SPIRITUAL SABBATHISM

by the late

A.H. Lewis D.D., LL.D.

Author of "Paganism Surviving in Christianity"

"A Critical History of Sunday Legislation" etc.

THIS BOOK, THE LAST WORK OF

Abram Herbert Lewis

For many years the corresponding secretary of the American Sabbath Tract Society, is fraternally dedicated to all lovers of truth. It is published by the Society not only as a contribution to the discussion of a great religious issue, but also as an affectionate tribute to the author's Christian manhood, his ripe scholarship, and his lifelong labors for the recognition of the Sabbath of Jehovah, Sabbath of Jesus, the Christ.

ara apoleipetai sabbatismos to lao tou Theo. Hebrews iv, 9.

By the American Sabbath Tract Society, Plainfield, New Jersey

Reprinted 1998

By The Bible Sabbath Association

3316 Alberta Drive

Gillette, Wyoming 82718

United States of America

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to David Hill of Queensland, Australia, for transcribing and editing this book.

Abram H. Lewis was the most noted Sabbatarian writer of the Nineteenth Century. This, his last book, capped a distinguished career promoting the day that the Creator made holy. May we continue to observe the Sabbath rest, which is truly a picture and object lesson of the Millennial Kingdom.

Richard C. Nickels

3316 Alberta Drive

Gillette, Wyoming 82718

This book is in the public domain. For a printed copy, or computer disk, please write: The Bible Sabbath Association, 3316 Alberta Drive, Gillette, WY 82718.

PREFACE

EDITORIAL NOTE

I. THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL

§1. Importance of the contrast

§2. The contrast in animism

§3. The contrast in mythology

§4. The contrast in astrology

§5. The contrast in religion

§6. The contrast in philosophy

§7. The intellectual dilemma

II. BIBLICAL SABBATHISM

§8. The spiritual power of Hebraism

§9. The fourth commandment

§10. The work and the rest of God

§11. Creation and redemption

§12. The root of authority

§13. The Sabbathism of the Psalms

§14. The Pharisees

§15. The Christ

III. NO-SABBATHISM AND THE SUNDAY

§16. The resurrection of the sun

§17. The Sunday of Mithra

§18. Mythology re-enters as Gnosticism

§19. Jehovah rejected as the Demiurge

§20. Justin, Tertullian, the Didache

§21. Sunday legislation begins

IV. SABBATARIANISM

§22. Roman Catholic

§23. Rejected by the Reformers

§24. Puritan

V. THE PRESENT SITUATION

§25. The decay of Sunday

§26. How can we attain Spiritual Sabbathism?

§27. Protestants must lead

APPENDIX: Notes and References

PREFACE

Crises are inevitable, for they are ordained of God. History is filled with them. All great reforms come by crises, for evil grows strong while men sleep. Escape from crises is impossible. God is in them, and eternal verities would be forgotten but for them. All great movements, whether political, social, or religious, are born in some crisis in which elements of the outgrown are destroyed. Religious issues remain unsettled until they are settled right, that is, on spiritual grounds.

Three great crises in the Sabbath question have appeared in history, as the present work will show. A fourth crisis is at hand. The key to the present situation is a spiritual key. The coming epoch is to be met on higher ground than was occupied at any time in the past history of Christianity. It demands an upward step so important that it must be called revolutionary as well as evolutionary. The entire Sabbath question calls for a new spiritual basis -- new in comparison with positions hitherto taken by Christians.

The hour demands clearness of conviction concerning fundamental and eternal spiritual values. Dogmatism is useless, compromises are delusive. In the presence of unspiritual and irreligious holidayism, Protestant theories concerning the Sabbath question are on trial before the grand jury of Christian history. Indictment has begun. History is an impartial and relentless judge, and the inexorable logic of events is an unbribable executive officer. The court is permanently open, and the trial will be finished.

Our time is burdened with materialistic philosophy and "scientific" unfaith. The popular call is for immediate tests and demonstrated finality. Spirituality and the eternal verities are out of date, for they can neither be verified in the laboratory nor cashed at the bank. If you admit to men of practical and materialistic temper that spirituality and the eternal verities are hard to define, you are regarded as defending the ghostly relics of primitive thought. They can not understand that the struggle for spirituality is not finished, that it is the chief end of man, and that until it is finished the word will never be fully definable. To define spirituality to a materialistic temperament is like defining fatherhood to a reckless boy. You can tell him that it is something infinitely noble and beautiful which he has not yet attained, and which no man fully appreciates; that is about all.

But at such a time as this it must be clearer than ever before to any religiously minded person that all questions which are at bottom spiritual are important. One of these is the question of Sabbath observance. Spiritually apprehended, Sabbathism becomes of timely, vital, practical significance to the twentieth century. Spiritually discerned, the question of Sabbath reform becomes a large question. It no longer appears a small, or legalistic, or casuistical, or ceremonial issue. It instantly transcends sectarianism. It becomes, not a question of formal deeds, but a question as to what men shall be at heart. It is inseparable from the struggle between flesh and spirit, between naturalism and a spiritual philosophy of life. It is the question whether time is merely a metaphysical puzzle, or whether men can transcend time by consecrating it, and live in the eternal while yet in time. Sabbath reform in the twentieth century can mean nothing less than this. In this century three words are on trial for their life the words "sacred," "eternal," and "Sabbath." Most Christians probably think that the fate of the last word has already been settled adversely, and that of the first two favorably. But to think so is to be at ease in Zion; it is to be ignorant of the powerful silent influences which are slowly substituting other terms, "more scientific" terms, for "sacred", and are modifying "eternal" till it will fit a godless universe.

In preparing to write this book I sent certain inquiries to men of various denominational connections, unlike my own. Thirty answers are before me, from the ablest representatives of Protestant Christianity, teachers in the strongest theological seminaries in the United States. I wrote:

"DEAR BROTHER:

"I am at work on a book on the religious and spiritual value of Sabbathism. My purpose is to aid, in uplifting the question of Sabbath reform to a higher plane, and to show that Sabbath observance has the highest pragmatic value in the development of Christian character and spiritual life. In view of the vital interest involved, I venture to ask your aid through your own helpful suggestions and through such books or other literature as you may recommend. I seek the broadest view touching Sabbath observance and Sabbathism, whether the seventh day or the first day be considered as sacred, or whether all days be considered equal and alike in the matter of Sabbath observance. Questions: (1) Is Sabbath observance an essential element in Christianity? (2) Do Protestants need a higher estimate of Sabbath observance and a better conception of its value in developing and promoting spiritual life? (3) If these are needed, how can they be attained? (4) Considering present tendencies, what results are likely to come if a higher estimate of the religious and spiritual value of Sabbath observance is not secured?"

All the answers to the first question were in the affirmative. In some cases the writers defined "essential" negatively, saying that Sabbath observance -- based on legislation human or divine -- is not essential as faith in Christ is essential, but that in its practical, vital relations to the life, growth, and perpetuity of the Christian church, it is essential. In most of the answers it was held or implied that no specific day of the week is important, one day in seven being sufficient.

The answers to the second question were emphatically in the affirmative. The answers to the third question called for clear, vigorous, and frequent instruction from Protestant pulpits concerning the religious value of Sabbath observance. It was held that fearless preaching of fundamental doctrines concerning sin and righteousness, grace and repentance, would tone up weak consciences and promote Sabbath observance.

The answers to the fourth question showed a clear consensus of opinion that present tendencies toward Sabbathlessness must result disastrously to Christianity. "Physical and spiritual decline will, I fear, result to individuals, communities, and nations." "There will be a decline of spiritual power, increase of worldliness, postponement of the millennium." "The growth of the church will be retarded and its life endangered." "Unless the Sabbath is properly appreciated and observed in our American life, our institutions will be imperiled. The loss of the Sabbath will mean, in large part, the loss of our civilization." "It is certain, in my judgment, that, if Sabbath observance is not carefully maintained, the spiritual life of the church will be seriously impaired." "The consequence would be a less vital Christianity." "If a better and more general observance of the Sabbath be not secured, we are certain to see, and speedily, the decline of spiritual religion, then the decay of morality, then the subversion of our civil liberty." "There will result nervous prostration of our race, further inroads upon the social rights of those who toil, and dulling of the ethical and religious instincts." "There will be increase of present stress and strain, and a greater number of suicides." "The danger seems to me that we shall become a nation of materialists." "I regret the lack of interest in these things. I share the consequent perplexity of the day. It seems futile to say that we have fallen upon a strange period, in which the spirit of the times is at once educational and unspiritual."

