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and listen to the wondrous story that she has to tell.
more vast and wonderful the universe in which we live with
conscious joy, the greater will be our eager and impassioned
souls. I cannot understand the ill-disguised or frank con-
tempt with which the religious partisan frequently waives
aside the scientific aspect of the world, as if that had for us,
and could have, no religious meaning whatsoever. For this,
I take it, is God's world; and, if his soul has been engaged
upon it some millions and billions of years, with plastic
force, to make it what it is, we shall do well, I think, to
spend a little of our time in thinking his thoughts after him
and endeavoring to enter into the meaning and spirit of his
work. There is more of real worship in the hushed and
reverent step with which we follow a Darwin or a Spencer
on his majestic course than in all the formal liturgies and
prayers. It is the man, sometimes, more than his thought
that greatens us,— his life's unwritten poetry, or eloquence,
or statuesque repose. I know of nothing that is more great-
ening to the soul, save only its own constant striving for
the best and honorablest things, than intercourse with the
truest and the best of men,- such intercourse as is afforded
us by their biographies written as Channing's or as Emer-
son's by men having a providential fitness for their task.
Fear not that by such intercourse you will be debarred from
doing any worthy social task. These men will shame your
pleasant idleness, will bind your corselet and your greaves
upon you and send you forth to battle with earth's ignorance
and
wrong;
will set a trumpet to your lips that
you may blow

"A Roland blast to flood this grim defile
Till echoes pour beyond it "

that shall summon other men to come and fight upon your side. And yet another way of greatening your soul is to lay bare your spirit to the happy influence of living men stronger and better than yourselves, and to theirs, also, whom death "leads enfranchised on" and whose remembered truth and love are laws we dare not disobey.

"Living, our loved ones make us what they dream;
Dead, if they see, they know us as we are.
Henceforward we must be, not merely seem;
Bitterer woe than death it were by far

To fail their hopes whose love can still redeem;
Loss were thrice loss which thus their faith could mar."

The last great means of greatening our souls has been
already named. It is to find the elements of greatness in
the humblest tasks, to compel the opportunity for greatness
from the cares and troubles and perplexities which make up
the warp and woof of every fleeting day. There are no
greater souls than those who know this secret of the world
and who have shaped their lives according to its law. And,
as their souls, so also are their hopes: for all who struggle
and aspire, for all whom grievous burdens crush and maim,
for all whose fond imagination pictures for them a better
country, even a heavenly, wherein they shall again behold
the faces that once brightened all their ways.
But the great
soul is better than the greatest hope.

"A MERE MAN."

THERE are some texts so obviously good that it were churlishness to pass them by, and not to set one now and then in the forefront of the battle. Certainly, having chosen for my subject "A Mere Man," nothing could be more natural than for me to find a text, or motto, in the Psalmist's question, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?" and his answer, "Thou hast made him little lower than God." Strange, is it not? that such a text as that should have awaited Channing's doctrine of the Dignity of Human Nature for two millenniums and half another! True, in the King James translation it reads "but little lower than the angels"; and the controversial ingenuity of the good old times was quite equal to contending that it meant the fallen ones. But, had the present reading, which was that of all the scholars for a long time in advance of the revision, always been the English reading, it would probably have made no difference. For though, in general, the Calvinistic theologians got their theology from the Old Testament, if they found anything sweet and pleasant there, they passed it by; and, if they found anything particularly disagreeable in the New Testament, they pounced upon it like an ant upon an aphis, quick to appropriate its limpid juice.

The phrase "a mere man " is the phrase which has oftener than any other expressed the contemptuous sense of the Trinitarian and other supernaturalists for the humanitarian conception of Jesus. There has always lurked in it a miserable fallacy; for into the " "the orthodox contestant has imported his own conception of humanity, and, so doing, it is no wonder that the Unitarian assertion of the

mere man

humanity of Jesus has seemed to him a great indignity. For his own conception of humanity has been the denial to it of any physical or intellectual or moral good. And for this conception, it must be allowed, he has had the warrant of the New Testament in no half-way fashion. It has been very common among Unitarians to insist that the traditional theology of Christendom is a perversion of the New Testament teachings. And so it often is, but not always. Hardly can it be shown that Augustine or Calvin painted human nature blacker than did Paul. Hardly can it be shown how any one could paint it blacker then he painted it. That Channing, more certain that his rational nature was from God than that any book was the expression of his will, and attending to his rational nature for the voice of truth as to no book whatever, clearly thought out and bravely published the Dignity of Human Nature, is not greatly to be wondered at, though it is an ample sign of the essential rationalism of his intellectual procedure. But that his Unitarian contemporaries generally should have accepted his doctrine of human nature, while immersed in barren textuality, while thinking it necessary to find chapter and verse for their opinions, is passing strange; and it should help us to be tolerant of those progressive orthodoxists who seek in the New Testament a warrant for their aberrations from the Westminster standards. One thing is certain: that, if the elder Unitarians imagined foolishly that Paul could be induced to testify for Channing's doctrine of the Dignity of Human Nature, there are many of the younger, and one at least whose years overlap by thirty-seven the years of Channing's life, who recognize that Paul's doctrine of human nature is absolutely antagonistic to their own. The one is Martineau, in whose recent work, sent forth in the absolutely sound and sweet maturity of his eighty-sixth year, Paul's doctrine of human nature is exhibited without any least disguise; and the nakedness of its deformity may well make the non-Revisionists of our Presbyterian assemblies say, "He has become as one of us." He has shown that theirs is the

New Testament,— at least, the Pauline doctrine; that Augustine and Gottschalk, Pascal and Calvin and Edwards, did not, and could not, exaggerate the utter hideousness and hopelessness of that. The progressive orthodoxists will doubtless say, "This is the most unkindest cut of all,- just as we were giving up our Calvinism for Dr. Martineau to say that the New Testament is for it. How will the non-revising heathen rage!" But it is all right. It is just as well for the sects to go on believing the traditional doctrines until they are prepared to reject them as Martineau does, not on account of their lack of Bible warrant, but on account of their intrinsic irrationality. Saint Paul is for the utter physical and intellectual and moral incapacity of human nature; he has reduced its baseness to its lowest terms. But what good reason is there for setting up the opinions of Saint Paul as a standard of belief for men who are alive when he has been full eighteen centuries dead? There is none. And this perception is the most significant. that appears in the ebullition of doctrinal change that is so lively at the present time. And the most surprising, the most comical, the most pathetic aspect of the matter is the endeavor of the liberals to make out a New Testament argument for their liberality. It is like the scramble of men to get on board a sinking ship when the solid land is easily within the reach of their endeavor, when they would drift to perfect peace and safety in a little while.

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Not only in times past has the orthodox contestant imported his own idea of humanity, the Calvinistic idea, into the phrase mere man," but the phrase itself is of his own invention. Those who have affirmed the simple humanity of Jesus have believed too much in humanity to qualify it with such a word as 66 mere," always a qualification of contempt, as when men talk of "mere morality," on which Emerson retorted that it was like saying, “Poor God, with nobody to help him!" The deification of Jesus, or his exaltation to a more than human standing, has always marked the tendency to a low view of human nature, or the survival of such a view in men's general thinking, even when

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