World Parliament of Religions Scrapbook 003

              #003 World Parliament of Religions Scrapbook, p. 133

The first literary products of Christianity,
apart from those of its founder, were the epis-
tles of St. Paul. It is difficult at present so to
separate them from the veneration in which
they are held as to look at them in a free and
critical way. A prevailing dogma of inspiration
shuts us out from both their meaning and their
excellence as compositions.
         Greek Theology.
I must also pass by the Latin fathers who dis-
placed the Greek conception of Christianity and
put in its place one of local origin, which domi-
nated the church for more than a thousand
years, but never won the conquest over litera-
ture which the Greek fathers had achieved
through their greater openness to the ancient
Greek authors, the chief original fountain of
thought and art. The Greeks produced philoso-
phies, the Romans systems.
What would have been the result if the Greek
mythology, with its friendly relations to Greek
literature and philosophy, had it not been sup-
planted by the Latin theology devoid of a liter-
ary background, and antagonizing the spirit of
literature, cannot be told. Heresy might have
overwhelmed the church, and Christianity might
have been refined into a beautiful mysticism or
a forceless philosophy unfit to cope with the
rough world.
The church sung its hymns of faith, but no
great spirit poured itself out in song or spake
aloud for human nature.
I hasten to name the exception—Dante, "the
spokesman of ten silent centuries," as Carlyle
called him—the first, if not the greatest, name
in Christian literature.
Dante condemned as a poet what he would
have built up as a son of the church. He meant
to be constructive; he was revolutionary. By
portraying the ideal he revealed the hopeless-
ness of the actual church. He was full of er-
rancy—political, ecclesiastical, theological—all
easily separable from the poet and the poem,
but at bottom he was thoroughly true and pro-
foundly Christian.
         Dante's Inspiration.
Dante's inspiration consists largely in the ab-
soluteness of his ethical and spiritual percep-
tions, and as such they are essentially Christian.
Greek in his formal treatment of penalty, he
goes beyond the Greek, and is distinctly Chris-
tian in his conception of God and of sin. In the
purgatory and paradise he enters a world un-
known outside of Chr stian thought. In the
Greek tragedies mistake is equivalent to sin and
crime, and it led to the same doom, but the "In-
ferno"—with a few exceptions made in the in-
terest of the church—contains only sinners.
Dante came both too early and too late to be
caught in the meshes of dogmatism; the church
and not dogma was in the ascendant.
I speak at length of Dante because through
him Christianity first thoroughly entrenched
itself in literature, and also because the divine
comedy is one of the masterpieces of human
composition and also the formost product of
Christian literature.
The strong point in Dante is that he ingrafted
into literature fhe purgatorial character of sin;
I do not say the dogma of purgatory. Whatever
Protestant theology had done with this truth,
Protestant literature has preserved it, and, next
to love, made it the leading factor in its chief
imaginative works.
          As a Mouthpiece.
In Dante it was settled that henceforth Chris-
tianity should have literature for a mouthpiece.
We must look for Christianity in literature not
as though listening to one singer after another,
but rather to a whole choir. The Fifth sym-
phony cannot be rendered by a violin or trumpet,
but only by the whole orchestra.
The range is wide and long. It reaches
from Dante to Whittier; from Shake-
speare to Burns and Browning;
from Spencer to Longfellow and Lowell; from
Cowper to Shelley and Wordsworth; from Mil-
ton to Matthew Arnold; from Bunyan to Haw-
thorne and Victor Hugo and Tolstoi; from
Thomas a Kempis and Pascal to Kant and Jona-
than Edwards and Lessing and Schliermacher
and Coleridge and Maurice and Martineau and
Robertson and Fairbairn; from Jeremy Taylor
and South and Barrow and the Cambridge
Platonists to Emerson and Amial and Carlyle;
from Bacon to Lotze; from Addison and Johnson
to Goethe and Scott and Thackery and Dickens
and George Eliot. Pardon the long but still
scant list. 
         Shakespeare's Motive.
Christ is more than a Judean slain on Calvary;
Christ is humanity as it is evolving under the
power and grace of God, and any book touched
by the inspiration of this fact belongs to Chris-
tian literature. If the predominant motive of
Shakespeare were sought in his own lines it 
would be the couplet in Henry V.:
"There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distill it out--"
a sentiment one with the Christian estimate of
this world and indicative of its process.