These answers enable us to see the situation through the eyes of men who are thoughtful concerning the great issues involved. They ought to arrest attention, compel consideration, and induce action on the part of Christian men, and especially Christian leaders.

If there is to be Sabbath reform, we can all agree that its watchword must be, Back to Christ! Around no other banner can we rally. From no other source can we derive the tremendous energy which will be needed. There are differences of opinion as to Christ's Sabbathism, and of the relation of his resurrection to the Sabbath. But there can be no question that if there is to be cooperation or reform, the person of the Christ must be made central.

Our task, then, since the question of sacred time is involved, must be nothing less than to consider anew the concepts of the temporal and the eternal as related to the Christ. To do this we must begin with a clear perception of the importance of both experiences -- that of time and that of eternity; we must trace the antithesis in religious history and in philosophy, and decide how, if at all, there may be a living reconciliation between the concepts of time and eternity; we must look to the Scriptures for an interpretation of the problem and its profound relation to the Christ. This being done, we shall be in a position to estimate the subsequent history of Christianity, and to meet the present situation. Shall we indeed find in the Christ the very spirit and secret of Spiritual Sabbathism, or has Christianity pinned its faith to an unimportant Jewish reformer named Jesus?

EDITORIAL NOTE

When the death of the lamented author of this book occurred, November 3, 1908, the first draft had been completed and the revision begun. The work of revision has been completed by one of the author's executors, his son, Mr. E. H. Lewis. It was the editor's understanding that the revision was to include the expansion of the earlier chapters and the condensation of the later chapters. To this task, therefore, he has applied himself, though realizing that unconscious changes of style were often unavoidable. At his request the undersigned committee of the publishers have compared the completed work with the first draft, and find that the revision has been performed with conscientious regard to the spirit and purpose of the author.

Attention is called to the Appendix. This is designed to contain all necessary notes and references. But neither footnotes nor index-numbers will be found in the text, since it is desired that the reader's attention shall not needlessly be diverted from the argument.

THEO. L. GARDINER,

Editor of The Sabbath Recorder.

ARTHUR E. MAIN,

Dean of Alfred Theological Seminary.

WILLIAM C. DALAND,

President of Milton College.

Spiritual Sabbathism

CHAPTER I

THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL

§1. Importance of the contrast. -- The antithesis between the transitory and the enduring is possibly the most important contrast used by man. Every practical value can be read in terms of these two words. Whatever worth inheret in money or progress or law or goodness or affection -- that worth can in some sense be measured by its degree of permanence in time.

Mystics and men of affairs have alike admitted this. Kings have been great in proportion as they built for the future. States have been valuable in proportion as they were stable. Scripture is precious, because, though the grass withereth and the flower fadeth, the words of God have endured. Song has been cherished because it permanently enshrined some human joy, or "some natural sorrow, loss, or pain which has been and may be again." Great pictures have become too dear to be sold, because they have caught the happy moment, or the beloved face, or the thrilling ideal, out of the stream of time, and made it forever fair and young. Sculpture still brings to us a sense of divine repose, for the Greeks knew how to set eternity in the brows and eyes of Jove. And, conversely, great men were great because they brought a permanent purpose to bear upon the transitory moment. They have known that the eternal is always applicable here and now, in these troublous hours and this obscure place. "A moment," said Goethe, "can be made representative of eternity."* "This is eternal life," said our Lord.

At the heart of every labor worthy of a man there is an effort to endow and dignify the fleeting moment with permanent value. It is something for Cheops to have built thirteen acres of stone into a tomb -- though now the tomb is empty. It is something for Homer to have planted Olympus in the midst of time, even though his beautiful immortals perished after one thousand of the world's many thousand years. It is something for Heraclitus**[ ] to have left us the lasting verses which lament that nothing lasts. It is more to have formed an eternal purpose like Paul's, and to have endured to the end. But define the eternal how you will, you can not oust it from art, or morality, or statecraft -- much less from religion. The essence of valuable living is in some way to bring time and eternity together; to relate them; to make them interpenetrate.

When we speculate systematically about time and eternity, we meet with tremendous technical problems, and are in danger of losing the practical importance of the contrast. In this book we are not to speculate, but we are to summarize some of the speculations of the past in order to emphasize two distinctions -- that between speculation and spirituality, and that, between carnal living and spiritual living. Let there be no mistake as to the final purpose and upshot of our inquiry. It is intensely practical. Though at times the distinctions made may seem unreal, they are such as concern the battle of life, and in that battle they are to be tested. We seek a practical adjustment of the temporal and the eternal. The search is not new. From the first minute of recorded time the search has been going on, and the path of it is marked not only by hope and joy but by blood and tears.

We begin our search with an examination of primitive thought. We ask how "savages" have dimly struggled upward toward the contrast between the temporal and the eternal. We shall use the headings “animism”[1] “mythology,” and "astrology," though these are all phases of the same thing. By animism we shall mean the peopling of nature with a multitude of souls; by mythology, the effort of primitive men to explain the origin of things; by astrology, the effort to relate the enduring heavenly bodies to the practical needs of mortal man.

The crudeness and grossness of primitive thought can not hide a certain thread of the spiritually permanent in that thought. Why it was necessary for man to develop slowly in time it is not for us to say; it is God's method for man, and only the spiritual philosophy of the future can explain it. But the law is certain -- first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. And it is a very great error to lament the principle. The whole of life, the joy of it as well as the sorrow, springs from the upward struggle. The helpless babe does not suggest the great man which he may become within a half century of earth's years, but the potencies of greatness are in the babe. In the childhood of the race, too, there are spiritual potencies. In the tropical forest of primitive thought there is one tree which overtops the rest. The tangled undergrowth is primitive knowledge; the towering tree is the aspiration of man toward God.

From the beginning there is communion of man with God. It is such communion as the little child may hold with his father -- a communication full of minor misunderstandings but of essential reality. Primitive thought is God's spiritual kindergarten for the race. The very likeness which exists in all primitive thought shows this. Need is one, the world over. Naturalistic philosophy asserts that the brain is a machine which grinds out the same phenomena, wherever it is. But men are not automata. God has made of one blood all men to dwell upon the earth, and he is their God. If we are to be likened to mechanisms at all, let us be likened to the instruments of wireless telegraphy. There is some spiritual attunement among all men, and between each one and God. There must be intercommunication; continents can not divide us, nor the deep abyss of heaven.

§2. The contrast in animism. -- Viewed as animism, primitive thought peoples nature with innumerable minds. Once the world was full of “momentary” gods -- parts of it still are. The savage imagines a soul to rest for a moment in an object, and so consecrate it. The fetish is preserved in the hope that the soul may again return, and it is sometimes threatened with punishment if the soul fails to return. At the next stage of development, the more important objects of nature are hallowed by the permanent residence of a god. What is there in nature which has not, at some time, in some place, in some sense been considered sacred? Sun, moon, stars, sky, air, clouds, thunder, water, ocean, lakes, rivers, springs, wells, earth, mountains, high places, caverns, stones, trees, graves, houses, hours, days, weeks, months, years, the chieftain, the king, the medicine man, the shaman, the priest, the woman consecrated to a god, statues, images, amulets, the dishes touched by a consecrated person, the ant, the ass, the bat, the bear, the bee, the beetle, the bull, the butterfly, the cat, the cow, the coyote, the crab, the crocodile, the crow, the deer, the dog -- and so on through the alphabet of animals -- all these things and more have been held sacred. And what has been the fate of most of them? The sacredness of most of these things has been destroyed by time. They were all perceived at last to have been but momentary gods, and therefore not gods at all. Time, in large amounts, is the essence of any contract with a god. And time is precisely what the false gods have not been able to assure; there came a day for each when they could not keep their promise.

This is why so many scientific men have no confidence in the future of any religion. They say that religion has had its turn at the wheel,[2] and has failed to guide men into the haven. They say that time has overthrown the proudest religious systems of antiquity, and will strip the last vestige of sacredness from those which now exist. They say that animism and religion are merely obsolete science.

If these were mere assertions of polemists, we might cheerfully pass them by. But the historical tendency is obvious and undeniable. Whatever our own security of belief, we can not escape the question as to the future fate of the sentiment of sacredness. The great question of the future is whether anything is sacred or can be made sacred.

