success like success." Still, as the des- potism and beneficence of nature are one, so is the justice and mercy of the Divine law regarding the soul. Perhaps it will help you to get at my thought here if I give you an illustration. If a plant be blighted and mildewed, destitute of all beauty, what real good will it do it to decorate it with false verdure? None at all, save cheat, perhaps, a few strangers to the true condition of things into a fleeting admiration. You can see at once that the proper thing to do is to cut away the dead branches and apply good care to the roots. Now all the time you should neglect to do this to those who beheld it in its withered condition, there would be no beauty in it that they should desire it, but it would be wrong to say that was the fault of the plant, for when rightly cared for the life at its heart would cause it to clothe itself with new beauty. Then at once all would admire it; all the laws of nature would be in tune with it; the sun, rain and dew of Heaven, instead of hastening its decay, would all serve to in- crease its life. Not a created intelligence in the universe of God would there be who would not do it honor through their love and enjoyment of all beauty. So though there are thousands of souls that present to us no evidence of this divinity of life, blighted as they are by the parisites of passion or mildewed in the foul, poisonous atmosphere of ignorance and crime. But how vain to say that these souls are saved from their moral de- formity by covering them with the declaration of a creed or the righteousness of another, even though it be that of the pure Christ. The thing to be done is not to cast all the blame on them, for ofttimes souls are like plants that never get the right care, but to follow the example of Jesus, who in a word cast aside the old growth and at once sought to penetrate to the heart of life with the warmth of his love and gentle, refreshing rain of his sympathy. Thus he saved the lost, enlarged our thought of the Divinity of humanity, proclaimed a gospel that is peace on earth and good will to all men. This is what he meant when he said : "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added." "The kingdom of God is within you." Let the soul, like the plant, receive the proper care, so
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that it can unfold itself according to the law of its being, and it will at once be at the heart of the universe; conscious of the boundless character of its inheritance, the flowers will bloom and exhale their fragrance for it; to such a soul belongs all truth and beauty; the music of the summer breeze, as it sings like soft strains struck from golden harps by angel hands, through the forest leaves; the sunlight, as it falls like flakes of gold through the same; the day, with its changing beauty, from its morning freshness and perfume to the evening's hushful twilight as the stars come out one by one and the earth itself becomes as silent as a star, while these unnumbered worlds proclaim their allegiance to the soul that greets them from afar, and all pure spirits of Heaven and earth in their love and companionship. " Are they not all ministering spirits to these heirs of salvation ?" And then, while the morning stars thus sing together and all the suns of God shout for joy, above all these swelling thunderous notes of praise may be heard the music of a Diviner voice saying : "Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee." "All mine are thine and thine are mine;" and then, though to all earth besides it be blasphemy, such a soul will say with Jesus : "God is my Father and I and my Father are one."
But what is the condition of the growth of the soul in this consciousness of its Divine relationship ? Liberty-not liberty as some understand this word-but the genius of liberty, the free, spotaneous growth of the soul, the recognition that religion is no foreign but a natural plant of the soul ; that it exists under all kinds of surroundings, but always best when most natural in its growth.
Our time is one that calls for earnest deeds ; Reason and religion, like two broad seas, Yearn for each other with outstretched arms Across the narrow isthmus of the creeds.
