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De Tocqueville on Religion.

[LECT.

great works, La Démocratie en Amerique, which has already passed through fifteen editions. It is really a treatise on the principles that should guide popular governments, and the elements that are needed for their stability. His other great work, L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution, was published in 1856. Several English translations of these works have appeared; but curiously enough, notwithstanding their extreme value as political treatises, I have in all my wanderings among the bookshops of Tokio, only once seen among their heterogeneous contents a single new or second-hand copy for sale.

All the works of de Tocqueville, says a recent critic,1 are written in a calm, dignified, and powerful style. An ardent lover of liberty, he is yet fair to all sides. His facts are unimpeachable, and the conclusions he draws are invariably logical. No more luminous, severe, dispassionate intellect ever applied itself to politics. It is hardly extravagant to call him the greatest political thinker of his day in France, perhaps even in Europe.

De Tocqueville then finds in the distinctively human attribute of hope the universally felt need among the nations of a religion. And this hope, it must be remembered, is essentially a personal and not an altruistic hope, for a man's own future must ever remain to him his chief concern. We are by nature servants with duties to perform and naturally hope for a reward; a doctrine characterized as selfish by men who fire rockets into the air that descend as sticks. Religion must therefore explain to man the grounds of his hope; must answer the two great questions-What are the moral attributes of the creator? and, What is the destiny of man?

To these questions Christianity has given the completest

1 Globe Encyclopedia, Edinburgh, 1879

IV.]

Christianity the best Solution.

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solutions, and those most satisfactory and salutary to the human heart. It replies to the first that God has sent His own well-beloved Son to the world to live among us and

"To teach his brethren and inspire

To suffer and to die."

Christ has made us all his brethren, sons of God, and if sons then heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ. Every Christian has therefore a standard, and that standard is Christ. He has one supreme master, the God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in us all. An end or object is thus given to every man, and a means of attaining it; the end a Christian must set before him is to glorify God after the manner of Christ. By glorify he understands to fulfil the purpose for which God intended him, and obey God's will however revealed.' He recognizes his position as a servant in creation; he acknowledges the fatherhood of God; he lives in hope of growing more like Him.

To the second question of man's destiny, so vaguely or insufficiently answered by other creeds, Christianity answers, fully and well. Christ in his person brought life and immortality to light. He solved the great problem of death, preserving and promising a higher unity in the dissolving of the earthly unity of body and spirit. Body and soul were both honoured by him, but neither at the expense of the other. The Egyptians had fondly embalmed the bodies of their dead, striving almost suc

cessfully against the ravages of a corruption and dissolution that meant to them the death of the soul also; an unnatural and misguided homage paid to the material part of man. The Brahmin, despising his animal covering of flesh and bones, tried to find satisfaction in the starving of his bodily appetites, and longed for the absorption of his personality into the universal spirit. But Christ taught that while our bodies are 'temples of God' and worthy of honour, they have only a symbolic

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Christianity of pedagogic value.

[LECT.

connection with the after life of man. Our vile bodies shall be changed into the fashion of a larger and more glorious personality. In the future our present bodies have no part, but yet there will be no loss of personality and no absorption of the spirit.

A religion which teaches two great fundamental truths like these is a moral force in the elevation of men and communities. The meanest serf by it becomes the brother of the noble, and looks forward to a time beyond death when they shall together enjoy the same immortality of higher being. A life of service and sonship, however numerous its trials and disappointments and whatever its close, never seems incomplete to him who lives it, for death is only a stage. In the beliefs of Christianity the common people find peace and contentment, and their rulers find a service and an end.

Now a certain school of philosophy, while admitting the pedagogic utility of religion to a half-civilized people, look upon it merely as a stage in the development of man, to be succeeded by a further and higher stage. The religious attitude to them is full of misconceptions and absurdities. The voluntary interference of a Saviour God is to them the belief of an age of partial light. Fuller light shows the mistake of believing in any thing incapable of experimental treatment. Auguste Comte considers that there are three stages in the development of man, and that Christianity is merely the culmination of the first or theological stage. After the theological comes the metaphysical, in which nature and its problems are explained à priori from subjective conceptions of the mind. But the highest development is the positive stage, in which man satisfies himself by observing the connection of phenomena, and dismisses every thing that is incapable of proof as unworthy his attention.

Conceptions therefore, like the immortality of the soul and the fatherhood of God, doctrines taught to us by authority and

IV.]

The theological attitude not a stage.

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to whose truth our souls may respond, but which are incapable of anything like experimental proof (except so far as history declares their high political utility), are swept away in a positivist philosophy, or interpreted in a purely rational manner. The brotherhood of all men in Christ becomes merely the equality of man; or, to give a negative but more satisfactory definition, the absence of political privilege; instead of the immortality of the soul we have the satisfaction of posthumous fame or a sublime acquiescence in material absorption. A love of humanity supersedes the love of God, and humanity in the abstract becomes an object of worship.

It is not necessary here to enter into a discussion regarding the tenableness of this threefold development theory, for few people actually believe in it. But it does concern us to know whether the theological attitude of mind is really a stage of development and not a permanent condition. Is there any reason to suppose that the positivist attitude of mind is the highest development of man intellectually, and not a mere phase whose incompleteness is proved by history? The positivist, demanding for a man's guidance merely the teachings of what seems to him individually the best morality, regards Christianity as an outworn structure of the past, on which the presence of a personal God casts an oppressive shadow. The Christian, on the other hand, considers the human individual nature under all circumstances incomplete, and a modern civilization tottering to its fall, in which the spiritual truths of his religion are not reverenced and followed.

It must be confessed that very many in Christian lands, who are deservedly respected and honoured, content themselves with a simple morality and pay only an outward respect to religion. Their creed, attractive enough when viewed merely by itself, has been put into simple poetic form by Leigh Hunt in his poem of Abou Ben Adhem:

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Simple morality inadequate.

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase)
Awoke one night from a dream of peace,
And saw within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou ?"-The vision raised its head,
And, with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou; "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel.-Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,

And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!

[LECT.

Here love of one's fellow men is exalted above love to God, or held to supersede it as the greater includes and absorbs the less. Now history and experience all point to the very reverse of this, that only in conscious love of God does humanity find its highest expression. The Christian injunction puts the matter in the right and natural order,- Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.' This is the first commandment. And the second is like this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' A love of one's fellow men, undirected by the recognition of divine service in its conduct and expression, is found within only a limited sphere, and has never proved an impulsive and controlling power in any man or body of men. Leigh Hunt's distinction is an imposible one in practical realization. An appeal may be made to the past; all the great loving hearts of the past have loved their fellows because they first loved God. Even the beggar recognizes the fact: "Something for a blind man, for the love of God!" We