In civilized countries no animal is today considered sacred, and many species have been exterminated. In Christian lands, as in non-Christian, the person of the king was once considered sacred; now it is caricatured in popular journals. We mourn in American youth the lack of reverence, but why in youth alone? "Reverence," said a serious and able Englishman to Professor Bosanquet, “is a thing I can not understand.”[3] I suppose he meant that in science, in politics, in religion, nothing is intrinsically sacred; everything must submit to reason. To this serious and able Englishman reason was probably to be revered -- though one must speak with caution as to just what he meant.

But consider again the divine right of kings, and the sacredness of their persons. Do we imagine that the sentiment which produced that faith was a slight force? On the contrary, it dates back to a time when sacredness was the greatest of forces.

It dates back to the taboo. A thing tabooed is at once blessed and cursed, it is sacrosanct. Amid such things the savage lived. Every act of his life was governed by them. Religion, such as it was, was the very essence of his conduct. Half of the things that we do were forbidden him. If by accident he ate of the chieftain's food, which is sacrosanct, and then learned whose food it was, he died of fear. If the medicine man cursed him, the same result followed. We can catch glimpses of this terrible energy in the case of peoples suddenly civilized. A few years ago the person of the Mikado was sacrosanct, and any dish that he touched must be broken after he used it, must be broken because a taboo dish is dangerous. Before the Japanese have lost this sense of the Mikado's sacredness, before they have ceased to feel that he may demand the life of any subject, before he has ceased to symbolize all that is dear to his subjects -- a great war comes. The Japanese have meantime suddenly learned chemistry, engineering, modern military practice. Young Japan goes forth to die for the Emperor, and ends by routing a Christian nation's forces. But for what will Japan fight when the Mikado shall no longer have the sacred right to command men's lives? The Japanese have embraced science. But science, as Laplace said, does not need the hypothesis of God, and to scientific method nothing is intrinsically sacred. The world's debt to science is beyond calculation, but it is awkward that the principle of Laplace fits crime as neatly as it fits science. Let us grant that for free and unimpeded progress of science the hypothesis of God is not needed. We must also grant that the hypothesis of God is not needed for the free and unimpeded progress of crime. It is awkward company for so admirable a personage as science to be in. We can not infer that progress in science means progress in crime. Therefore we must assume that in proportion as science rejects the idea of sacredness she offers or recognizes some substitute for it. What will that substitute be? What will the scientific Japanese of the future die for? Will it be for policy? utility? the scientifically advisable? There is a saying of the Christ that the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath day. And now comes a school of distinguished Aramaic scholars who assure us that in the language of Christ "Son of man" means simply "man."[4] I do not accept this version of the word. But the idea that man is the lord of the Sabbath is an idea so congenial to contemporary thought that in logic its defenders should extend it to every institution which claims divine sanction. If man is lord of one religious institution, why not of all? Why should marriage be celebrated by priests, or burial be solemnized by the clergy? Motherhood, fatherhood, the helplessness of children, the memory of the noble dead, promises, chastity, truth -- these things we are wont to call sacred. But are they perhaps merely matters of policy? If man is "lord" of religious institutions, then he is competent to abolish the marriage institution or any other institution human or divine. He is lord of everything ever called sacred in human life. It is an immense responsibility.

Is it possible to believe that "lordship" over what is sacred will ever result in the abolition of the sentiment? We can not think that the time will ever come when men shall cease to feel that some things, some times, are more sacred than others. The hour when the boy knelt at his mother's knee; the hour when the man looked into his child's dying eyes; the hour when the sinner struggled up from baseness and consecrated himself to a new life -- these hours are sabbatic as compared with the hours of moral chaos or of empty barrenness which preceded them. Take away such hours from life, secularize life to the extreme, and life would not be worth living. Men will not be content to face death in such a mood, to pass from a secular life into a secular silence.

But false gods will continue to expire at the touch of time. The name of sacred will not forever attach to things which are essentially impermanent. The eloquent silence of oblivion will be God's only comment upon every institution which fails to satisfy the soul's hunger for God.

§3. The contrast in mythology. -- Mythology is very largely, though not wholly, a speculation on the origin of things.[5] A "myth" is a "word," or story. It is a word about the gods rather than a word from them or a word to them. It is a story about how the gods produced the present state of things. It is not an appeal to the gods for help, comfort, courage. The savage whose prayer is brief and earnest will not hesitate, in colder mood, to spin an endless tale of the creation. The distinction is significant. Our secular and our scientific moods are allied to the relatively cold mood of mythology.

The keynote of mythology is multiplicity. Every object in nature must be explained, and its origin may recede indefinitely, precisely as origins recede in science. Therefore the literature of mythology is vast, and is constantly growing as anthropological science reports new finds. George Eliot showed scholarship and humor when she made her Mr. Casaubon die before his great "Key to All Mythologies" was fairly begun. Merely to read through the long list of human races in Quatrefages gives one a sense of shock, and makes one feel a stranger in the earth. If then we recall that each race has not one but several mythical explanations of every bird, animal, and tribe, we see that finite man presents an infinite variety of problems. Each mythology rests upon an earlier one, represents a reform. We can understand the noble Greek Zeus as he was explained by Greek philosophers and dramatists; but we can not understand the ignoble Zeus of obscure Greek legend, or the Zeus whose grave was shown in Crete, except as we appreciate that mythology was one long series of prehistoric reforms in scientific thought. The history of modern science is strewn with abandoned hypotheses. The history of ancient science is strewn with abandoned creators. Zeus has died not merely in Crete but in a thousand other places. His grave might even be shown in America. In fact this whole hemisphere, nine thousand miles long, is the grave of a race of creators. In Curtin's "American Creation-Myths," or in Brinton's various books, one can read how vast was the system which was understood on this continent by scores of aboriginal tribes. The theory of our red brothers was in general this: America was once inhabited by a race of perfect men, utterly different from those now living. They were godlike and divine; they were the gods. At length however they began to break their perfect brotherly love with quarrels, and this evil fact itself reacted upon them and changed them. Some were changed to birds, some to animals, some to trees, some to mountains. If we start with any given creature we can follow back to its human-divine origin. Each is the result of a fall. The myth-makers can tell the story in every case, and the name of the stories is legion. How such a system throws light upon man's ethical nature! It does not explain the bird or beast, but it throws light upon man. It is useless for man to deny moral responsibility. He knows that he can fall from grace. And mythology, like a vast luminous projection of his soul upon the sky, shows these spiritual facts within the soul.

Only one of the myriads of creation-myths bears directly on our investigations. This is the Babylonian, which was discovered in 1875 by George Smith on a series of clay tablets which are now preserved in the British museum.[6] It is a highly polytheistic story, as befitted a nation which recognized sixty thousand gods or more. It records a strife between the dragon of chaos (Tiamat) and the gods. The gods, led by Marduk, are victorious. Marduk splits the dragon in twain, as one splits a flat fish, and of the two parts makes heaven and earth. Much ingenuity has been expended to trace the creation-story of Genesis to this source. Later we shall consider this matter in its spiritual significance, and show that the Hebraic story is partly a criticism of mythology, partly something more profound. Undoubtedly some West Semitic variant of the myth was known to the early Hebrews, and undoubtedly it was the task of the prophets to disillusion their hearers' minds concerning it. Dragon worship, star worship, moon worship, Baal worship -- the struggle against these makes half the history of Israel. Babylonian, Canaanitish, and Assyrian ideas were only too influential among the less spiritually minded Hebrews, as we know from the burning words of the prophets. We can guess at the force to be combated when we learn, from the wonderful Tel el-Amarna tablets,[7] discovered in 1887, that a king of Jerusalem (Urusalim) wrote in the Babylonian language to his Egyptian overlord in the fifteenth century before Christ.

As we recall the burning words directed by the prophets against false gods, we must admit that the temporal element in mythology is vast and hateful. Much of what was permitted in prehistoric days becomes ghastly under a fuller spiritual light.

But we can not deny a certain slender thread of spiritual reality in mythology. When the Aztecs believed that maize was once a god who gave his life that men might eat him and live,[8] we must say that this creation-myth dimly foreshadowed the true bread of life, which cometh down out of heaven. When the Aztecs solemnly ate little cakes of maize in honor of the self-slain god, the Jesuit missionaries were in terror, for they believed that Satan was luring the poor savages into blasphemy against the holy eucharist. But if the beloved disciple John had been the missionary, he would have smiled gently and said, "He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew him not."

