ATHEISM AND THE CHURCH. 629 



the new religion preached that the great exterior existence, the Some- 

 thing Is, the awful " I am," can alone be presented intelligibly to man. 

 For " No man shall see Jehovah and live," says the Old Testament : 

 " No man hath seen God at any time," says the New Testament ; the 

 Son of man, who is etf rov koXttov tov Trarpbg ' — projected on the bosom 

 of the absolute " I am " — he hath declared him. 



Of this language in St. John's Gospel, it is obvious that Hegel's 

 doctrine — echoed afterward by Comte and the positivists — is a sort 

 of variation set in a lower key. In humanity, said he, the divine idea 

 emerges from the material and the bestial into the self-conscious. 

 Humanity presents us with the best we can ever know of the divine. 

 In " the Son of man " that something which lies behind, and which no 

 man can attain to, becomes incarnate, visible, imaginable. But it can 

 not surely be meant by these philosophers that in the sons of men 

 taken at hajy-hazard the Divinity, the great Cosmic Unknown, is best 

 presented to us. It can not possibly be maintained that in the Chinese 

 swarming on their canals, in the hideous savages of Polynesia, or in 

 the mobs of our great European capitals, the " Sometliing is " can be 

 effectively studied, idealized, adored. No, it were surely a truer state- 

 ment that humanity concentrated in its very purest known form, and 

 refined as much as may be from all its animalism, were the clear lens 

 (as it were) through which to contemplate the great Cosmic Power be- 

 yond. It is, therefore, a SON of man, and not the ordinary sons of men, 

 that we require to aid our minds and uplift our aspirations. Mankind 

 is hardly to be saved from retrograde evolution by superciliously look- 

 ing round upon a myriad of mediocre realities. It must be helped on, 

 if at all, by a new variety in our species suddenly putting forth in our 

 midst, attracting wide attention, securing descendants, and offering an 

 ideal, a goal in advance, toward which effort and conflict shall tend. 

 We must be won over from our worldly lusts and our animal propensi- 

 ties by engaging our hearts on higher objects. We must learn a lesson 

 in practical morals from the youth who is redeemed from rude boyhood 

 and coarse selfishness by love. We must allow the latent spark of 

 moral desire to be fanned into a flame, and, by the enkindling admira- 

 tion of a human beauty above the plane of character hitherto attained 

 by man, to consume away the animal dross and prepare for new en- 

 vironments that may be in store for us. What student does not know 

 how the heat of love for truth not yet attained breaks up a heap of pre- 

 judices and fixed ideas, and gives a sort of molecular instability to the 

 mind, preparing it for the most surprising transformations ? Who has 

 not observed the development of almost a new eye for color, or a new 

 ear for refinements in sound, by the mere constant presentation of a 

 higher assthetic ideal ? And just in the same way, who that knows 

 anything of mankind can have failed to perceive that the only success- 

 ful method by which character is permanently improved is by employ- 



1 On the Father's bosom. 