Each hour has its own need. In an age of little spiritual consciousness, and among people of that class to this day, such a message as early Methodism bore to the souls of thousands, doubtless best carried them forward into this inheritance; but a new age has new wants. Growth of intelligence has carried the majority away from the power of this message about the neces-
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sity of a spiritual birth, because intelligence means general spir- itual consciousness and insight into moral truth. To make this spirituality progressive the teacher of religion must free it from dogma. This new life no longer fits into the old formulas about it. So that between the best and most intelligent consciousness of to-day and the teaching of orthodoxy, there is of necessity antagonism, just as there was antagonism between the new life of Methodism and the old formalities of religion. The mistake of evangelicalism is in the assumptions that the conditions of success in one age are the same in all. For a long time both the seed and soil of a new faith have been preparing. The signs of a new revolution in religious thought are again visible. Again those who would save their self-respect, escape being laughed at by their own souls as they change from an angel of light into a demon of darkness, must take sides for the truth. This world is not designed for a soft couch in which we may lie down and dream, but a battle-field on which we must contend earnestly for the right. The breath of a new inspiration to manhood is breathing through the land. The sounds of the coming storm are rustling the tree-tops of thought everywhere. Whoever lives truly must not hide from it, out of sight, but breast it like a man. In vain do men cry with holy horror that the question of the popular religion is settled; that it is no longer open to objection. For thousands the old faith has no more the word of God. Their souls daily protest against it, and through a nobler type of manhood prove that this new-born protestantism has a great work to do in the regeneration of the life of humanity.
So plainly has the necessity of the fullest liberty of mind and conscience to all in religion been written on the hearts of thou- sands that if they prefer light to darkness, truth to falsehood, honor to dishonor, they must stand for its defense against all op- posers. As our fathers won the liberty of the State with earn- est deeds and brave endeavors, so must we that of the church. Nothing hurts me much more than to meet with those who see and feel the need of this broader liberty of the church, who yet excuse themselves because of disliking to hurt the feelings of their friends, who think differently, from taking part in this new battle for liberty. If, when tyranny sought to subject and de- stroy the manhood of the Colonists by making them mere pup-
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pets, moved and controlled by others, without giving them a chance, through representation, to speak their own minds about it-our fathers had argued thus, we would have had no grand, free Republic. But they were true to the emergency of the hour. They opened their hearts to the inspiration of liberty. It fanned their souls into a flame of enthusiasm and made them such men as all generations shall crown with the unfading laurel- wreath of glory. Shall we be like true to the inspirations of our times ? Will we, at all hazards, declare that we will no longer be taxed by the church with obedience without representation in the world of religious thought? Shall the world hear a new, a fresh declaration of independence, in the defense of which the fires of liberty shall be kindled again? Before high Heaven, and as God lives, it shall ! As Heaven planted within us the love of liberty and kindly gave our blood a moral flow, many shall be true to duty. Men will not always sleep. Indifference never possesses any throne ; for long, eternal vigilance is the price of power as well as of liberty. The malaria that has been instilled into men's souls through the mists of fanaticism and fogs of su- perstition shall be driven out through the energy of this new de- votion to liberty. Nations bowed in sorrow, armies meeting in the dreadful shock of battle, escaping slaves lurking in swamps by day and at night, guided only by the north star, pressing their eager way towards the land of liberty, Hypatia hewed to pieces by infuriated monks, Jesus nailed to a cross, Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, Galileo pining in a dungeon, Bruno burning at the stake-all bear witness to the value the human heart has ever set on liberty. Once let the souls of men see this larger place for the soul for which we as a church are fight- ing, and they will soon rally about our standard. Let us not then in this church shirk from our principles or falter in this day that yet demands patient waiting as well as eager battle. As long as a soul is born into this life to be contradicted-find its way hedged up-we are making history that will read in the fu- ture like the record of the barbaric times does to us. What right has any one to say this matter is all settled? We and our fathers have done all the thinking. The need of the hour is not only freedom in the pulpit, but also in the pew. Each man must be taught, before all things, to be true to himself. Each soul
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should be looked upon as the most sacred temple-the place in which the Divine perpetually unfolds Himself anew.
The most sacred thing about man in this our new faith and work must be this personality by which he knows himself- stands alone in the liberty of his Divine sonship. Creeds de- stroy this individuality and freedom of the soul whenever they are regarded as infallible and binding upon all alike. Man be- comes an article of merchandise to be bought and purchased at the counters of the church. The temple of prayer is turned into a den of thieves by the money-changers, who make a trade of the worship of the soul. But the love of liberty is springing up in thousands of hearts that will drive with the lash of truth and terror of unshaken conviction all such mercenary wretches from this Divine habitation. The civilized world is rising up from its old, soft couch. Already these systems of bondage are fleeing before the presence of majestic souls who are daring to lay claim to their heritage of freedom. Tired and weary as we all are with the endless disputes over the meaning of the texts and hair-splitting of metaphysical subtleties touching the nature of God and of the future life, let us dare to shut our ears to all this noisy jargon. Flee away from the dim religious light of mys- terious incarnations, atonements and trinities, that we may think our own thoughts, cherish our own hopes, bask anew in the sun- light, and listen to the voice of God where it speaks to us in the babble of the brook, beauty and perfume of the flowers and songs of the birds as they in joyous innocency make love to each other. With Jesus we will make our temple the arch of the blue-vaulted sky. On the mountain height or beneath the shadow of the trees we will open our hearts to the Divine pres- ence until he reveals himself to us as the spirit of all life and Father of all souls.
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep ; The wrong shall fail, The right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."
ZOAR *.
ROBERT COLLYER.
Remember Lot's wife. Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it .- Luke, xvii, 32-33.
The story of the destruction of Sodom is as true, no doubt, as that of the destruction of Pompeii. There is no fragment left of the ruin, so far as we know, but travelers say that the indica- tions of a great disaster in the region where these cities stood are not to be mistaken. The event also is locked fast in our Bible and in the far-reaching traditions of the country, and is mentioned by Strabo and Tacitus and Josephus and Jerome, as well as by other early writers, as one of the things about which there can be no doubt.
It is evident, however, that in the course of time the central fact came to be clouded with misconception, as most of these things are in the Old Scriptures. Here was a great, sad mys- tery, for which those who thought much about it must find a reason, and as they had then no light on earth they sought for one in Heaven, and so came to the conclusion that Sodom was burnt from the face of the earth with her sister cities because their vileness had become past all healing-just as some ministers whose heads one thinks were very much softer than their hearts talked about Chicago in her great desolation-while the way in which Abraham pleads with God about the impending doom, and the angels go to rescue the one righteous man, and the scene in the street are all meant to fill in the outline of utter depravity, and as the seer thinks to justify the ways of God to man when his ways are past finding out. But the truth is beyond question that Sodom might have been the choicest sanctuary of holiness on the earth that day, and she would have burnt up all the same, root and branch, when the conditions of her burning came to
*Dedication Sermon preached in the Church of the Unity June 20th, 1877.
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their culmination, and as Jesus said in his lesson of the fallen tower, "these strokes are not made by the hand of God for any such reasons." The probability is that Sodom was, on the whole, about what Chicago is to-day, or St. Louis or Evans- ville; allowing for the better life which has come through all these ages and you would find what you find in all cities now, Heaven and earth and hell within the circle of her walls. There would be a life touching divine summits of goodness and infer- nal deeps of vileness at each extreme, and then between these that fair average of human nature which always makes the staple of our life. Honest men and pure women who had no religion to boast of, but were still honest men and pure women, mer- chants who would not deal in lies, and mechanics who would make them houses as wholesome as yours and mine, and temples in which through all the dimness souls still sought after God. So we must beware for the credit of our common human nature how we fall in with this man's conclusion or believe his report. The fire came because the time had come, as the earthquake came just now to those hapless towns in Peru, and the idea that it was the vengeance of God for her sin can be no more reason- able and true than it would be if we should say the same thing about that crushed and broken remnant, or about those hapless folks at Mt. Carmel.
So the background to the picture of Lot's wife is something like the sight we see two thousand years after about the roots of Vesuvius-fire and sulphur, smoke and ashes in the Heavens, and on the earth two fair cities in the grip of doom. A life in easy motion yesterday, bent on its business and pleasure, to- morrow a waste of smoking cinders, the beauty turned to ashes, the cities blotted out, and of the people some dead and some away out on the plains, where they have fled for their lives, the women and children weeping, and the men with hard set faces wondering what they shall do, now that nature herself has broken her ancient faith with them and destroyed her own sanc- tuaries. And between yesterday and to-morrow this poor woman, drawn two ways at once, to Zoar through one instinct, to Sodom through another, the husband and children before her and the old home behind her. While she is in this sad instant,
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no more able to break with the past than she is able to close with the future, and for that hesitancy is destined to stand through all the ages-the central figure in this fine picture, a sharp and bitter petrification, a pillar of salt, and so to become, to my mind, a way-mark of the times, when we are all in some such strait. The times when we must make our election to break with the broken past for the sake of the whole future, to count all loss light, which still leaves us life and life's worth, or to petrify so that there is no hope for us and no help. Hard and bitter and useless to our kind, only open to the hope that the God who understands us may see some use for us within the vast dominions of his loving kindness and tender mercy.
Yet when this is said, one must still feel a very tender con- sideration for the hapless and helpless woman, and see how natu- ral it was that she should lose her chance of the future in her loyalty to the past. If there is any worth in the chronology, she had lived twenty-one years in Sodom; and as there is no mention of the fact that Lot had a wife when he went to live on the land there and to settle finally in the city, it is a fair infer- ence that this was her native home, and held everything of any worth to her, except her husband and children, when the storm of fire began to gather, and they had to flee for their lives. I think I can see, therefore, how she must have looked that morn- ing. The wild eyes and the white face turned toward the old homestead and the household gods; the despair tugging at her heart for all she had left behind her, neighbors and friends and kinsfolk, the things she brought with her when she came there a bride, and the things which had, grown dear to her through all the years of her wedded life; touched by the sacredness of births and burials, and of all true uses down to the kettle on the hearth. The very deepness of her nature, as I look at her in this light, would drive and clinch the nails which bound her to her cross. Had she been a poorer type of woman, in this sense, she would have kept abreast of her husband and children, and the rude sailors and peasants would not be pointing to-day to- ward that block at the southern end of the Dead Sea and whis- pering, Lot's wife. A true woman, as I take it, in this truth to the old home then and its treasures ; a nature planted so deep in
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the soil that this fearful convulsion was not able to bring the roots to the surface, except as she could summon the mighty force of the human will to their help, and in that dire moment work out her own salvation, as we all must, when our time comes, at any cost; not a sinner in this light, but a martyr rather, dying for very good reasons, unable to sever her heart and life from that which was shrivelling like a scroll in the lurid fires of that fearful morning-dying for the past as those of another nature and endowment die for the future, and so petrified where they are sanctified.
But this pity must not blind us once more to the truth that her life depended, that day, on a still deeper loyalty than this which drew her to her death. She must not go back or stand still, but turn once for all from the things which were petrifying or dissolving, as she watched them through the smoke ; find her way out into a world which was still to be trusted and a life which had the future in it as well as the past. There was noth- ing but despair in looking back, but there was the dawn of a new hope in looking forward. Darkness lay behind her, but there was light ahead. All the real reasons that could smite her were one with her instant duty to keep her face away from that disaster. Her husband was ahead and her children. There was a new home to be made and other treasures to be gathered; old friends to be sought out who'would help them or who needed help, and new friends waiting. This shock about God's provi- dence was to be met and mastered, and the doctrine readjusted to the new light which was coming to her through such dreadful shadows, so that she should be still nearer God after the despair than she was before, and brave the truth, that we may pass through the fire yet the flames shall not hurt us. Look at it as we will, there was no use in turning back or lingering; and use, here, I say again, was one with duty. The demand was for that heroism in which the woman is always more than a match for the man. The heroism of a million women in the world to-day who, with their hearts planted deeper in the past than ours ever can be, follow us to the ends of the earth, swallow down their trouble and make no sign ; because that is longing, and this is duty ; that is of the things which were once, but never can be again, and this of the things which may be, if she is true to her
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