The truly scientific explanation of things does not attempt to reach beginnings. It is content to carry the research back step by step through natural causes, and to rest content when the limits of knowledge are reached. And its method is impersonal. It can not work with spirits that interrupt the chain of law. This fact has brought anxiety to the religious mind, but it is a needless anxiety. The final aim of science is not metaphysical, but practical. It uses impersonal methods to personal ends. The physician’s only interest in the abstract formula is to save personal life. And so, while creation-myths are not literally true, they are dim gropings after truth. As science they are transitory; but there is in each some parable, some assurance that the origin of things is not blind force or fate. Slowly, slowly have men developed in time, yet, from the beginning, without a parable spoke He not unto them.

We do not deny that modern science has sometimes failed to see her own limited purpose. She has sometimes erected her impersonal principles into gods. Speaking for the scientific men of his day, Huxley bravely says: "Most of us are idolaters, and ascribe divine powers to the abstractions Force, Gravity, Vitality, which our own brains have created."[9] When this happens, mythology returns. Then the fight between the transitory abstraction and the eternally spiritual must be renewed.

Surely we have offered good reasons for discriminating between the transitory and the permanent in mythology. Yet doubtless we must contend with opposition both from the religious and from the scientific side. The one will accuse us of defending “superstitions”; the other of defending "survivals". Well, superstition is superstitio a thing left over. But if in what is left over there is any spiritual nutrition, it is for us to gather up the fragments of the bread of life, that nothing be lost. And as to "survivals", that bugbear of the pseudo-scientific mind, we point out emphatically that science has dogmatized about "the survival of the fittest." She has said that in nature only the fit survives; but, to science, thought is a part of nature. Therefore science faces the paradox that only superstitions are fit to survive. Let her explain her own paradox, and we are content.

It would be a curious world if there were no survivals. Roughly speaking, Geology asserts that first the algae, and then invertebrates appeared, then the mosses and the fishes, then the ferns and the amphibians, then the pines and the reptiles, then the grains and the birds, and lastly the mammals. But it is only too obvious that not merely the mammals have survived. The mammals could not survive, in fact, but for the continued existence of the lower forms of life. The living fern and fish and pine and grain still serve us. Nay, in the form of coal, the dead fern and pine still serve us. And what is true here of nature is true also of thought. In thought as in nature, the primitive we have always with us. And some of the achievements of primitive thought -- such as the idea of God, the idea of sacredness, and the idea of stern responsibility -- are to be regarded as precious and permanent achievements.

Unless we recognize this fact and study its meaning, we can not safely build for the future. Our religion ought to face forward; it ought to leave the dead past to bury its dead; but in its haste it must not bury the quick with the dead.

§4. The contrast in astrology.[10] -- The eighth Psalm, is an exquisitely noble and spiritual view of man's relation to the starry heavens. "When I behold the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him? . . . Thou hast made him but little lower than God." The second sentence thrills us with a sense of man's spiritual possibilities, but the first abases all pride of intellect. Man can not divine the secrets of the stars, nor draw down their power by magic, nor use them to penetrate the future. Man's power is of the earth. There he must live and work. He can not stand considering the stars, wrapped in futile contemplation of possible disaster foretold by them.

Yet in our versions of Psalm viii the word "behold" -- raah -- is translated "consider." Our very words betray the ancient power of astrology; for to consider the heavens meant to the Romans to consult the constellations (sidera). Two other words used above are of astrological origin -- "disaster" and "contemplation." A disaster is produced by unfavorable stars (astera). Contemplation is consideration of the heavenly templa. The astrologers cut the heavens into "temples", and to contemplate is to find one's magic hour within a section of the zodiac. The root which means divide (tem) appears in tempus, time, and in templum, a temple or place marked out on earth, or in the sky, or on the side of the human head, to indicate our magic relations to the celestial temples.

We rightly and emphatically shake our heads at astrology. But there are plenty of persons who still astrologize, who still seek to know the future by magic means. In any large city of the world you can get your future predicted by an astrologer or a palmist. And many persons who scorn the palmist astrologize unconsciously, as when they fear the terrestrial effect of sun-spots; or dread Friday, or the number thirteen, or moon-stroke; or fancy that they have a lucky number; or respect predictions as to the exact date of the earth's destruction. As to that date, "none knoweth save the Father." Yet in all ages the astrologer has pretended to know, and has commanded the money of the frightened.

The sign of Jupiter [11] was considered auspicious, and physicians placed it before their prescriptions to make them efficacious. There the sign remains to this hour, though its meaning has been lost; ancient conviction lingers on as a modern habit. Even great men who were by no means credulous have astrologized instinctively. It is fundamental with astrology that the star which presides at our birth affects our destiny on earth. Well, Napoleon believed in his star. Shakespeare tells us that the fault is in ourselves, not in our stars, if we are underlings. But our fate is not wholly in our hands, and when a man feels himself borne onward to great deeds and great dangers, he must acknowledge his dependence either on nature or on God.

We have astronomy, and for reasonable minds astrology is dead. We can not say of this dead only that which is good, but we need not persecute the dead. Juvenal long ago admitted, in that tremendous sixth satire against feminine credulity, that the way to make astrology powerful is to persecute it. We must discriminate between the temporal and the eternal, even in astrology. The impulse of it was to grasp the relation between the temporal and the eternal. The method was to construct the heavens as a huge organism by analogy with the earth and the human body.

At first the savage pays little attention to the heavens; he sleeps at night, just as most of us do. But gradually a sense of the starry glories dawns upon him. The heavenly bodies are enduring, while men come and go; sun, moon, stars must be divine. The poet Tennyson, looking at the heavens and the earth, asks himself whether, after all, these things are not God. Perhaps these fair and eternal objects are God, -- only it is our doom to see him as these things. Perhaps our eyes, which falsely tell us that far things are small and that parallels meet, play us false; perhaps it is they which sunder God into heaven and earth. The eye of man, says Tennyson, can not really see; but if it could, were not the Vision -- He? Less subtly reflecting the savage sees moon and stars as actual gods. He is too literal, and literalism is the very soul of astrology and magic. But he can not help it.

For he relies on the starry heavens, especially the moon and the sun, as means of thinking. Their permanence helps him at every step. Their motions are steadier and larger than his. At first he paid small attention to times. Life was one long irresponsible holiday, and hunger was his only clock. But then he perceived that the sun measures time; the sun-god has daughters, the days and the nights. He further noted that some days brought him joy and luck, others misfortune and pain. Probably there was magic in days. Perhaps the magic of days could be calculated ahead.

The moon too was a measurer of time. Once in so often the thin scimitar of light grew to maturity and flooded earth with glory. It was a victory of the enduring over the transitory. It was the creation of a world of light. It was a god slaying the dragon of darkness. Long before Sinai's red granite flamed with Jehovah’s lightning, the mountain had its name from the Arabian moon-god, Sin. At his festival the idols grew darker and darker, only to recover their brightness when the festival was about to end. And what influence upon human life might not these changes of the moon foretell or portend? To this day the Mentras[12] of the Malay peninsula believe that human strength declines and recovers with the moon. The savage could not know our satellite's influence upon the tides; he could not see the "moon-led waters white" as the poet or the mathematician sees them. But the women of Babylonia knew that there was a mysterious physical relation between them and the month, and they worshiped the lady moon as the queen of heaven and mother of gods. So also did the Grecian women until the cult grew base; then came a reform, and the moon-goddess became Diana, the virgin.

The month, then, was magical in its influence. Indeed, in certain languages we see the power of thought itself expressed in terms of the moon. Mens is mind, and mensis is month. Mensuration is measure. Thus mind and month are both measures. The moon and the mind are both dividers, and both divide in order to conquer.