When God opens the eyes of a man very wide
it is to be expected that he will see him and his
Christ. It is not a haphazard universe; mind is
correlated to fact; great minds do not fail to see
great facts.
Goethe is to be regarded as one in whom
Christianity won a victory. I have spoken at
length of Goethe, not because he is an inter-
preter of Christianity in literature, but because
he illustrates the relation to Christianity of cer-
tain authors who are usually counted as doubt-
ful, or as on the wrong side of faith. An earnest
skeptic is often the best man to find the ob-
scured path of faith. Those who always lie "in
Abraham's bosom" do not readily catch the tone
of the eternal waters as they break on the shores
of time.
There is no doubt that the church has relied
too exclusively upon the miracles; Arnold re-
minds it that the substance of Christianity does
not consist of miracles. It had come to worship
the Bible as a fetich, and to fill it with all sorts
of magical meanings and forced dogmas—the
false and nearly fatal fruit of the reformation,
Arnold dealt the superstition a heavy blow that
undoubtedly strained the faith of many, but it is
with such violence that the kingdom of heaven
is brought in. When God lets loose a thinker in
the world there is always a good deal of de-
struction.
          Ethical Conceptions.
In tracing our subject historically it is inter-
esting to note a certain progress or order of de-
velopment, especially in the poets, in the treat-
ment of Christianity at the hands of literature.
In Chaucer and Shakespeare we have a broad,
ethical conception of it, free from dogma and
ecclesiasticism. The former mildly rebuked the
evils and follies of the church, but stood for the
plain and simple virtues, and gave a picture of a
parish minister which no modern conception
has superseded. The latter denied nothing, as-
serted nothing concerning either church or
dogma, keeping in the higher region of life, but
it was life permeated with the humanity and
freedom of Christianity.
Milton represents the force of the Puritan
movement; it swept him off his feet, a thing that
seldom happens to a poet. It captured him not
only as a statesman but as a poet, and so he sang
its theology in verse unapproachably lofty, but
without corresponding spiritual reality.
Scarcely any "books that are books" appear
in English type but they are either heavily
charged with Christian humanity and sentiment,
or they debate some problem of faith or some
question of morals.
           Love Enthroned.
Christianity is a spirit that seeks to inform
everything with which it comes in contact; the
process has had clear and growing illustration in
the poets of the century. In one way or another
they have striven to enthrone love in man and
for man as the supreme law, and they have
found this law in God, who works in righteous-
ness for its fulfillment.
Tennyson speaks on the level of our finite
hearts, believes and doubts with us, debates the
problems of faith with us, and such victories as
he wins are also ours. Browning leaves us be-
hind as he storms his way into the heaven of his
unclouded hope, but Tennyson stays with us in a
world which, being such as it is, is never without
a shadow.
The most interesting fact in connection with
our subject is the thorough discussion Chris-
tianity is now undergoing in literature. The
lesson taught by Tennyson was also taught 
by Job; it was taught and lived out by Christ.
The value of these restatements of Christian-
ity, especially by the poets, is beyond estimate.
They are the real defenders of the faith, the
prophets and priests whose succession never
fails.
1. Literature interprets Christianity correctly
for the plain reason that both are keyed to the
spirit.
2. Literature stands squarely upon humanity
and insists upon it on ethical grounds and for
ethical ends—and this is essential Christianity.
3. Literature in its highest forms is unworldly.
4. The greater literature is prophetic and
optimistic.
5. Literature in its higher ranges is the cor-
rection of poor thinking.
The theology of the West, with the Western
passion for clearness and immediate effective-
ness, is mechanical and prosaic; it pleases the
ordinary mind and therefore a democratic age
insists on it; it is a good tool for priestcraft; it
is easily defended by formal logic, but it does
not satisfy the thinker and it is abhorrent to the
poet.
For the most part the greater names in litera-
ture have been true to Christ, and it is the
Christ in them that has corrected theology.
It was nearly 1 o'clock when one of the
largest and most enthusiastic audiences of
the week adjourned till 2 o'clock.
           AFTERNOON SESSION
  Papers by Rev. Milton S. Terry, Mrs. Jo-
         sephine Lazarus, and Others.
Promptly at 2:30 o'clock Judge Bonney's
gavel fell and the great audience gradually
dropped into an attitude of attention. The
chairman of the afternoon session was Rev.
Dr. George Dana Boardman. The first sub-
ject on the programme, "Study of the Sacred
Books of the World as Literature," was
presented by Rev. Milton S. Terry, D. D.,
professor in the Northwestern university.
The substantial points of Professor Terry's
discussion of the subject were as follows:
There have been and probably yet exist some
isolated tribes of men who imagine that the sun
rises and sets for their sole benefit. We say:
How circumscribed their vision; how narrow
their world! But the same may be said of any
one who is so circumscribed by the conditions of
race and language in which he has been reared
that he has no knowledge or appreciation of
lands, religions, and literatures which differ
from his own. I am a Christian, and must needs
look at things from a Christian point of view. I
am a Christian; therefore I think there is noth-
ing human or divine in any literature of the
World that I can afford to ignore.
My task is to speak of the "sacred books of
the world" as so much various literature.
            The Tao-teh King.
I commence with a quotation from the treatise
of the old Chinese philosopher, Laotsze, where
he gives utterance to his conception of the in-
finite. The twenty-fifth chapter, as translated
by John Chalmers, reads thus: "There was
Something chaotic in nature which existed be-
fore heaven and earth. It was still. It was
void. It stood alone and was not changed. It
pervaded everywhere and was not endangered.
It may be regarded as the mother of the uni-
verse. I know not its name, but give it
the title of Tao. If I am forced to make
a name for it, I say it is Great;
being great, I say that it passes
away; passing away, I say that it is far off; be-
ing far off, I say that it returns. Now Tao is
great: heaven is great; a king is great. In the
universe there are four greatnesses, and a king
is one of them. Man takes his law from the
earth; the earth takes its law from heaven;
heaven takes its law from Tao, and Tao takes
its law from what it is in itself.
Now it is not the theology of this passage, nor
its cosmology, that we put forward; but rather
its grand poetic concepts. Here is the produc-
tion of an ancient sage, born six hundred years
before the Christian era.
           The Hymn of Creation.
I select next the famous hymn of Creation
from the Rigveda. He looked out on a mist-
wrapped ocean of being, and his soul was filled
with strong desire to know its secrets:
"Then there was neither being nor non-being.
The atmosphere was not, nor sky above it;
What covered all, and where, by what protected?
Was there the fathomless abyss of waters?
When neither death nor deathlessness existed;
Of day and night there was yet no distinction.
Alone that One breathed calmly, self-supported.
Other than It was none, nor aught above It.
Darkness there was at first in darkness hidden;
This universe was undistinguished water.
That which is void and emptiness lay hidden
Alone by power of fervor was developed.
Then for the first time there arose desire,
Which was the primal germ of mind within it,
And sages, searching in their heart, discovered
In nothing the connecting bond of being.
Who is it knows? Who here can tell us surely
From what and how this universe has risen?
And whether not till after it the gods lived?
Who, then, can know from what it has arisen?
The source from which this universe has risen,
And whether it was made or uncreated,
He only knows, who from the highest heaven
Rules, the all-seeing Lord—or, does not He
know?"
The old Scandinavians had also in their sacred
book "the Elder Edda," a song of the prophet-
ess, who told the story of creation.
I need not quote, but only allude to the Chal-
dean account of creation recently deciphered
from the monuments, and the opening chapter
of Genesis, which contains what modern scholars
are given to calling the "Hebrew Poem of Crea-
tion."
Each composition bears the mark of an indi-
vidual genius. He may, and probably does in
every case, express the current belief or tradi-
tion of his nation, but his description reveals a
human mind wrestling with the mysterious
problems of the world, and suggesting, if not
announcing, some solution.
              The Veda.
I turn now to the great collection of ancient
Indian songs known as the Rigveda. As a body
of sacred literature they are especially expres-
sive of a childlike intuition of nature.
The world of sight and sense is full of God, and
earth and sky and waters, and all visible forms
of natural beauty or terror are instinct with in-
visible forces, which are colored as things of life.
             The Tripitaka.
The sacred scriptures of Buddhism comprise
three immense collections known as the tripi-
taka or "three baskets." One of these contains
the discourse of Buddha, another treats of
doctrines and metaphysics, and another is de-
voted to ethics and discipline. In bulk these
writings rival all that was ever included under
the title of Veda, and contain more than seven