THE CONFLICTS OF FAITH.(')

THIS day and this occasion are consecrated equally to the contemplation of those truths most intimately related to the religious nature of man. These young persons whom I especially address are on the eve of the completion of a long and earnest course of secular study; and yet we desire to freight our latest admonitions with thoughts which shall fortify those faiths which take hold on the things unseen and unsecular. We live in an age the most glorious and most to be desired that has ever dawned in the history of man; and yet, in this advanced and progressive age, we hear a strange and unexpected clangor of arms in the world, proceeding from what at first appears to be a desperate conflict between the champions of religious faith and the champions of that learning which makes our age so glorious; and, in the midst of this din, we want to ask you to stop, and go with us to a mount of observation and contemplation, where we may dispassionately view the whole field of the facts, and discern, if possible, the meaning of the noisy conflict around us.

The Battle-fields of Faith have been many and bloody. They are scattered along the whole march of human history. No wonder the unphilosophic have deemed the conflict mortal, and more than once declared that either religion or science must go under; that they can not live together in the same world in peace. No wonder that, in a period of ecclesiastical ascend

(1) A baccalaureate address to the graduating class of 1874, in the College of the Liberal Arts of the Syracuse University.

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HUMAN POWERS IN THE CONFLICT.

ency, science has been clipped of her plumes and chained to an effete and fungoid carcass. No wonder, again, that, in an interval of strangulation of the voice of religious faith, secularism should have trampled religion in the mud.

But religion still lives; and science still marches on. What does it mean? In the economy of existence, may it not be that both are ordained to live? And may it not be that both are ordained to live in amity and mutual respect? Or is their incessant conflict an incident of the law of progress through antagonism? As affliction mellows the soul of man, and adversity whets its powers, perhaps religion and science are appointed to be mutually whetstones to each other, and their collisions are but the friction which sharpens and improves.

If we gaze for a moment at the human powers which prompt to this incessant struggle, what do we see? The religious phenomena of the race are as universal and obtrusive as the intellectual. The religious activities are equally uniform in their essential nature; the dominion of the religious instincts is equally controlling. Notions of supernatural creative power, of moral government, of personal responsibility, are as universal accompaniments of human life as notions of reality, of causality, of externality, or the distinction between self and not-self. The prompting to prayer and sacrifice, and the confidence in their efficacy, are factors of humanity as positive as the longing and the seeking of the infant for its food, or the impulse of the understanding to inquire after causes of things. The religious sentiments, it may be rigorously shown, are a native endowment of human nature. The promptings to prayer and worship, and the sense of accountability, by all the reasoning of Lubbock and Darwin, and Burton and Comte, have not been proved less a primordial constituent of man than are the intellectual discernments which stand correlated to another sphere of ideas.

We have, then, for our present purpose, two groups of intui

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS.

209 tions or feelings—the intellectual and the moral. Among the latter, let it be distinctly understood, must be ranged the sentiment of Deity, the sentiment of accountability, the sentiment of right and wrong, the sentiment of prayer, the sentiment of piacular offerings, the sentiment of future life. I am willing to denominate these feelings as sentiments. In the lowest conditions of the human mind, I confess they are but feeble sentiments; and yet I desire to impress the psychological fact, that the intuitions belonging to the intellectual group are also but feelings or affections of the mind. I desire also, by way of a caution, to remark, that the vague sensus numinis which I here denominate the sentiment of the supernatural is not our only avenue to the cognition of Deity.

Among the intuitions of the intellect must be ranked such as the following: A thing cannot exist and not exist at the same time. That which impresses my senses is external to me. It is also a reality. Every attribute implies substance; every effect, a cause. The whole is equal to the sum of all its parts, and is greater than any of its parts.

It is not my purpose to prove that there are realities corresponding to the primitive beliefs existing in the human soul. I desire merely to remind you-and that, only in passingthat we have the same ground for accepting the reality of the correlates of the ethical beliefs as of the intellectual beliefs; that the universal and ineradicable beliefs in divinity, right, and duty answer to verities as absolute as our beliefs in the things testified by perception or memory. To impeach one witness is to impeach all. To deny the validity of our primitive beliefs is to plunge us into the fearful abyss of nihilism, which is a suicide instigated by a metaphysical insanity.

We must admit that these two groups of mental powers are absolutely co-ordinate in legitimacy, in authority, in signifiThis proposition, which I am not attempting to-day to prove, can not be too profoundly pondered. The religious fac

cance.

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ETHICAL AND INTELLECTUAL POWERS.

ulties of man have a right to existence and activity. No apology is needed for their exercise-none for the assertion of their rights-none for the imperious sway which they exert, and always have exerted, over the lives of men. But, though equal and like in a certain sense, in another sense they are unequal and unlike. Each group of powers has its sphere. The conscience discerns the fact that right, and wrong, and duty, and accountability exist, and prompts unremittingly to some line of action in harmony with its discernments. But it does not determine what line of action this shall be. The intellect must discern the act most conformable to the law of right and duty. This is a judgment. The ethical nature makes discernments, and feels duty, and urges to right action; but these states all concern the abstract; the intellect supplies the concretes-the particular things-between which the discernments are to be made, by which the feeling of duty is aroused, or toward which action is to be urged. Moral discernments, duty, and obligation are verities of one class; particular acts or particular facts are verities of another. The ethical sentiments are a heart yearning for a consummation; the intellect is the eye which discovers the way to it. The heart of man cries out for God; it feels the being of God; it demands to be shown its God. The infant intellect opens its eye, and, behold! the glory of the sun is everywhere; the sun is the most powerful and glorious object within reach of the senses: the intellect introduces the sun to the religious consciousness as its God. The religious nature accepts it, and pays it worship. In another land, the supreme and terrible majesty of mountains impresses the intellect as the grandest manifestation in the visible world, and these become the gods on which the poor, blind heart wastes its adoration. Again, it is the ocean, or the sky, or the storm which the soul rests upon in its groping for the felt Deity. But

"The thoughts of men

Are widened with the process of the suns."

HOW CONFLICT ARISES.

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By-and-by, the intellect perceives that it does not belong to material objects to exert the attributes of divinity; and then the sun and moon and mountains become the manifestations or the abodes of divinity. The mind of the infant race could only picture Deity as a human form, with human passions; and, under such guises, it represented Deity to the religious nature. The fancies of anthropomorphism were hardly swept from the minds of the Jewish writers—or else they were permitted to employ anthropomorphic language to suit their utterances to the mental status of their times.

The religious nature is a set of impulses and accompanying beliefs in the reality of their objects. It enacts its laws and enforces them inexorably. No man may think he can evade them. The intellectual powers take cognizance of the natural truth which furnishes the means and modes of gratification of the ethical powers. If the intellect be undeveloped, the relig ious mandates may drive mankind to fetichism, to idolatry, to polytheism to juggernaut or the funeral pyre. The religious nature must act. If intellect fail to open a rational avenue for its exercise, it rushes blindly into imbecilities, superstition, bigotry, dogmatism, persecution. But it has a right to act according to the best light which reason affords; and when it acts thus, it acts rightly, it acts righteously. Many a poor Buddhist will enjoy a higher seat in heaven, I believe, than the enlightened in our own ranks who are struggling to think their religious promptings a superstition.

Hence arise the conflicts. The soul that has fixed its religious affections upon the sun or the mountain is loath to remove them when assured that neither sun nor mountain can possibly exert divine attributes. The intellect utters this disparaging declaration, and the religious nature revolts at such profanity. Out upon that knowledge which would rob us of our gods! Such unbridled daring must be restrained. The intellect beholds the religious nature paying its devotions to a senseless

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