As for the week, who shall say whether the moon gave humanity the week or whether humanity gave the moon the week? The astronomer laughs at the question, but the psychological student of the number-concept hesitates. Comte pointed out that there is, so to speak, a week in the very structure of the mind.[13] Primitive counting can grasp two triads and a rest, or three couples and a rest, but must then begin anew. The Eastern nations early had the universal week, which is quite distinct from the lunar week. Greece used the decade. In Rome the week conquered the decade, and is now firmly ingrained in human thought. When these psychological facts are thoroughly considered, it will appear that the astronomer merely astrologizes when he asserts the "derivation" of the universal week from the lunar. The moon is at least in part a construct of the human eye; its color is "in the eye," not in the lunar rock. And the moon does not make the power of counting. It is we who divide the orb into quarters. So, as to the exact relation of the moon to the week, let us not mythologize, as our present anthropologists are inclined to do. Let us wait till we know whether the "idealist" or the “realist" is right in metaphysics, and until psychology has been more profoundly related to the normative sciences. We will even ask serious "consideration" for the astronomer Delambre's acute remark: "Those who reject the Mosaic account of creation will be at a loss to assign to the week an origin having much semblance of probability."[14]

Almost every primitive religion had its lunar festivals. The day of the new moon, as well as the eighth, fifteenth, and twenty-second, was likely to be in some sense magical, sacred, blessed, auspicious or inauspicious. Traces of such feeling are found in Egypt, China, India and Africa, as I well as in Asia.

Efforts have been made to trace the Hebrew Sabbath to the Babylonian lunar seventh day. But recent investigations indicate that this theory is quite indefensible. The word Shabbatum occurs in Babylonian, but it names the fifteenth day of the month.[15] Whereas the Hebrew Shabath means 'to desist', Clay says of Shabbatum, “The very root from which the word is derived, if in use in the Assyro-Babylonian language, is almost unknown, and can not be shown with our present knowledge to have the meaning ‘to rest, cease, or desist.’” Nor is there any indication that the Shabbatum, or fifteenth of the month, was a day of rest. As for other Babylonian days, it is only certain that (in two months of the year) the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first, twenty-eighth, and nineteenth were "evil days", on which the king might not offer a sacrifice, or the augur make an oracle, or a physician touch the sick. Apparently on these days the surly gods would not receive sacrifice or answer queries or assist the physician. A curse would follow if these officials ventured to perform religious duties on the magic holiday of Marduk and Ishtar. Come not unto us, ye that labor and are heavy-laden, for we will not give you rest! It is a strange contrast to a true Sabbath.

When in Egypt and Babylonia astrology had proceeded far enough to discover the motions of the planets, new magic arose. Each day of the week became sacred to some one of the seven planets, counting the sun and moon. And now the day of twenty-four hours is measured, and each hour is presided over by a planet. In Egypt the hours were assigned in turn to Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon. Each day of the year and each hour of the day had its astrological meaning. All times were magical. There was a veritable polytheism of time, and men's activities were weakened by fear.

There is no need for us to explain the pseudoscience of astrology as it was perfected in the middle ages. It was not different, psychologically, from that of early Assyria or early Egypt. In the middle ages the astrologer took precedence of the physician at the birth of a prince, that the royal horoscope might be rightly cast and warnings of threatened disasters be given. This happened in Christian lands, and clearly shows that paganism had never been quite conquered. The same caricature of sacred times may be seen in early Assyria. We have an ancient Assyrian calendar on which every day of the year is marked as either lucky or unlucky. For Egypt we have even fuller records.[16] The priests could tell you of what divine event each day of the year was symbolic. A defeat of a sun-god on a given date would give to that day an eternal curse; a victory would give it the charm of an amulet. The devout Egyptian must know the magic calendar. If he bathed in the Nile on Paophi 22, he would certainly be devoured by a crocodile, for on that date Sit sent a crocodile to attack Osiris. On Paophi 12 every action was dangerous. On Thot 20 no work could safely be done, no stranger safely entertained. On Mechir 30 it was forbidden to speak aloud. A child born on Tybi 4 will live to be old. The sixth of Tybi is fortunate, the seventh inimical. And so on and so on -- a terrific list of restrictions and dangers, alternating with the rashest auguries of good. The god Thot, however, knows the secrets of each day, and has such knowledge of the other gods that he can compel them. He gives his magic knowledge to his priests, and they can put it at the service of those who pay for it.

In such ways were the eternal heavens bent to very trivial temporalities. Numbers themselves, those children of time, became magical. Three, six, seven, nine, ten, twelve, thirteen -- what number has not promised or threatened the credulous believer? Even unity has been considered magical, and worshiped as an end in itself.

But we have seen enough to assure us that the sacredness of sacred times is not what primitive men thought it to be. The terrible fear of taboo, the terrible foreboding of disaster -- these were the harsh forms by which astrology groped toward spiritually sacred time. The harshness means the importance of sacred time. But it must sorely have puzzled some ancient Egyptian to find that noble joy could happen to him on an "inauspicious" day. And on the sabbatum some gloomy Babylonian king, shut up in his palace, may have said: "Alas that God should fail me in my utmost need."

§5. The contrast in religion. -- To perceive in the history of religion two opposite tendencies regarding time and eternity, it is unnecessary to define either term with strictness. Whether we call time the measure of motion, or the underlying reality of phenomena, or a mere illusion of the senses, or a form under which the human mind constructs experience, or the form of the human will; whether we call eternity an eternal now, or an endless duration, or the reality behind time, or an unknown something quite different in its nature from time -- the fact remains that instinctively some religions have valued time more than others have valued it.

The ancient Persians placed great emphasis upon time. In the religion of Zoroaster[17] (Zarthusht) the world is regarded as having a definite beginning and a definite end in time, and the history of it is brief. The entire period is only twelve thousand years. During the first third of this period the will of God (Ahura Mazda) is supreme. During the second third there is a tremendous struggle between good and evil, Ahura and Ahriman. During the last third the evil is defeated. The first half of the twelve thousand years sees the calm life of the waiting spiritual forces, including the undisturbed existence (for the second three thousand years) of one gigantic primeval man, the righteous Gayomart. Then for six thousand years comes the life of ordinary men, a life of struggle and responsibility. The final destiny of every man is decided in these six thousand years. Zoroaster is sent to men to enlighten and encourage them in the midst of the six thousand years. "I have created thee," says Ahura to Zoroaster, "in the middle time . . . for whatever is in the middle is more precious, as the heart is in the midmost of the body." This conception of the world made each moment of life significant. Man is working out his own destiny day by day. And he is a fellow worker with God. He is in the thick of the fight against evil. The issue between good and evil, which seemed doubtful when Zoroaster appeared, is indeed not doubtful; the good will prevail; but unless each man fights shoulder to shoulder with the cause of the good, he will be condemned at the judgment to the fires of hell. Life is short and every minute counts. History is irreversible. When once the end of the world has come, it will be a full end, and there will be no renewing. There will be no purgatory, no future probation, no reincarnation, no revolving cycles of creation and destruction. It is now or never.

Contrast with this temper of mind that of ancient India.[18] The creator Brahman lives in a weary succession of a hundred divine days and nights, each of a length beyond man's appreciation. At the end of each night he creates the world anew. After this early Brahmanism we have Buddhism, in which the alternate periods of creation and destruction oppress the imagination beyond words. A great period, or Kalpa, of cosmical evolution -- the period between two destructions of the world -- is divided into four incalculable periods: that of destruction, that of duration of destruction, that of renovation, that of duration of renovation. It is impossible to exhaust one of these periods by numbering hundreds of thousands of years. If a mountain of iron were touched once in a hundred years by a piece of soft muslin, the mountain would be worn to nothing before one incalculable elapsed. Such was the teaching of Buddha; but nevertheless Buddhists have tried to calculate these periods, and one estimate of an incalculable requires three hundred and fifty-two septillions of kilometres of ciphers. If a disciple would free himself from evil and be purged to perfection, it is through such periods as these that he must forever die and be born again, passing through endless reincarnations. What a man does in this life is important, but not because it leads to salvation at a last judgment. It is important because law, Karma, is inexorable, and the consequences of each act last through inconceivable years. A blow received today is punishment for a blow given in some previous incarnation, perchance a million years ago.

Once started on such thoughts as these, the human mind quickly passes beyond vast periods and spaces which calm the soul, and comes to an ever receding emptiness which terrifies. It evokes aeons and solitudes which make the thought of God impossible; which freeze the blood; which force the soul to groan with insupportable tedium or sink in vertigo. Add to these spectres the conviction of Karma, relentless in its logic, omniscient in the details of its cruelty, and it is the wonder of psychology that the Hindu mind could support such a creed. The patience of that mind is abnormal. If these be metaphysical thoughts, then we can not say that metaphysics is without practical importance. It can drive a man to insanity. It can ungear the soul from practical endeavor and so paralyze it by eternity that it is useless in time.

