America has become, during the last quarter of a century, the object on which the eyes of the intellectual world have been fixed, with all the interest that attaches to a novel and critical experiment. Up to that period she had virtually taken not only her religious systems, but all her ideas on philosophical science, from the Old World. She had mutely acknowledged her indebtedness to the great intellects whom the combined thought of Europe had canonised as men of light and leading, in their respective departments. Her universities were fashioned after Oxford and Göttingen, and their students sat at the feet of Old World professors, and accepted their teachings with the deference that is due to learning and the sanctities of tradition. Meanwhile, in the mechanical arts, America had asserted her independence. She took the moulds of European inventions, improved upon them, broke them, and cast them aside as worthless and antiquated. And whilst her schools and colleges were accepting European ideas and traditions, there was scarcely a mill in America that had not reached a full half century of progress beyond the best-appointed and best-conducted factory in Leeds or Sheffield.
Such a state of things could not last. A nation of fifty million inhabitants, with infinite possibilities before it, and with all its intelligence quickened into activity by the interfusion of races, with their specific principles and traditions, could not remain in leading strings to any other people, nor maintain a rigid and senseless conservatism in those very things in which the human mind demands
What then is to be the leading system of thought in the great Western Republic? How will its progressive ideas develop themselves? It starts on its career free and untrammelled by prejudice or superstitions. It enjoys the most perfect freedom, not only in its political life, but even in that social life which amongst ourselves has laws more despotic, and decisions more magisterial, than state constitutions. Nature has thrown open her treasury, and already dowered its children with superabundant wealth, and promises of inexhaustible supplies. America inherits free all the blessings of the civilisation which nineteen centuries with an infinite expenditure of thought and labour have accumulated; and she commences her career without a single care for all those sad and terrible possibilities which hamper progress in the Old World. What is to be the issue of the new civilisation? Will it become licentious in its freedom, and reap in the near future the sad consequences of the violation of that political and intellectual discipline which, like the laws of nature, avenges itself upon its transgressors? Will it run riot in speculation and conjecture about the mighty mysteries of mortality, and end, like the Old World, in dreary scepticism? Or will it accept theology as an exact science, with its truths revealed and absolute, and preserved inviolate in its temple, the living Church? Will its strong democratic spirit eventuate in that freedom which slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent, or will it issue in a revolution which will dwarf the revolutions of the Old World by its colossal wickedness? Will its aristocracy of wealth and intellect draw away more and more from the masses, and ignoring all Christian obligations seek to establish feudalism and an oligarchy, until the inevitable disruption that will fling them and the people in common ruin? Or will they admit a common brotherhood, and coming down to the level of poverty and ignorance, throw the glamour of intellect and wealth over the forced asceticism of the people? To reduce the question to its broadest terms, will the future religion of America be the cultus of sense and science, the Neo-Paganism, in
There are two things indicative of the mental and moral genius of a people: its habits of thought and its habits of life. These two agents act and re-act on each other; licentiousness of thought producing laxity in moral principles, and easy virtue begetting the utmost liberality in matters of belief. We will glance at both, and see if, to borrow an expression from Matthew Arnold, the stream of tendencies in modern America makes for righteousness or not. We shall put aside for a moment the Catholic Church in America, and consider the systems of religious thought that lie outside it.
The whole history, then, of Protestantism in the States at the present time, may be described as the history of a desperate and critical struggle with that Agnosticism which has followed, not very logically indeed, from the theories of the evolutionists. Owing to the absence of copyright, and the consequent enterprise of publishers, all the Agnostic literature of the Old World has become the property not only of the thinking, but even of the reading public of America. When we are told that the poetry of Matthew Arnold adorns the tea-papers of the New World, that the publishers have issued a popular edition of his works, that the treatises of the International Scientific Series have been cheapened and simplified, that sociology and kindred subjects are matter for study and debate in the homeliest literary societies, and that a vulgar lecturer, like Ingersoll, can always command an audience of three or four thousand persons in every city of the States, we must be prepared to admit that materialism is a growing creed in America, and that it will need the strongest efforts of Christian faith and Christian scholarship to resist it. The causes that have led up to such a disposition in the public mind are manifold. In tracing and classifying them we shall best understand how deeply laid are anti-Christian ideas, upon what forms of investigation or imagination they are founded, what influence external causes have exercised
The sources then of Free-thought in America may be stated thus.
They are historical changes, speculations in philosophy, the absence of definitive dogmas in all the Protestant communions, wealth boundless and luxury unrestricted, weakness from within, and aggression from without. We will limit this Paper to a consideration of the first two of these causes which are also the most important.
The dark, intolerant spirit brought over by the Puritans in the Mayflower, and which is best known to us through the sombre pages of Hawthorne, might be said to have been broken by the great War of Independence. The principles involved in the famous Declaration, and which were simply the expression of the collective feelings of the people, were found to be inimical not only to foreign domination, but also to the class and creed ascendency which had hitherto obtained in the New England States. The right of every man to worship his Creator as he willed was made the cardinal doctrine of the New Republic, and it broke for ever the power of the fierce bigots who rigidly upheld their ancestral beliefs against Catholic and Quaker by appeals to the branding iron and the pillory. A reaction was inevitable. Intoxicated with freedom, the people rushed from the gloomy doctrines and unbending discipline of Puritanism into extreme licence of thought as the Jews of old, freed from the terrors of invasion and death, revelled in sensuality and idolatry. And events on the European Continent were giving to the mind of America a bias in the same direction. The American Revolution was immediately succeeded by that in France. An invisible bond of sympathy existed between them; and although in their motives, their objects, and especially in their results, they were essentially different, they agreed at least in their hatred of tyranny, their demand for freedom, their insistence on social equality, their impatience of any thing or person, who would attempt to limit human freedom, or coerce human thought. And the ideas that led up to the French Revolution, the Deism of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, were wafted to the New World, and became the foundation of that Unitarianism, which for so many years was the prevalent belief in America, which counted
Beyond comparison the first name in the annals of Unitarianism, as well as the first in American literature, is that of Ralph Waldo Emerson; and we introduce his name here, for we believe, that his life of lofty spiritual, if not Christian thought, and his character of quaint and earnest simplicity, have had a charm for the young intellects of America, the potency of which can only be measured, when its effects are clearly understood. He might have removed for ever his own strong indictment against his nation that it had no distinct national literature, had he not selected as the basis of his philosophy that German idealism, which originated with Kant, was developed by Hegel, and still holds pre-eminence amongst all other systems in the German schools. His tour in Europe in 1833, and his visit to Carlyle at Ecclefechan1, became turning points in his professional and literary career. He was seized with the ambition of effecting for America what Carlyle had effected for England to create in all minds the belief that what the world was seeking for centuries was to be found in Germany a perfect system of philosophy which would satisfy every demand of the human intellect, and every craving of the human heart. He became the interpreter of German transcendentalism to the mind of America. And no professor by the Elbe or Rhine ever disclosed to receptive minds the mysteries of the new philosophy with such passionate earnestness, or preached the naturalism that underlies it with such faultless eloquence. Rhetoric, in fact, is not only the handmaiden, but the mistress of this vague philosophy. To hide an obscure thought in a cloud of words, or to present a familiar idea in strange and
Yet the play of splendid intellects around mighty problems of nature and mind has in it something highly fascinating to the young and the undisciplined. To leave behind, for a moment, the solid ground of Christian philosophy, founded on Divine revelation, and to ascend into cloudland with the gods to see mighty mysteries of life and death, time and space, God and the universe, duty and immortality, treated as freely as the astronomer swings his globe, or the navigator his sextant: all this is very daring and attractive to the young. And when the brilliant speculations of these leaders are floated through the world, and through the ears of men, in liquid poetry, and prose that is as firm and measured as the tramp of a conquering army, it is not easy to resist the temptation of worshipping their brilliant but erratic intellects. We know how Carlyle was sage and prophet to half the young intellects of England in his time; how he drew all London to his lectures on Heroes, and how silently and respectfully they listened to this uncouth Scotchman telling them, in his broadest Doric, that there was only one thing worth worship in the universe, that is, strength and success; how he held spell-bound the students of Edinburgh University in his famous address as rector; and how a single phrase of that address was made the text of a hundred sermons.
But, in other hours, nature satisfies the soul purely by its loveliness, and without any mixture of corporal benefit. I have seen the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its rapid transformation: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind. How does nature deify us with a few and cheap elements? Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie: broad noon shall be my England of the senses and understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams. Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm last evening of a January sunset. The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness, that it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in
But it is with his thoughts we have principally to deal, and they are manifold and brilliant. Wisdom flashes everywhere through his writings wise thoughts that have never touched us before, and thoughts as familiar to us as our daily prayers. It is a feature of genius that it can present to us our own ideas, yet so changed and coloured that we can scarcely recognise them. The thought that we see from only one direction presents itself to the mind of a great thinker under every aspect. And under every aspect it is shown us, until we declare it unfamiliar and original. Like the story of Faust, which is totally different as it comes from the hands of Marlowe, and Goethe, and Bayley, or the sweet legend of the Falcon, which is one thing in Coventry Patmore's verses, quite another in Tennyson's drama, all our wise fancies come back to us in the pages of Emerson, but so glorified and etherealised that we cannot recognise them. The commonplace in his hands becomes brilliantly original. Every page of his writings sparkles with the wisest thoughts and the wittiest conceits, and conjectures as lofty as ever disturbed the mind of Plato are compressed with Scriptural conciseness into a single line. Hence, a generation of American scholars has sat at his feet, and accepted his teachings as the sum and essence of all that is worth knowing in ancient and modern philosophy. And hence, too, to him more than to any other teacher of his time is to be ascribed the fact that the best intellects of America have been swept clear of every vestige of revealed religion, and left blank to receive the new impressions that have been made by the theories that of latter years have been pushed to the front in the name of science.
For Emerson, let it be said, was not a philosopher in the same sense as Plato or Bacon. He is an eclectic; but by far the most brilliant of eclectics. He did not create so much as collect. His warmest admirers cannot discover a trace of system in his writings. The sincerest critic amongst his friends, M. Arnold, has declared that he can never be considered a great philosophical writer on account of his method, or rather want of method, in