Of course the Hindu mind has been obliged to seek relief from such thoughts. The popular forms of Indian religion have found it in various genial polytheisms. The higher speculative forms have found it in denying reality to time. In the system of Shankara, the most famous commentator on the Vedas, time and space form the tissue of a veil -- maya, illusion -- which separates us from reality. At bottom things are eternal in the sense of being timeless, and if we could open our eyes we should see nothing but eternal good, a good already accomplished. The yogi, the man of spiritual enlightenment, is able to do this by contemplation. The state which he attains is nirvana, a condition of passive rest and subtle quiet joy. But though the yogi may thus elude the terrors of infinite duration, he theoretically takes himself out of all actual struggle in the world of time. As a matter of fact there have been yogis who have done India a great deal of practical good, men who have emerged from their peaceful dream, refreshed for genuine service. But the desire to escape all the responsibilities of time -- this always means a touch of spiritual paralysis. Even in our own day, when a new spirit of action is awakening in India, it is not surprising to find a distinguished Hindu leader declaring that altruistic action is useless. The late Swami Vivekananda said that a man's trying to help the world is "like the running of a white mouse in its circular cage."[19] "We can not add happiness to the world. All these talks about a millennium are very nice as schoolboys' stories, but no better than that."

If there were in the world no type of religion save the ancient Persian and the ancient Hindu types, the modern western mind would unquestionably prefer the Persian. It strikes a certain chord of response in us. To feel that now is the accepted time, now is the day of salvation -- this appeals to us, no matter how recreant we may have been in seizing opportunity divinely offered. It is in line with the stern doctrine, Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving your own souls. It is in line with the less spiritual principle that time is money. It chimes with the cry for progress. It strengthens our feeling that we too are making history. We like to feel that "something happens in what happens," and that our efforts to make things happen do really count.

And yet the Persian type of religion had its dangers. We know so little of spiritual life in that far place and day that we can not clearly record those dangers. Yet the Persians probably lacked patience; probably built with too little regard for the terrestrial future. Haste and anxiety may have made them cruel. In spite of their noble prayers to Ahura -- prayers in which the note of aspiration, inquiry, and effort is still to be detected -- they could not know the peace of God which passeth understanding. If there is action without reflection, or zeal without knowledge, then progress becomes a mere beating of the air. Carlyle complained of our boasted modern progress that much of it is "all action and no go?” It may even have dawned upon the ancient Persians that though they should win their salvation and escape hell-fire, they would possibly be restless in eternity for lack of occupation. Such a fear may be guessed at from the rise of a Zoroastrian heresy called the Zervanite.[20] Zervan (Zrvan) is time, and this heresy not only makes time infinite, but deifies it. Of this heresy we shall hear again, in our third chapter.

As the religious imagination tries to conceive of God, it is inclined to oscillate between the concept of time and that of eternity. And, rightly or wrongly, it associates with this antithesis various others -- change and permanence, appearance and reality, activity and rest. Thus arise two opposing conceptions of God, or of God and the world.

In one picture, the world is real and time and space are genuine facts. This is true not only for us, but for God. To him, as to us, the past is past, the future is to come. He watches the course of history calmly, and guides it to a glorious issue. Or, he watches the course of history with anxiety, and struggles to make the good prevail in time. He acknowledges in men a genuine power of freedom, and expects them to work with him, producing real results in history. The struggle against sin is a real struggle. Evil is a reality, which men must help to root out of the constitution of things. God loves men truly, and arms them for the fight.

In the other picture, time and space are appearance merely. They are subjective illusions -- such as we suffer when we seem to see a stick bent in the pool, or when we imagine a sad night to have been longer than it was; or they are forms of our finite constitution, necessary modes of our thinking, but modes which God does not share. God is eternal in the sense of being quite out of relation with time. His life is a nunc stans, an eternal now -- and even this way of stating it is false to the fact, for it is temporal and paradoxical. To such a God there is no past or future -- nay, in strict logic, no present either. There is no change in him. He does not strive. To him the darkness and, the light are both alike, and evil is mere seeming, and men's efforts are but appearance. He is pure being, the only reality. If we say that he loves us, it is by a figure of speech, for human emotions can not in strictness be attributed to him. He is omniscient, omnipotent, infinite, timeless, unchangeable, absolute. But since these attributes, taken abstractly, seem to nullify each other, he is in very truth indefinable save by negatives, and in strictness we have no right to call him either personal or impersonal. Silence is our only answer to questions as to the absolute.

Such are the two extremes to which the religious imagination is carried by the antithesis of which we are speaking, and those which are instinctively associated with it as corollaries. But the soul can not rest content with either picture alone, with either picture conceived intellectually. The religious paradox insists that God is at once timeless and in time, at once in scrutable and known, at once passionless and loving, at once and in some sense active and at rest. Later we shall see in what way the Bible offers a spiritual solution of the problem.

§6. The contrast in philosophy.[21] -- We next inquire whether philosophers have achieved any general agreement among themselves as to the definition of time and eternity.

Every philosophy has tried to reconcile the temporal with the eternal, the transitory with the permanent, the changing with the immutable, the contingent with the necessary, the dependent with the independent, the many with the one, the particular with the universal. Thought can not proceed at all without the help of such contrasts as these nor can it rest content in either group of abstractions.[22] There is one group of thinkers who stand merely for the temporal, the transitory, the changing, the contingent, the dependent, the many, the particular. There is no one group who stand merely for the eternal, the permanent, the immutable, the necessary, the independent, the one, the universal. Doubtless, however, there are temperamental biases.

Apparently the “temporal” group of concepts was especially vivid to Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus,[23] Democritus, Hobbes, Ampere, Weisse, Kierkegaard, Beneke, Duhring. Apparently it is now especially vivid to Messrs. Ostwald, Haeckel, Hoffding, Bergson, James, Dewey, B. Russell, Hodgson, Schiller, Sturt.

Apparently the "eternal" group of concepts impressed with peculiar force Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Melissus,[24] Plato, Aristotle, Shankara, Ramanuja, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Eckhardt, Boehme, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel. Today this group of concepts attracts such men as Messrs. Bradley, Bosanquet, McTaggart, Eucken, Munsterberg, Royce, Caird, Watson, Taylor, Ormond.

We make these groupings with hesitation, and in the notes will be found certain qualifications of them. But after all we are not attempting a chapter in the biography of philosophers. The point is merely that there are two general philosophical temperaments, to one of which time is relatively real and stubborn, while to the other it is relatively unreal and illusory. But we must hesitate long in the case of certain great thinkers. Such names as Augustine, Newton, Leibnitz, Lotze, give us pause. In these men the two temperaments collide so sharply that no radical system results. Indeed some judges would probably declare the same of Aristotle, of Kant, of Dahring, or of Messrs. Eucken, Munsterberg, Royce. But it does not follow that because we seem to find deep inner contradictions in a thinker like Augustine such men have failed to be influential. It is impossible to name more influential thinkers than Aristotle, Augustine, Kant.[25]

From the development of such temperamental differences as those above described have come the various philosophical systems. They result when different men persistently ask of their own intellects the exact definition of the great concepts by which the race has thought its way upward. Systems result when different types of mind inquire of themselves what spirit really is, what matter really is, what space, time, motion, force, consciousness, goodness, God, really are. The mind does not hesitate to ask of itself even the question what it really is to be; even a child, reflecting upon the word is, may wonder what "is" is. When the answer eludes the questioner, the question takes a different form, but it does not cease to recur unless the thinker sinks back to the unquestioning animal level. The question, "What is God?" may change to "What is God to me?" -- in which form it seems more real, though now a definition of "me" is also required. The question as to what time really is may become the question as to whether time is real at all. By such shifting of the questioning from phase to phase of experience the problems of philosophy get reduced to a small number, the solution of any one of which would quickly lead to the solution of the others. Hoffding has said that the problems are only four -- that of consciousness, that of knowledge, that of being, that of values.[26] He also thinks -- but perhaps too hopefully -- that all these may be at bottom one, the problem of the relation between continuity and discontinuity.

The critical analysis of the time-concept has been comparatively late; and a great deal of attention is now being paid to it. In early Greek philosophy the question was rather as to the relations of change and permanence. To Heraclitus change is the great reality; everything changes, flows. Plato met the Heracliteans by pointing out that ideas are less changing than matter. A mathematical relation, for example remains true and real though the materials that it concerns are changing. Geometrical roundness and squareness are changeless and timeless, however perishable round things and square things may be. Thus Plato set an impassible gulf between mental forms and material objects. The former have their perfect and eternal existence in God, who is pure mind. The latter, including the entire visible world, are perishable. Time is not real, but is a moving image of immovable eternity; it was created, and it will cease to be. Aristotle, that greatest of ancient students of physical facts, refused to admit the impassible gulf. He gave to every object its own form, and made the world and time as eternal as God and eternity. Time is the number of motion, and motion proceeds in some way from an unmovable mover, God.[27]

Discontented with the static look of Aristotle's realism, the Neoplatonists tried to rehabilitate Plato by establishing a closer connection between time and spiritual energy. Plotinus regards time as generated by the activity of the world-spirit, which longs to give to formless matter the form of perfection.[28] The spirit of man shares this energy, and can imitate the eternal perfection "by going", by striving. The present thus acquires a new dignity and becomes the very life of the soul. There would be no time save for the restless spiritual energy which strives to transcend time. It is a noble conception, and helps to account for the immense influence of Neoplatonism, which, like certain other religions, struggled with early Christianity for possession of the Roman world. But with its doctrine of time Neoplatonism combined a conviction of the unreality of matter and of evil, and a strong tendency to dream. It therefore failed to master the intellect of the hard-headed Roman people. Only men of Augustine's type could do that -- men to whom had been given a profound sense of the reality of the Christian struggle against evil.

Augustine was a mystic as passionate as Plotinus, but he was also, a shrewd, strong, practical organizer of spiritual forces.[29] It is therefore not surprising to find him deeply divided in mind as to the nature of time. "If no one asks me what time is, I know; but if I wish to explain it to an inquirer, then I do not know." He believes with Plato that it was created with the world. But when he abstracts from his experience of it, he finds it consisting of three unreal parts -- the past which no longer is, the present which is a mere imaginary point, the future which is not yet -- and so he wonders whether it is not a mere subjective illusion. His ardent prayers for enlightenment do not solve the abstract problem.

During the middle age the Platonic and Aristotelian views reappear with various modifications. The most significant of these is the schoolmen's distinction between time and duration. Time, which applies to man only, may be viewed either as duration or as succession, but in reality includes both. Duration is applicable to God, but succession is not.

At the beginning of the modern period, Descartes makes time unreal, but space real.[30] Spinoza regards space as an attribute of God, but denies both duration and succession to the divine nature.[31] With Hobbes the modern spirit of skepticism concerning both time and space sets in. To Hobbes time is a certain image or phantasm left upon the mind by the motion of a moving body. To Locke time is the mere succession of ideas, and reality is known to us only through sensation.[32] To Hume the relation between cause and effect is merely customary, not necessary, and since cause and effect are a temporal relation, the reality of time is annihilated.[33]

Kant meets the skepticism of Hume with the severest analysis of consciousness that has ever been made, and the conclusion that time and space are essential ways of human thinking, though they have no validity for that unknown reality which is ultimate.[34] They are not ultimate, for time can not be conceived either as beginning or as not beginning, and space can not be conceived either as ending or as not ending. Yet they have this much permanence -- that they are of the very structure of our consciousness. Their permanent contradictoriness is the condition of all human thinking, and science ought to be possible, even if no other than scientific knowledge is possible to man.

Such are the typical conclusions -- not the arguments -- about time, from Plato to Kant. Kant makes time real for the life which now is, and in his great book on the practical reason he attempts to build a practical philosophy as strenuous as those which his criticism had destroyed. But the chief result of his life's work was the proposition that ultimate reality is unknowable, and this is the legacy he leaves to his philosophical heirs. Many have accepted it. Hence we have the school of agnostics, a school which includes a large number of the ablest scientists of the time. Mr. Bertrand Russell, the philosophical mathematician of the English Cambridge, remarks that "It is customary with philosophers to deny the reality of space and time"[35], but he forgets for the moment that Kant killed off many philosophers and nipped many more in the bud. It is precisely because time and space are hard things to handle in philosophy that so many men have turned their backs upon metaphysics in disgust. A Darwin meddles not with the infinite, but devotes his life to a study of real changes which have taken place in time. The same feeling that leads so many Christians to ask, "What is the practical use of metaphysics, anyway?" leads scientific men to say, "What is the practical use of either religion or metaphysics?"

But agnosticism is not the only type of thought since Kant. The desire for some positive assurance as to the ultimate nature of things is very strong in human nature. Men like Fichte and Hegel built upon this fact.[36] They felt that to assert positively the impossibility of absolute knowledge was itself an absolute statement, and they assumed the existence, in the human soul, of some standard of absolute knowledge. Hence in Europe -- as formerly in India -- arose the so-called systems of absolutism. The whole of reality is called the Absolute. Absolutism assumes that in the absolute all positive and negative characteristics meet; it is the ground in which all opposites, even good and evil, are reconciled. The question then arises as to whether human knowledge is adequate to determine the absolute. The idea of God is not the same as that of the absolute, and it is precisely one of the questions of metaphysics whether the absolute is in any sense personal. Fichte and Hegel preferred to identify God and the absolute, but whether either was warranted by his method in doing so is still a subject of warm debate. Fichte conceived the absolute as the Divine Will, in which man shares by virtue of his spiritual nature. Hegel conceived it as the Divine Idea, which is ever coming more and more into consciousness in the process of history. By means of these concepts these thinkers sought to show how what is absolute comes to express itself in temporal experience. To Fichte, the temporal and spatial world is involuntarily constructed by each mind in its spiritual activity, and since there are absolute laws at work, the result is essentially the same for all minds. To Hegel "everything is spirit, and spirit is everything"; but just what spirit is -- whether it is the process of thought or whether it includes the independent striving of free spirits -- about this the critics of Hegel do not agree. Whatever it is, it is something to which time is unreal.

It is impossible here to discuss the close reasoning by which Fichte, in his system of "antitheses," and Hegel, in his system of "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis," defended their conclusions. Still less is it possible to follow the attempts, sometimes brilliantly illuminating and sometimes ludicrously absurd, which Hegel made to apply his dialectic to nature and to human history. We are attempting here to summarize conclusions only, and learn if there is any general philosophical consensus as to the nature of time and eternity. When we add that both these absolutisms, professedly theistic, have led to absolutisms theistic and absolutisms atheistic, it becomes clear that neither Fichte nor Hegel has won the philosophical world. Yet each was a thinker of the first rank.

Of the systems deriving from Hegel, that which is just now most discussed is Mr. F. H. Bradley's.[37] Mr. Bradley's absolutism concludes that knowledge is unequal to the real because knowledge is relational to the core, and the absolute is not relational. But just as in the animal there is feeling which is lower than reason, so in man there is feeling which is higher than reason. Like any mystic, Mr. Bradley the skeptic here appeals to the private consciousness. To this mystical higher plane of feeling the absolute is present. Yet even here it is not present as absolute merely; it is present together with appearance; at the highest level we can not wholly escape the relational. Mr. Bradley has worked out this position with great brilliance and acuteness, but it can not be said to have met with any general acceptance among thinkers. It does not reconcile good and evil in any way that appeals to our spiritual activity, and it is not surprising that one graceless critic has called it "the higher synthesis of God and the devil." Such flings do not disturb Mr. Bradley, who, when he desires, is a master of irony, but who is at heart a thinker of the greatest seriousness and sincerity. It is obvious that in this absolutism time figures as mere appearance. "If time is not unreal," says Bradley, "I admit that our absolute is a delusion."

The noble absolutism of Professor Royce, though deeply indebted both to Hegel and to Bradley, refuses to admit the unreality of time.[38] Royce makes much of the fact that our present consciousness of time has always some duration; there is a time-span, a more than specious present; we are never aware of the present as a mere moment, and must assume that it is a false abstraction to divide time into a non-existent past, an imaginary present point, and a non-existent future. Rather our present is, as certain older thinkers said, like our grasp of a bit of melody; we are conscious of the musical phrase as passing note by note, yet at the same time we grasp the phrase as a whole. Our actual present then includes something of the past and of the future. If this be true of our present, much truer is it of God's. God is eternal, yet his consciousness includes both past and future. If it be answered that this makes God static, the critic is asked to conceive once more the phrase of music, or any human act. It is then seen that our present owes its duration to our active will; for it is the meaning of the music that we are trying to grasp, it is the purpose of the act that gives it reality. Time then is the form of the will, and is included within the eternal by the fact of purpose. God is eternal, because he is working out an eternal purpose. Furthermore, as our own true meaning and purpose, could we but realize it, is one with God's, so our true higher selves, toward which we strive, are included in God.

The absolutism of Fichte finds its most noticeable recent representative, or heir, in that of Professor Munsterberg.[39] Once more we see the essence of reality regarded as will, or rather as deed, act. But since Fichte's day scientific knowledge has greatly advanced; Munsterberg himself is a distinguished experimental psychologist. Nevertheless, instead of being drawn into "psychologism" -- the habit of regarding ultimate reality as the psychologist regards the human mind -- this modern idealist draws a sharp line between absolute and scientific knowledge. The great World-deed, in which we as free agents share, and which we unwittingly affirm every time we will to deny it, is timeless, but it creates time. Precisely as a man freely wills to take his mind into the psychologist's laboratory and try to measure it, so the Ultimate Will freely produces time itself. It is a free creation, and man is not its slave. Space, time, and quantity are not perceptions, but acts which we execute in order to make the free valuation of existence possible. The striving of the will becomes the starting-point for two opposite directions. We call the starting-point "now", and we create the "no-more" and the "not-yet." The absolute striving toward an aim shifts the "now" continually into the "no-more," thus separating itself into an endless series of units of effort. In every act, the aim and the attainment coalesce. In the act both past and future are made one, and that is the meaning of eternity. The World-act (Welt-tat) is eternal in time, as the circle is endless in space. The spiritual world is eternal, for it is act in every fiber; and in the act future and past become a unit.

The argument is sufficiently subtle, and any attempt to summarize it mutilates it. But when, in spite of the sense of freedom which is aroused by reading the system, we learn that "strictly speaking, nothing in the world of causes really evolves", we are left wondering why, after all, the Timeless Deed should express itself in time. The assurance that "striving is alone valuable" hardly relieves our perplexity. The abstract eternal striving of a timeless will is hardly more attractive to the natural man than the concrete mortal striving of the psychological will. The system requires us to think of ourselves as each divided horizontally, so to speak, into a timeless ego and a psychological ego. Doubtless, however, an experimental psychologist, wearied of studying nervous reactions and observing mortal time-measurements, may enjoy retreating into an utterly timeless self.

We have now sketched three or four types of absolutism without finding any substantial agreement as to time. To Fichte and Munsterberg it is a creation of the timeless will; to Royce it is included within an eternal purpose which is not -- in the Fichtean sense -- timeless. To Bradley it is mere appearance, hopelessly relational. Such are the results of one constructive school of philosophy since Kant. But there are other post-Kantian schools besides agnosticism and absolutism. There is, for instance, naturalism.

The mood of naturalism is known to us all in some elementary form.[40] As children we have all wondered, with Mark Twain's boy, whether the stars were supernaturally created, or whether "they just naturally happened." The enormous advances of physical science have cast suspicion upon the word "supernatural," just as they have cast suspicion upon the word "sacred." The scientist repeats the remark of Laplace, that in the construction of a mechanism of the heavens, the hypothesis of God is not needed. When, therefore, the scientific mind is confronted with abstract systems like Hegel's or Bradley's, it is tempted to swing to the opposite extreme and declare that time and matter and energy are real, and that nothing else is. There is energy and there are the real forms in which it is expressed -- matter, motion, change, time -- and there is nothing else. God is an imaginary being, “a gaseous vertebrate.”[41] Consciousness is something given off by energy, or it is potential energy, or it is a product of the imagination (whatever that is); it is like the fly on the balance wheel, imagining that it makes the wheel revolve; it is the noise of the whistle, not the force in the whistle; it is the delusion of a stone which, being thrown from an unknown hand, awakes in flight and imagines itself a bird; it is not a reality but an epiphenomenon.

There is such a thing as the eternal, but its true name is time. There is one permanent thing; its name is energy. At all events Ostwald says, "from what I know of science I have the impression that energy will outlive everything else in the universe." Ostwald, being more cautious than some naturalists, declares that he does not feel justified in saying more than this. But his caution is pathetic. If energy should outlast everything else but then cease to last, what would be left? Apparently nothing, and we shall not be accused of introducing poetry into philosophy if we say that nothing is another name for death. It is then a choice between everlasting energy and everlasting death. Or, since Ostwald elsewhere agrees to call energy "work," it is a choice between eternal cosmic work and eternal cosmic death. A Godless universe, ending in eternal work or eternal death. And this is a popular philosophy! No wonder that the people need out-door recreation on Sunday!

Some philosophers who look on this picture and on that -- absolutism and naturalism -- feel the need of something different from either. Rather than lose God out of the universe entirely, Mill preferred a finite God limited by time.[42] So does William James.[43] So do Schiller[44] and Rashdall[45] of Oxford. We have Hoffding saying that "If time is an illusion, it is also an illusion of the second potency if we imagine that we can lightly rid ourselves of it," and yet Hoffding is a most sympathetic student of religion.[46] We have, finally, Bergson basing his whole philosophy upon the reality of time.[47]

Bergson's system is having a great vogue in France, and it is surprising that he has not yet been translated. He distinguishes between pure duration and spatialized duration. Pure duration is of the very essence of life. The vital impulse, elan vital, is pure duration, and is the creative inner force from the lowest organisms to the highest man. At every instant it produces something new; its method is creative evolution, l’evolution creatrice. Evolution is not mere vague "development"; it is an irreversible process, filled with new meaning at every step. This pure duration, however, is essentially hid from the intellect, because the process of conceptual reasoning is spatial. Space is a "later" thing than time, and wholly subordinate. Reason is a late product of life, and, so to say, is only a by-product at that. When thought attempts to perceive time it spatializes it, treats it as if it were a clock-face. All abstract thinking is static and geometric. It arrests life, and in trying to give form to it merely succeeds in deforming it. Thought is utterly inadequate to represent life or instinct or duration. "Intelligence is the art of making artificial objects" -- not of representing life as it is in nature.

Whatever, may be thought of Bergson's onslaught upon human intelligence, it is a legitimate reaction from the extreme artificiality of the Hegels and Bradleys. Nor is it surprising that attempts have already been made to give this biological theory religious significance. In the recent articles of M. Le Roy duration is assigned to the very essence of the divine nature.[48] God is like duration, for at every point he creates the new. He is in the very movement that we call evolution. Each hour brings genuine novelties into existence, genuine achievement, new forms of life, new thrills of hope. M. Le Roy's theology is doubtless regarded as heretical, but long ago men perceived that God is not in every sense immutable. If he were in every sense changeless, he could not answer prayer. In some sense he is indeed "the most changeable of beings."[49]

§7. The intellectual dilemma. -- Bergson brings us to a new sense of the limitations of thought. Thought never quite overtakes life. We perhaps "think the day over" when it is one, but first we have to get through the day; we have to do things and decide things, even though we act without much reflection. If this is true of common life, how much truer it is of speculation. If the need for rest does not cut short our philosophizing, some inscrutable paradox finally does. Jehovah shuts the way with a dilemma, saying, "Your thoughts are not my thoughts," and sends us back to experience for a wider range of materials. In all the centuries Christians have known that certain things have been concealed from the wise and prudent. They have been obliged to act, and action requires faith.

Surely in the main this must be our attitude on perceiving that as to "time" the masters disagree and leave us darkling. They plunge us into a dilemma. They lead us to an intellectual impasse, a blank stone wall. To be sure, our very method has precipitated the result, for we have abstracted merely the conclusions from systems already abstract enough. Yet if the great critical thinkers had achieved any real definition of either time or eternity, even the bare conclusions should have agreed. Our degree of success in explaining the antinomy by philosophical aid has not been such as to warrant our continuing the speculation. We have failed. What then? Shall we turn from metaphysics in despair as well as in defeat?

Christians have often done so. The theologian Mansel, in his famous lectures on the limits of religious thought, ended in blank agnosticism.[50] God is wholly unknowable. But if unknowable, why God? Why not, with Spencer, merely the Unknowable? Mr. Benn, the materialist, gloats ov

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Richard C. Nickels

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE