Jim Zwick writes about the "influential role" in the anti-imperialist movement played by leaders of the Ethical Culture movement in the late 19th and early 20th century. Articles by Felix Adler, William M. Salter, Jane Addams and others present an ethical perspective on war and imperialism.
Jim Zwick's article and complete list of historical essays
Articles by Adler on the site include:
The Parting of the Ways in the Foreign Policy of the United States, Oct. 1898.The White Man's Burden Is Sentimentalism, March 12, 1899.
The Philippine War: Two Ethical Questions, April 1902.
Anti-Democratic Tendencies in American Life, July 1904.
The World Crisis and Its Meaning, 1915.
Civilization and Progress in the Light of the Present War, 1915.
The National Character Spiritually Transformed, 1918.
National Self-Determination and Its Limits, Nov. 24, 1918.
Imperialism, by William M. Salter, Feb. 12, 1899.The New Militarism, April 16, 1899.
One Side of Kipling, 1900.
Articles by Jane Addams include:
Democracy or Militarism, April 30, 1899.An International Patriotism, April 1906.
The White Man's Burden Is Sentimentalism - Felix Adler
I am in favor of implanting civilization in the East, and I believe in the necessity of emancipating the Filipinos from the bonds of ignorance. But civilization that is forced down from above on a people seldom lasts. It is not wise, it is not right, that Western ideas, unadapted, should be carried to the East. Probably no man has done more to arouse public sentiment in this respect than Rudyard Kipling. With his grip on words whose roots smell of the earth from which he has dug them, he believes the whole white race to be the chosen instrument of God to carry Western ideas to enlighten the East.
Excerpt from a lecture on "The First Fruits of Imperialism" before the Society for Ethical Culture, New York, March 12, 1899.
Read the rest of the article here.
The Philippine War - Two Ethical Questions - Felix Adler
Adler attempts to answer two questions on the ethics of war: "Is it treason to condemn a war waged by our country while the war is still in progress?" and "Are civilized nations justified in adopting uncivilized methods of warfare?"
From an address before the Society for Ethical Culture of New York, April 1902.
Read the whole article here
Anti-Democratic Tendencies in American Life - Felix Adler
A 1904 article from The Ethical Record with Adler's views on true versus false democracy.
"My main point is before you: the false democracy is that which says that the individual is the aim and the reason for government. The true democracy says that, not the individual, but the social order -- social well-being and not individual well-being -- is the aim. The false democracy is that which assumes that all men are already equal; the true democracy is that which says that democracy is the instrument toward making them more and more equal. There is a difference as between the poles between these two conceptions."
Read the whole article here
From Horace J. Bridges, "Character versus Destiny," in "The Emerging Faith."
"I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live." So spoke Socrates to those who had falsely accused and unjustly condemned him. What lies behind this preference? The conviction of Socrates, as of every great spirit, that our character is in our own hands, though our destiny be not; the conviction that our business is to look to the quality of our life, which we can affect, and leave its quantity or its duration, which we cannot affect, to the inscrutable power that animates the world.In all that has here been said, I have no desire to impose upon any reader my own particular views concerning either immortality or God. The point I am concerned with is that, whatever may be the truth regarding these matters, still the only way for us to attain a personal triumph over death is by the method of Socrates. Unless we ourselves, in the pure autonomy of our own consciences, elect some supreme value that commands our soul's allegiance, and by our own will and deep affirm it as supreme, then though there be a triumph over death, it will not be of our winning. For if it happens, it will be, so far as concerns us, destiny and not achievement; and from the standpoint of the spiritual universe our having lived will have signified not at all.
The triumph of Jesus and of Socrates lies clearly in this: that for the sake of the right and the truth they had embraced they freely surrendered their lives. This is the ultimate and indisputable proof that in them the spiritual had mastered the physical and animal, that they had wholly purged themselves of fear and of the lust of life, and steered by the light of nobler values than the sub-human nature in us can discern.
Herein they, and all who have done as they did, won a victory not only for themselves but for the evolving universe; for they furthered the process of its evolution, the emergence of its latent splendors. They extended the dominion of the highest of its elements over the lower and mindless ones. But if, as our Church friends say, we are to owe our salvation wholly to Jesus Christ, this is only to say in other words that we ourselves are to mean nothing to the world and the world's achievement; that spiritually we have been and are to be but parasitic burdens upon it.
Thus, then, if I read it aright, the victory won by Jesus and by Socrates is the true and worthy challenge to our spiritual ambition. If, when our time for entering the silence comes, we are to go, as the poet says, "not like the quarry slave at night, scourged to his dungeon," it must be through the consciousness that we have, in our infinitesimal degree, added to the achievement of the universe. Some touch of lasting good must be there that without us would not have been. He of whom this can be truly affirmed when he leaves the realm of time, has reached the end and goal of life. For he has responded to the call which ennobles man by bidding him, the creature, become in his measure a creator--a factor of the creative force of the world.
The response to this challenge, which resounds in the soul of all of us, can be made by every man and every woman; for it depends not on the intellect, not on any special talent or anything out of our power, but on the quality of the moral will. And this, which Kant declared the only thing absolutely and always good, is in the power of us all. When this challenge is met, then comes in every life its Easter moment. Then is to be said what Dante wrote at the beginning of his story, "Incipit vita nova": "Here begins a new life." For then the man or woman concerned has contributed to the world an element truly new, one that enriches it for ever and is carried forward independently of him or her who originated it.
The real resurrection of Jesus was the change he made in the lives of his friends and followers, who in turn, by virtue of the power they had drawn from him, changed the history of the world. It is clearly a materialistic delusion to think that he did this, or could have done it, by means of a physical miracle. This holds true whether the physical miracle occurred or not. For this transformation depended wholly upon his character, his quality, the spirit and the life in his words; not on any extrinsic event. And the one way of truly honoring him, and all great spirits, is to do in our tiny measure what he and they have done in their great measure; to be, each of us, an original fountain of spiritual life pouring into others and quickening in them the responding spiritual life that is latent in them. Herein has lain the grandeur of the pilgrimage of man over the long, rough road of time. Here and there, the high potentialities that are latent in all have been actualized in the few. When this happens, we behold a miracle; For then we see what Bergson called the deepest fire from the heart of the world streaming from the crater of the lofty volcano; and the active volcanoes show us the possibilities of those that seem to be extinct, but are not, since they, too, have their access to the central fuel. We in our measure are to be to others what Socrates was to Plato and the young men of Athens; what Jesus was to Paul and his followers. Thereby shall be achieve the true end of our life, which alone can give it worth and dignity, and fulfill the sublime purpose of humanity's existence: which is to carry to new heights of spiritual attainment the ascending process of the universe.
by Jerome Nathanson.
What, then, are the conditions of a good marriage? The answer, in its simplest form, is the meeting of the valid human needs of each party to it.
First among these is the need for security: the deep awareness, which goes deeper than any specific bit of knowledge, that no matter what one is or does he really counts for the other person and can always feel completely at home. It means that no matter what the ups and downs of the world may be, or what one's experiences outside the home, or even within the home, in the pinches one can really count on the other person. To put the matter differently, an essential need that marriage must meet is the need of mutual dependence.
Second among these needs is that of understanding, both in the sense of being understood by the other person and doing everything one can to understand that person. In other words, it involves a constant effort to get at what the other person genuinely means, however inept or inadequate or even destructive the overt expression may be. Such understanding as this is not something with which we are born, nor even with which we enter marriage. It is rather the fruit of our experiences tempered by human sensitivity. In the best sense, it is indeed an extremely difficult thing to achieve, coming out of the pains and hardships we have experienced and whatever patience we have learned in the course of it. Ideally such understanding is the sharing of experiences with another person on the deepest levels of one's being.
Finally, a good marriage must be characterized by a feeling that each person is genuinely concerned with what happens to the other. Again, as with the feeling of athomeness and the sense of security, this concern is rather an atmosphere and an attitude than a specific act or expression. Nor by concern are we to understand that furrowed-brow attitude that we assume when we think of "problems." Instead, this concern is an affection, an emotional identification, which gives one the feeling of being cared about, of being loved for oneself alone. In the immature romanticism which is dominant in our culture, we have identified love with sexual passion. It is not this. For people may and do have many different sexual passions which have nothing whatever to do with love. On the other hand, love between mature men and women involves sex, but sex is not its essence. As Felix Adler has pointed out, love is essentially living in the life of another person: feeling his pains and pleasures, his sufferings and joys, as one's own.
Now the problem of meeting these very basic human needs is the problem of marriage. For by definition they comprise the major challenges to what we are as persons. The romantics used to say that marriages are made in heaven. However that may be, they are contracted on earth and, to make a serious play on words, they can be either contracting or expanding experiences.
Apparently, however, there is a contradiction here. Successfully to meet the challenges implicit in this relationship requires a good deal of maturity. Yet none of us is at the outset of marriage mature enough completely to meet them. In this apparent contradiction, then, a genuine one? Not at all. For it points to the central thing in all ethical life, the necessity of personal growth. Marriage thus viewed is a maturing experience, in many ways the most maturing of all. One is constantly pushed and pulled by the very nature of the relationship to grow up sufficiently to meet the needs of one's mate. Nor is this process ever finished, with a person reaching a point where he can say that he has finally achieved complete maturity. It is exactly for this reason that a good marriage is a relationship through which one can grow until the end of his days.
What are some of the major implications of marriage thus conceived? First and foremost, of course, is the family. This is not the place for a discussion of the meaning of children and the ethics of family life. But it is evident that one of the deep needs most people have in a good marriage relation is the need for offspring. This, in the strictest sense, involves the most creative act of the marital relation. For the creation of personality is only started with the act of procreation. It carries on through the efforts to develop the best possibilities in children; and this constitutes the basic common challenge for the parents themselves. Doubtless we have all known couples who were at sword's point with each other and yet who were, at the every same time, simply magnificent with their children. And we have seen the parents themselves grow through this experience, growing even to the point where it was possible for them to work out a much better relation with each other. This is not to say, as is sometimes advised, that couples who are having marital difficulties should have children in the hope of thereby resolving their problems. Indeed, nothing could be worse. In the first place, in the majority of situations the difficulties will not be eradicated by this expedient. Second, and far more importantly, children should never be wanted as problem-solvers or substitutes for our other unmet needs. They should be wanted for themselves alone, and we know this is basic to their healthy development. It is true, however, that concern with children can be an ethical transformer in the marriage relation itself.
Another implication of a good marriage is the contribution it makes to the work in which one is engaged, whatever that work may be. The maturing experience of marriage should give added leverage to a person's vocational life. Nor is this to be understood simply in the traditional sense of giving a person added incentive to make more money or to do a better job. Deeper than this is the fact that growing to the point where one can measure up to the demands of marriage brings one the comprehension and perspective in his working relations which should make him capable of performance which was never before possible.
Finally, a good marriage should be the source of one's making an increased contribution to the life of the larger community. For one way or another the security, the understanding, yes, and the affection, too, which characterize a good marriage relation should be brought to bear in the larger areas of life. That is why a good marriage is both a basis of an adequate approach to ethical problems and but the beginning of our dealing with them. Such a relation carries over into a drive to make the lives of other people at least a little more secure.
This, then, is the ethics of marriage, the ideal upshot of it. As in all the dimensions of life, so in this, the essential meaning comes down to our growth as persons. We say in general that our ethical growth comes only through and with other people. There is no relation in life in which this is so evident as in marriage. To shy away from the challenges which are implicit in the problems characterized by marriage is to stultify oneself, to cling to one's immaturity. To be challenged by these very problems, to be grateful for the opportunities which romantic love brings in its wake, this is to penetrate to the meaning and the ethics of marriage.
an address by Felix Adler delivered in South Place Chapel, London, June 7, 1925
In undertaking to give a brief account of some of the distinctive traits that have developed in the American Ethical Societies during the past fifty years, I may begin with a few words about the impulse that led to the formation of the parent society in New York.
Perhaps a hundred people assembled one evening, May 15, 1876, at the time when the country was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its political independence. The people who gathered had summoned me from Cornell University where I was at that time a very young professor of religious history and literature, in order to present to them the sketch of a religious society imbued with the spirit of religion without its dogmas. After the address, the first Society for Ethical Culture was established in New York.
The impulse that led originally to the formation of Ethical Societies sprang from the profound feeling that the life of man needs to be consecrated; furthermore that the consecration cannot be derived from doctrines which, however vital they may have been in the past, however true they may still be for some, have ceased to be so for oneself.
Among those who assembled that first evening, there was manifest a desire to separate the grain from the chaff, but also to preserve the grain, and not only to preserve but to plant it anew in the expectation of reaping a richer harvest. The majority of those present were men of affairs, were men and women of ordinary good education, some of them, indeed, of superior education--but the bulk of this first Ethical Society consisted of what would be called average people and especially of fathers and mothers who felt the need, both for themselves and for their children, of something to take the place of the consecrating influence of the old religions.
I cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that the movement did not start among the so-called intelligentsia, that it was not a rationalistic movement in its inception, that it was not negative in its attitude, that the people interested in it were not concerned with such questions as the authenticity of the Scriptures, or of miracles, or the reasonableness of the doctrine of the Trinity. Turning away from these matters, they asked with intense feeling, what consecrating influence shall we bring into our own lives, and particularly into the lives of our children? Indeed it was concern for the children even more than for themselves that led to the formation of these societies.
This desire for a consecrating influence expressed itself in the initiation of Sunday Services, which were marked by great simplicity. Simplicity should not be identified with bareness. Simplicity may indeed be empty but, on the other hand, may be pregnant with meanings that ritual cannot express or can express only incompletely. In the Sunday meetings of the American Ethical Societies there is no prayer, no ritual. There is music as a kind of frame, but the center of the service is the address. The conditions to which it is expected to conform, however difficult, however hard to live up to--never adequately lived up to but still implied--are that the speaker shall not indulge in random utterances just on the spur of the moment, that he shall give his whole life to the problems of ethical living, that he shall be steeped in the religious and ethical thought of the past, and that his object shall be to communicate light and heat to his hearers, that through their minds and hearts he shall endeavor to influence their will, shall quicken their highest aspirations, and thus seek to help them in the struggle toward spiritual freedom. An address that is a mere exhibition of the speaker's mind, a mere intellectual performance, however brilliant it may be, is not desired. The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon.
The real attitude of the Ethical Societies from the beginning was positive, not negative, not antagonistic. We wished to define our own goal, to mark off a path toward it. We wished to build for ourselves a spiritual shelter amid the immensities. But controversy was forced upon us. Like the builders of the second Jerusalem temple, we were compelled to build with one hand and to bear the sword, as it were, in the other. The Fundamentalists would not let us alone. Fundamentalism which is now experiencing an attenuated recrudescence, was at that time in robust possession of the pulpits.
It was not, as I have said, that we attacked them, but that they felt themselves obliged to attack us. For the attempt to lead the moral life, or even to try to lead a better moral life, without first accepting religious dogmas was to their way of thinking monstrous. If recognized as legitimate it would cut the ground from under their feet. Religious faith, they said, is the tree, morality the fruit. Without the tree there can be no fruit. Belief is the source, the fountainhead; morality is the stream. Without the source there can be no stream. It is not enough, they declared, to refrain from denying the existence of a personal Deity, or reward and punishment in a future life--these doctrines must be positively affirmed. To ignore them is the crime. For without the belief in these traditional teachings, yes, without the belief in the inspiration of the Bible, of the story of the Creation as told in Genesis, without the belief in Christ the Redeemer, etc., there could be no morality.
The position of the Ethical Societies connected with ethics the two notes of independence and reverence. The authority of the moral law is not borrowed; it is aboriginal and also sovereign. The ethical end is the sovereign, supreme end of life to which all other ends must be subordinated. Now fundamentalism attacked the independence of the moral law. The supremacy of it, on the other hand, the reverence due to it, was attacked from another quarter, namely from the side of moral skepticism.
In the next stage of our history, a second controversy was thus forced upon us, chiefly with the moral skeptics, those namely who hold, from a different point of view, that morality is arbitrary, not because it happens to express the mere fiat of God, but because it represents the mere convenience of men--or if not their convenience, their ignorant notions of social advantage, or their superstitions, or their class interests. "Morality is a convention" became a favorite phrase. A conventional rule is to be observed simply because it has been agreed upon, with indifference as to the nature of the thing which is agreed upon. The lifting of the hat in salutation is an instance. Any other sign or gesture, if agreed upon, would do just as well.
Aristotle wisely says that ethical habits must precede the recognition of ethical principles. The principle of living in promoting the best life of others must likewise be grounded in habits. The Ethical Societies therefore, are educational societies intended to create those habits through which the light of ethical principles shimmers, out of which the pure elixir of ethical principle may be distilled.
The last and most menacing tendency of our time to which the Ethical Society must relate itself may be called Voluntarism--marked by the exaggerated claims put forth on behalf of the individual will, the repugnance to binding ties. This tendency is for the moment everywhere in the ascendant. In literature it is illustrated by such names as Ibsen, Nietzsche, Anatole France, the admirable Romain Rolland, Shaw, Wells; in philosophy, Bertrand Russell and the Pragmatists. Gifted dramatists, poets, artists, social reformers, earnest educationists are among its protagonists. Its practical effects are showing themselves in the breaking up of families, in the growing change of opinion with respect to the permanence of marriage--a change advocated on the theoretical grounds that individual wills shall not be subject to binding ties. (Faithfulness, it is conceded, is perhaps better, but with the reservation that it shall last only as long as the relation continues to be agreeable to the individuals concerned.)
Voluntarism arises out of the overemphasis of one of the two poles of ethical experience--the incontrovertible value of selfhood--to the neglect of the opposite pole. It is easy to account for its temporary triumph. We are still in the period of revolt, partly against what remains of the feudal organization of society, partly against the smugness of the middle class. The habits which the experience of the sacredness of binding ties must create have still to be formed.
The problem of the Ethical Society, looking quite far ahead, is, how shall these habits be formed? What kind of binding tie shall be proposed? On what ground shall men be induced not so much to submit to it, as to desire a new constraint upon their wills? And by what educational methods shall the underlying habits be inculcated?
The new principle of constraint may be defined as the pull of spiritual evolution. Spiritual evolution is the progressive advance of mankind toward a state of things in which the light of ethical perfection shall be reflected from the face of human society; that is, in which all men shall live and move and have their being in mutually promoting the highest life of each and all. It means that the object of social reformation shall not be a mere change in the conditions under which men live, but a change in human nature itself. It means that we shall look forward consciously to the breaking forth of new powers in ourselves, to the release, through our own efforts, of capacities dimly latent in us.
Binding ties are imposed not from above (by fiat of God) but from ahead. The radiant future stretches forth its arms toward us, and binds us to be willing servants to its work, willingly to accept those limitations of the individual will which are indispensable in the service of a far-off cause, a service which at the same time disciplines and ennobles the individual himself. This, to my mind, is the solution of the problem how constraint upon the self is compatible with the affirmation of the self.
Felix Adler (1851-1933) was the founder of the Ethical Culture Movement, organizing the New York Society for Ethical Culture on May 15, 1876. He was active in many social service and civic reform enterprises, was for many years Professor of Political and Social Ethics in Columbia University, and was the author of Moral Instruction of Children (1895), An Ethical Philosophy of Life (1918), and The Reconstruction of the Spiritual Ideal (1923 Hibbert Lectures).
by William MacIntyre Salter - from Mr. Salter's opening lecture to the Chicago Ethical Society in 1883. Reprinted in The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Ethical Movement 1876-1926.
. . . I know the Churches speak sometimes of "mere morality," and ask if that can save a man. I answer readily that a surface, mechanical morality, no matter by whom practiced, does not and cannot save a man. But if so, the call, in my judgment, is not for something to take the place of morality, but for a larger, a more perfect morality, one covering the whole of life, and allowing no nook or corner of it to lie outside of the sacred sway of the just and the good. It is a higher standard of righteousness which the world needs, one which shall convict even the religions of the day of the lowness of their own standards; which shall awaken the slumbering consciences of men, and regenerate life, private and social. If the Churches had the idea of morality as a principle, would they dare to speak of it in this slighting way? No. By morality they mean custom or tradition, or at best a set of commands given by Moses or Jesus, and written down in a book. That it is an independent idea and law of man's own mind, prior to all custom and tradition and books and persons, and so capable of superseding them all and making them antiquated, is hardly imagined. But it is nothing else than this that I mean by proposing the pure dictates of conscience as the basis of our movement. We assert the independence of morality. We do not rest on dogma, because there is something in man closer and more constitutional to him than dogma: we do not rest on history, because we believe that within man lie the springs of history, and that history's grandest movements started from no inspiration that we cannot draw on equally well today. The modern world talks of progress; we believe in moral progress, that the ideas of righteousness are not stationary, but capable of endless expansion; that there can be no final statement of ethics; that men may get scruples in the future that they have no thought of now; that, for example, a sense of justice may develop that will make our present manner of conducting business and industry a reproach and a shame.
It is a word of this sort which I should like to throw out among men and women of today. It is a new center of interest, a new basis of union, that we have to propose. The old religions, and Liberalism in its present forms, rest on other issues. Judaism is a race religion--a pure, a lofty religion, but still a race religion. Christianity is more universal, but it is founded on and limited by Jesus of Nazareth; and, though I will not be surpassed in genuine reverence for that unique figure, that image of blended majesty and gentleness which has cast a light down the centuries, and has rarely been without influence, even when Christians were maddest and most bigoted, truth equally compels the admission that Jesus does not furnish a basis broad enough and large enough for the present and coming time. Yes, Jesus himself rests upon a deeper foundation in the reason and conscience of man; and on that bottom rock we may stand today as truly as he stood, and may build upon it as serenely, with as undaunted a faith and as firm a hope as ever he or his followers did eighteen hundred years ago. No more satisfactory is ordinary Liberalism. It is still largely critical; it is often but a wild and bitter attack on the old religions; it is at best a calm and clear perception that the old religions are no longer possible to us; it is not seldom coupled with indifference to moral questions, and, where it is zealous, its zeal must often be confessed to be on the wrong side. I believe the future is for those who have cut loose from the old-time forms and creeds, and who have no patience with them. But their impatience must go further; they must become impatient with themselves and with the moral state of the community; they must turn a deaf and relentless ear to all the siren calls that would confound liberty with license; they must rather own the call of stricter rules, of higher ideals of duty, and feel that, with the old citadels of faith in ruins at their feet, their work has but begun. It is to earnest and brave-hearted men and women who will turn their faces in this direction that the Ethical Movement addresses itself.
For let me make clear that the basis of our movement is not a theory of morality, but morality itself. The moral teacher is not primarily to give a metaphysical philosophy of ethics; to propagate transcendentalism or utilitarianism--though he may have views of his own, and on occasion need not refrain from expressing them. He desires rather, if he can, to bold up the idea of the good itself; to make men love it for its own sake, and own its beauty in the conduct, in the beautiful order and beneficence, of their lives. There is but one theory of morals against which I have any feeling, and this not because it is a theory, but because it is subversive of morality itself. I mean the view which we now and then hear advocated, that morality is but a refined selfishness, a long-sighted prudence; that the end of life is and can be nowhere else than in the accumulation of individual pleasures, and the avoidance of individual pains. That man cannot go out of himself; that he cannot love another equally with himself; that he cannot find an end of his being in his family, in the community, in the State; that for all these he cannot live, and cannot die rather than see them dishonored--that is what I call the real infidelity, and, whether uttered by priest or philosopher, has, and always shall have, my dissent and my rebuke. Morality is this going out of one's self and living in, living for, something larger. Prudence, selfishness--these are and may well be the servants, the attendants on morality; they never dare take the place of masters. Aside from this, which is not a theory but a statement of morality, a moral teacher need have little to say, at least at the start, of the philosophy of ethics. It is something far more primary and simple than philosophy, even the truest, that must be our immediate concern. It is the practically proving to the world that morality is an adequate foundation for our lives; it is the demonstrating that unselfishness can be by showing it; yes, it is, I sincerely hope and trust, proving that a higher morality is possible than the world now allows--proving it by the stricter purity of our private lives, by higher notions of honor in our business or professional relations, by juster conduct to our employees; yes, by a new wave of sympathy and humanity that shall take us out of ourselves and out of our business, and make us bear the burdens of the sick and the poor and the forlorn in our community as they have never been borne before.
William MacIntyre Salter (1853-1931), the son of a Congregational minister, prepared for the Unitarian ministry at the Harvard Divinity School. He began working with Dr. Adler in 1881, and in 1883 became leader of the Chicago Ethical Society where he demonstrated extraordinary moral courage in his support of the strikers at the time of the famous Haymarket Riot. He was Leader of the Philadelphia Society (1892-6) and returned to the Chicago Society from which he retired in 1907. Among many contributions to the literature of the Ethical Culture Movement was his book, Ethical Religion (1899).
Once more the fields have ripened to harvest, and the fruitful earth has fulfilled the promise of spring.
The work of those who labor has been rewarded: They have sown and reaped, planted and gathered.
How rich and beautiful is the bounty gathered: The golden grain and clustered corn, the grapes of purple and green,
The crimson apples and yellow pears, and all the colors of orchard and garden, vineyard and field.
Season follows after season, after winter the spring, after summer the harvest-laden autumn.
From bud to blossom, from flower to fruit, from seed to bud again, the beauty of earth unfolds.
From the harvest of the soil we are given occasion to garner a harvest of the heart and mind:
A harvest of resolve to be careful stewards of all life's gifts and opportunities.
A harvest of reverence for the wondrous power and life at work in things that grow, and in the soul.
A harvest of gratitude for every good which we enjoy, and of fellowship for all who are sustained by earth's beauty.
© American Ethical Union All Rights Reserved
(Percival Chubb was an Ethical Culture Leader in England, in New York, and in St. Louis. This document also located on the AEU web site, where there is a photograph of a bust of Percival Chubb in the Ethical Society of St. Louis. Photograph and original computer format by Gene Speckert.)
Also see: Lois Kellerman: Ethical Culture Thanksgiving Ceremony
This chapter from An Ethical Philosophy of Life is Felix Adler's attempt to describe what he means by "elicit the best in others." In doing so, he defends this as the "supreme ethical principle" -- that is, the fundamental principle of ethics. He describes an ethical conception of virtue in the context of realism: that people don't always act out of their most ethical, most virtuous selves.
Chapter VII - An Ethical Philosophy of Life - Felix Adler
The Supreme Ethical Rule: Act So As To Elicit the Best In Others and Thereby In Thy Self(1)
It is difficult to see the potentially divine nature in men when masked by the forbidding traits which human beings so often exhibit.
A number of vital considerations will now have to be emphasized as pertinent to the subject we are dealing with.
The first point is that the character of every person contains contrary elements.(2) Let the two kinds of qualities be called the fair and foul, or more simply still the plus and minus traits. The bright qualities, the plus traits, are undoubtedly more predominant in some, the dark or minus traits in others. But potential plus qualities exist in the worst characters, and potential minus traits may be surmised, and on scrutiny will be found, in those whom the world most admires.
A second point is mentioned as an hypothesis not indeed as yet verified, but I believe verifiable, namely, that certain defined minus traits will be found to go with certain plus traits. Wherever bright qualities stand out we are likely to meet with corresponding dark qualities or dispositions, and conversely. There are, I am persuaded, uniformities of correspondence between the plus and minus traits, and it would be of greatest practical help in judging others and ourselves if these uniformities could be worked out. A kind of chart might then be made, a description of the principal types of human character, with the salient defects and qualities that belong to each. Extensive statistical treatment of a multitude of biographies would lay the foundation for such an undertaking; also sketches of the prominent characteristics of nations, like those furnished by Fouillée would be utilized. Also the study of the character traits of primitive races as partially carried out by Waitz in his Anthropology and the character types of animals, so far as accessible to observation, might be used for comparison. Instructed in this manner, we should, on coming into contact with others, either on their attractive or repellent side, be prepared to expect and to allow for the opposite traits. And we should learn to see ourselves in the same manner; we should see our empirical character as it really is, the dark traits side by side with the bright. The courage to wish to know the truth about one's self is rare, and when the revelation comes or is forced upon us, it often breeds a kind of sick self-disgust and despair. The saint at such times in moral agony declares himself to be the worst of sinners. He has striven to attain a higher than the average moral level, and behold he has slipped into only deeper depths. The minister of religion, the revered teacher, the political and social leader, when abruptly shocked into self-examination by some evidence of grossness or deviousness in themselves, no longer to be glossed over or explained away, are fated to go through the same ordeal. A profound despondency is the consequence. It is not only the badness now exposed, but the previous state of hypocrisy that seems in the retrospect intolerable. Some persons live what is called a double life in the face of the world. But who is quite free from living a double life in his own estimate? Achilles said of himself (greek omitted) ("cumberer of the ground"). Many a man has echoed that cry with a bitterness of soul more poignant than that which Achilles felt when he uttered the words.
Now the principle of the duality(3) of character traits, or as we may also designate it, the principle of the polarity of character, applies to our natural or empirical character, and our empirical character is not our moral character. The distinction between the two will serve, as we shall presently see, to rescue us from the state of moral dejection just described. But first it is indispensable to fix attention on the natural character, to recognize that we are composite, each and every one of us, and that the all-important thing to know is which of our plus qualities go with which of the minus. Here the psychologist can help us. Here a great field is open for a practical science of ethology. This would give us a more adequate knowledge of the empirical character, the substratum in which ethical character is to be worked out.
Point three opens up a great enlightenment in regard to the whole subject. It is that the distinction must be drawn, and ever be kept in mind, between the bright and dark qualities and the virtues and vices. The bright qualities are not of themselves virtues. The dark qualities are not of themselves vices. To suppose that they are, to confuse the bright with virtue and the dark with viciousness, is the most prevalent of moral fallacies.(4)
A person is found to be kind, sympathetic, gentle, and on this score is said to be virtuous or good. But gentleness, kindness, a sympathetic disposition, while they lend themselves to the process of being transformed into virtues, are not of themselves moral qualities at all, but gifts of nature, happy endowments for which the possessor can claim no merit. And sullenness, irascibility, the hot, fierce cravings and passions with which some men are cursed, are not vices, though it is obvious how readily they turn into vices as soon as the will consents to them.
The question becomes urgent: What then is a virtue? The fair qualities are the basis, the natural substratum of the virtues., the material susceptible of transformation into virtues. In what does the transformation consist? When does it take place? The answer is, when the plus quality has been raised to the Nth degree, and in consequence the minus qualities are expelled. This result, of course, is never actually achieved. The concept here presented is a concept of limits. But in the direction defined lies growth and continuous development not of but toward ethical personality. In public addresses I have often said: Look to your virtues, and your vices will take care of themselves. I can put this thought more exactly by saying: Change your so-called virtues into real virtues: raise your plus qualities to the Nth degree. And the degree to which you succeed in so doing you can judge of by the extent, to which the minus qualities are in process of disappearing.
One or two examples will illustrate the pivotal thought thus reached in the exposition of our ethical system with respect to its practical consequences. To raise to the Nth degree is to infinitize a finite quality, or to enhance it in the direction of infinity. I shall take two examples, one self-sacrifice, the other justice, both viewed in their finite aspect as plus traits requiring to be subjected to the process of transformation.
The empirical motive of self-sacrifice may be egocentric or altruistic. In egocentric self-sacrifice, doing for others is a means of exalting the idea of self to the mind of the doer. He uses others, not as sacred personalities, worth while on their own account, but subtly exploits them by benefiting them. He uses them as objects by means of which to achieve a finer self-aggrandizement. He may indeed go to the utmost lengths of devotion for his friends. He may perform for them the most repulsive offices. He may give freely of his means, denying himself meanwhile comforts and even necessaries in order perhaps to extricate them from pecuniary difficulties. He may contribute in refined ways to their pleasure. As a physician he may watch night after night at the bedside of the sick, foregoing sleep though fatigued to the point of exhaustion in order to be at hand to mitigate the pains of the sufferer, jeopardizing his own health in order to assist others in recovering theirs. Yes, he may even give of his own blood to renew their ebbing life. In all this be will look for no material compensation. Gratitude, especially gratitude expressed in words, is repugnant to him. The lofty image of self which he strives to create would be marred if any such coarsely selfish motive were allowed to intrude. All that he requires, but this he does inexorably require, is that his beneficiaries shall silently confess their dependence on him, that he shall see the exalted image of himself mirrored in their attitude, and that they shall move in their orbits as satellites around his sun. The egocentrism is veiled and easily confounded with the purest moral disposition. But it is there all the same, and the proof of it is that the very same person who is thus friendly to his friends, and an unstinting benefactor to those who pay him the kind of homage he exacts, is capable of behaving with almost inconceivable hardness and even cruelty toward others who will not stand in this subordinate relation to him, or who in any way wound his self-esteem. Sister Dora, serving enthusiastically in a small-pox hospital, while neglecting the nearer duties at home, intent on dramatic, histrionic self-representation, is likewise a palpable instance of egocentric self-sacrifice.
The self is precious on its own account. The nonself, the other, equally so. A virtuous act is one in which the ends of self and of the other are respected and promoted jointly. It is an act which has for its result the more vivid consciousness of this very jointness. Egocentric self-sacrifice errs on the one side, the personality of another being made tributary to the empirical self, despite the actual benefits conferred. Altruistic self-sacrifice errs in the opposite way. In it the personality of the self is effaced or made servile to the interests or supposed interests of another. Not, let me add, to the real interests, for the spiritual interests are never achievable at the expense of other spiritual natures. The wife or mother is an instance, who slaves for husband or children, obliterating herself, never requiring the services due to her in return and the respect for her which such services imply, degrading herself and thereby injuring the moral character of those whom she pampers. An historic instance of the altruistic error on a larger scale is afforded by the Platonic scheme of scientific breeding under state supervision, a suggestion revived in modern times, in which freedom of choice between the sexes, and the integrity of the personality of those concerned, is sacrificed to the supposed interests of the community. Nietzsche's doctrine may possibly be regarded as a compound of the two errors described, the Superman representing the egocentrism, while altruistic self-sacrifice, entire annulment of their personalities is expected of the multitude.
It is easy to distinguish the plus and minus qualities in the characters of the egocentrist and the altruist: in the one case, beneficence combined with hardness; in the other, service of others combined with absence of self-respect.
The second example to be briefly considered is the finite trait commonly mistaken for justice. A typical illustration of this is presented by the merchant who ascribes to himself a just character on the ground that he is punctual in the payment of his debts, that his word is as good as his bond; or by the manufacturer who entertains the same opinion of himself because he pays scrupulously the wages on which he has agreed with his employees.(5) One wonders that so great and profound a notion as that of justice should be understood so superficially, restricted to such narrow limits, and that rational human beings should claim to possess so lofty a virtue on the score of credentials so inadequate. The reason is that the empirical substratum of justice is mistaken for the ethical virtue itself. This substratum may be described as an inborn propensity toward order in things and in relations, a natural impatience of loose fringes, a certain mental neatness. Hence insistence on explicitly defined arrangements and on simple, over-simple formulas. These are favored because they keep out of sight the complex elements which if considered might introduce uncertainty and possibly -disorder into the situation. Thus a manufacturer, impatient of looseness, over-rating explicitness, will be led to grasp at a formula of justice which reduces it to the bare literal performance of a fixed agreement, no matter with what unfreedom, owing to the pressure of want, it was entered into by the wage-earners, and no matter how deteriorating the effect of the insufficient wage may prove to be on their standard of living.
But it is a far cry from this empirical predisposition to the sublime ethical idea itself. The idea of "the just" as exemplified in any act performed by me includes the totality of all those conditions which make for the development of the ethical personality of others in so far as it can be affected by my action. To do a just act is to act with the totality of these conditions in view, in order to promote the end in view, which is the liberation of personality or at least the idea of personality in .others and in myself.
It is thus evident that a just act -- an ideally, perfectly just act, -- can be performed by no man. First because the right conditions of human development are but very imperfectly known, and are only brought to light by slow degrees. Secondly because even as to the known conditions of justice, for instance the abolition of the evils of the present industrial wage system, a single employer, or even a group of well-intentioned employers can bring about the desired changes only to a very limited extent.
Raising the finite quality underlying justice to the Nth degree therefore means opening an illimitable prospect. The ethical effort in this, as in all other instances, is destined to be thwarted. It is an effort in the direction of the finitely unattainable; the effort itself, with the conviction it fosters as to the reality of that which is finitely unattainable, being the ethically valuable outcome. The just man, therefore, in any proper sense of the word, is one who is convinced of the fact that he is essentially not a just man, and a deep humility as to both his actual and possible achievements will distinguish him from the "just man" so-called, who arrogates to himself that sublime attribute on the ground of the scrupulous payment of debts, or the fulfilment of contracts. Humility in fact will be found to be the characteristic mark of those who have attained ethical enlightenment in any direction. It is the outward sign from which we may infer that the finite quality in them is in process of being raised to the Nth degree.
I have given these few specific illustrations of my meaning, but what has been said applies equally to any of the plus qualities. The plus qualities are the ones which are favorable for transformation into the infinitized ethical quality. The ethical principle itself is one and indivisible. Amy one of the plus qualities, when ethicized, will conduce to the same result. From whatever point of the periphery of the ethical sphere we advance toward the center we shall meet with the same experience. Thus self-affirmation or egoism when in idea raised to the Nth degree will reveal that the highest selfhood can be achieved only when the unique power of a spiritual being is deployed in such a way as to challenge the unique, distinctive power that is lodged in each of the infinite multitude of spiritual beings that are partners with us in the eternal life.
And altruism, or care for others, at its spiritual climax, will conversely involve the recognition that true service to others can only be perfectly performed when the power that is resident in ourselves is exercised in its most vigorous, most spontaneous, and most self-affirming mode. And as the diverse empirical qualities which we observe in one another all appear to be modes of or cognate with these two principal tendencies-the self-affirming and the altruistic-the method of transfiguring empirical qualities which has been set forth may be found to apply in every instance.
(1) Or more exactly act so as to elicit the sense of unique distinctive selfhood, as interconnected with all other distinctive spiritual beings in the infinite universe.
(2) The conception underlying Robert L. Stevenson's sketch of Jekyl and Hyde is to be taken seriously, and applied without exception mutatis mutandis to every human being whatsoever (but see footnote p. 76). It is not original with Stevenson. The French, who are perhaps the keenest psychologists, long ago invented the apercu that everyone has the defects of his qualities.
(3) The use of the term duality is not intended to exclude the possibility of multiplicity, but only to call attention to one striking bifurcation of human character.
(4) Stevenson falls into this error. He confounds Jekyl with the virtuous and Hyde with the vicious side of character. In reality the one should stand for the empirical plus traits, the other for the empirical minus traits.
(5) Contract-keeping is peculiarly, the moral rule applicable to mercantile transactions. To apply it without modification to the dealings of employers and wage-earners is to intrude the mercantile standard into the industrial sphere. This is what we are now witnessing, The industrial standard is only in process of development and clarification, and the accepted mercantile standard is really in conflict with it. Among merchants it is of the very essence of their transactions that a contract shall not be invalidated, despite the injurious consequences to one or the other party which it may turn out later on to involve. The security of commercial transactions would be gone if revision of the contract should be permitted whenever consequent loss appears. Again, and this is particularly important, merchants are assumed to be on a footing of equality in dealing with one another, equally free in accepting or rejecting a proposed contract., equally competent to take care of their respective interests. The relation of employers to wage-earners however is not that of economic equals, but of the economically stronger with the economically weaker. And this difference is of cardinal importance in determining the rule of justice as it should obtain in the industrial sphere. I do not of course intend to imply that an agreement between employer and wage-earners once made should not as a rule be kept as scrupulously as that between merchant and merchant. What I affirm is that in view of the greatness of the injury possibly inflicted upon the weaker, the economically stronger party is bound at least to share the responsibility with the weaker for the essential fairness of the terms of the agreement before it is finally completed. Nay, I would go a step farther, and say that despite the indispensable condemnation of contract-breaking, provision should be made for possible revision in cases where it can be shown that exceptional hardships have appeared, unforeseen and unforeseeable at the time when the agreement was made.
An Address by Dr. Felix Adler
May 10, 1931
In this address, delivered when Dr. Adler was 80 years old and at the end of his career as the founding Leader of Ethical Culture, Adler looks back at the founding of the movement and the 55 years after. At the end, he reflects on possibilities for the movement's future.
IN this solemn moment, at the end of fifty-five years, my mind goes back to a certain May evening in 1876, when I saw before me an assembly of men and women who had summoned me to state explicitly the nature of the proposed Ethical Movement outlined by me in a previous public address. That evening the Society was founded. Of those who were present, the charter members of the society, I am, to the best of my knowledge, to-day the sole survivor. I am as it were the memory of the society. With deep gratitude I think of those who first asked me to lead them along a new path, and who followed so devotedly. They have all passed away, and others, thousands by this time, who succeeded them have passed -- a great procession! I greet them in meditative hours. Their faces are not mournful. Their extended arms point forward. They were interested in the future -- in something great to be. And they put their trust, not in a person but in an idea. From the first they resented the imputation that this could be a merely personal movement, they believed rather that it was destined to acquire a universal significance.
I have decided, in celebration of this anniversary, to speak of the inner history of this society and of the movement. With its outward history you are acquainted. It did not remain a New York society alone. There are the five societies in the United States, the societies in England and on the continent. There are echoes of the movement in the distant East, in Japan. But this outward expansion, though not negligible, must yet appear insignificant to those who appraise a movement by the numerical test. Quantitative memberships ebb and flow. In the long last it is only quality that tells.
I have said that I would speak of the inner sense of the movement. What was the motive that appealed to those who first joined it? I answer: it was the desire to rid their lives of the burden of falseness -- the burden of ceremonies of religion which to them were not true. They felt this especially in critical moments of their lives, as when at the obsequies of one beloved the Christian minister would say in the name of Jesus: "I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth on me, though he were dead, yet shall he live" -- that is to say, immortality on the condition of faith in Jesus; or among orthodox Jews, when at the burial the survivor passes between the ranks of his friends, and they say to him: "Be comforted in the midst of those who mourn for Jerusalem," though it no longer even incurred to him to mourn for Jerusalem. Or again, the call for supernatural intervention in the anguished moment of suspense for the recovery of the sick. They desired to shift the burden of falsity from themselves, because falsity is unlivable; and for their children they wished that nothing unlivable should be put into their minds, that those young beings should not have the picture of life obscured by a mist and cloud of untruth.
So much for the more external practices, the ceremonies of the prevailing religions. But beyond these, there were the creeds, embodying a certain philosophy of life, a certain account of the universe and of its origin, also declaring the place that belongs to the Bible, to revelation, etc. If truth was to be the test, a truthful way of living the demand, did these creeds bear the test! More than that -- was any creed hereafter to be accepted! A creed has sometimes been likened to a sarcophagus like that in which the early relics of Alexander the Great were deposited -- of costly stone perhaps adorned with precious symbols, containing within it the remains of what was once power and glory, but is now only dust and ashes.
This is the freethinker's view of the creeds. But is not acceptable to me. For every one of the chief religions has some element of truth, some vital element in it. This has been fearfully overlaid with superstition. But what now matters is to free the grain from the chaff, to rescue as much as possible of the wisdom and the moral insight that past generations have stored in their religions, not to allow any result of the effort of mankind toward truth to perish, to preserve truth but at the same time to restate it in such fashion as to fit it into the larger truth that has since been gained. I say that each of the religions contains some gem which must be rescued from the dross that obscures its brilliance -- some gem that should be saved so as to be placed in a new setting as a jewel in the crown of humanity. On this account, to tell distinctly what our movement was not -- it never was an iconoclastic movement. Even icons, as we have lately observed in the Russian exhibit in this city, have a certain beauty; even idols, statues of the gods like the Olympian Zeus and the Hermes, have a certain greatness -- only they must not be worshiped, as if they were more than similitudes. Our movement was never a Thomas Paine or Ingersoll movement, shattering the beliefs that men held holy, devastating movements since they too often destroyed the sensitiveness of men to whatever is not palpable, not of the senses.
In the very first volume of lectures published, which contrasted Creed and Deed, stressing deed as against creed -- in that very volume you will find appreciations of the great religions of the past, reverence for the old masters hand in hand with aspirations for the new. Nevertheless, I said emphatically, not creed but deed. Why not creed, if it contains an element of truth? Why this sharp antithesis? Because a creed expresses a certain view of the universe and of human life that is supposed to be absolutely true, true for all time. Creed is a Procrustes' bed. If the facts of life do not fit it, they must be stretched, if they overpass the creed they must be contracted into it. And this is true even of the most liberal creeds. Thus to-day, after every ancient dogma has been rejected by them, liberal teachers still insist (it is the "last ditch") that the ethical verities of Jesus are and will ever be unsurpassable. Again, the creed is a formula, something that can be recited, a profession of faith, and experience shows only too clearly that the profession may be on the lips or even in the mind and yet remain without effect in practice. Deed then, not creed, meant the effect on actual conduct to be the test of any philosophy of life. It did not mean, it never was intended to mean, blunt empiricism, action without the guidance of thinking. On the contrary, deeper, fresher thinking on the ever-lasting problems was challenged, in order that the conduct, the doings of men might become nobler. Action without thinking is blind, thinking without action to test it is footless. But there must be no inflexible statements, no inelasticity of the mind in attacking the problems. Is what you think as to the meaning of man's existence true? The test is: is your philosophy vital, is it livable?
The world is sick in many ways. A philosophy of life is like the prescription of a physician intended to produce health. To offer this philosophy as a creed is like asking a patient to swallow the paper on which the prescription is written, in the expectation that a cure will result. The right way is to compound the ingredients prescribed in the doctor's formula, to take in the medicine, and then to decide whether it makes for health and healing.
I have contrasted the movement with the orthodoxies, both fundamentalist and liberal; let me contrast it briefly with the betterment movements, the socialisms, the efforts for the fairer distribution of the products of labor -- the housing movement, the child labor movement, the peace movement -- in all these matters the people who came under the influence of our movement were alert, interested exceedingly, and not without influence.
But there was a definite point of view that distinguished us in regard to the betterment movements. It was explicitly stated from the first, and could not possibly be misapprehended, that the order of means and ends in the conduct of men must be the reverse of that which as a rule obtains. For morality, or any advance in morality, is commonly regarded as a means and mere happiness as the end. Do the right, even the difficult right, in order that you may have as your reward for yourself or others -- happiness. In contrast to this I stated most earnestly and set it down in our publications that our movement is inspired by the belief that the ethical end is itself the supreme end of life to which every other is subordinate, that right relations between men and women, between employers and employees, between people and people, are not to be regarded as the means for making mankind happy, but that right relations are supremely worth while on their own account, that to act rightly is to do the right for right's sake. Not that happiness is underrated, or that we affect to be so superhuman as to despise the things that make for joy. But in the first place we realize that one cannot guarantee happiness. There are too many vicissitudes, too many unforeseen casualties, too many attacks from without, too many bereavements, too many failures of strength. Of course to the extent of our power we endeavor to give the cup of happiness to those we love -- crosswise, as I like to think of it. I not seeking my happiness, but receiving it from the other, and he or she not seeking theirs, but receiving it from me, an interchange of the wine of life. But even so, I should say that to make another, precisely one whom we love, just happy, to have only that in mind, the joy of that life, is to think not highly enough of the beloved person. I heard a man say -- "It is my utmost aim to give my wife every luxury, to gratify her every wish in the matter of attire, in the matter of adornment, in the exquisiteness of her environment." How then does the man think of his wife? Is it as a being to be surrounded with everything that flatters the sense and thereby suffocates the soul? Happiness on the other hand when rightly understood may be itself a means toward spirituality -- the joy of life, the beauty of life, may be the pedestal on which to erect the statue, the earthly harmonies and perfections may be suggestive of that supreme ethical perfection which we are pledged to strive for.
Therefore, in every movement for the improvement of conditions, the cachet of the Ethical Movement has been this: that we have kept the ethical end in mind for which these improved conditions are the means -- better homes, yes, but not only for the comfort, the brightness, the little garden perhaps; but because these necessities or amenities are propitious conditions for the family life as ethically it should be lived. Not the rescuing of the child from the mill and the mine only for the sake of the free development of his physical and mental life, but because the freedom to grow mentally and physically is a condition of the child's manifesting the worth that is potential in him, not the relief of the oppressed from the oppressor merely that they may breathe a deeper breath, but because the state of being oppressed and the state of the oppressor too are hostile to the development of the worth that is latent in man. So I have ever insisted that as Christianity says: "Forgive your enemies," we shall say: Side with your enemies, be on the side of the oppressor, on the side, namely, of that which is not the oppressiveness in him; liberate him too from the tyranny he exercises.
There are some who maintain that the satisfaction of conscience is itself a kind of pleasure, and therefore that we ought not to criticize pleasure as the supreme object of existence. There are higher and lower pleasures, they say, -- pleasures of conscience are preferred by some. But I think this is mere sophistry. There is a kind of serenity possible amid great physical and spiritual anguish, the "peace that passeth understanding," but that is not pleasure in the sense in which the word is commonly understood. Socrates was serene, but he was not happy when he drank the hemlock cup. Jesus was not happy on the cross. And to speak of one of the great martyrs of science, Bruno, who was burned at the stake in 1600 at Rome -- his mood was indeed exalted, but would you say that he was happy when the smoke and the flames gathered about and smothered him? Joy is one of the means of spiritual advance if rightly used, but suffering is another, the more poignant, potent means.
There is one more distinction which it is important to draw. Are we a religious movement? I have already in substance answered that question when I said that a philosophy of life is necessary as a guide to conduct. A religion is a kind of philosophy, but it is not the only one. Like every other philosophy it has to be tested, approved or rejected according to its influence on the ennoblement of men in all their relations.
Now, as the initiator and first Leader of the movement, I would say that I was moved and am moved by a religious impulse. I felt myself to be the channel of a spiritual principle that operates in and through men. What strength I have had has been derived from that. All the influence that I ever exercised is due to that. But so far from claiming that as a special privilege, as charlatans do, my whole aim and purpose was to reveal to others the same principle, dormant but present in them, capable of being roused into astounding action. (As the physicists tell us of inconceivable forces which are locked up in the atom, and which would produce vast effects if they should be released, so I hold that there is a spiritual force in men that can change the face of humanity if once it be released.) But I do not invite you to accept my religion, I ask you to consider the practical directions for the conduct of life which follow from it, and if, having tested them, you find them valid in your experience then they will be of use to you.
In the beginning someone called me a "suppressed atheist." That was a mistake. I did not believe in his God, nor do I now. Someone may say at present that I am a suppressed theist. But let us not debate about a word. I will try to state distinctly what I believe in order that now, if not before, you may understand that I have been driving at, nay, what has been driving me all these years. I believe that Nature is but the outside surface of things, that it is the painted drop curtain behind which the real play is enacted, that there is divinity, that the essential life of the universe is perfect and therefore divine. The two words perfect and divine are synonymous. Dante in speaking of his master, Brunetto Latino, says: "He taught me to eternalize myself." That is the third word that goes with the two others - eternal, perfect, divine. The religion which I hold is intended to help me "eternalize" myself.
I draw a sharp distinction between divine being and divine life. All the theistic religions insist on divine existence, the existence of a divine being -- perfection, eternity, divinity, being contracted into a single individual being. That being is called God. If you believe in that being, you are religious; if not, you are an atheist, they say. I draw the distinction between existence and life. There have been endless attempts to prove the existence of the individual named God. All these attempts have failed -- the argument from design, the argument from evolution, etc.
The attempt to prove by logical argument the existence of an individual deity is foredoomed to failure. And if it succeeded it would not avail. The logical outcome of such a logical argument would be what Aristotle described, -- a self-sufficient, self-contemplating, self-enclosed perfection, between whom and ourselves there could be no relation. If I cannot taste divinity, if I cannot experience it, I have no use for it. Now it is otherwise if I anchor on the conception of divine life. If the perfect life quickens in the universe, then it may quicken in me who am a part of the universe, and of this quickening life I can have actual experience. The uttermost secret of it indeed I cannot penetrate. What essentially life is I cannot tell, but I can know its manifestations. There is an unmistakable difference between a dead stone and an organism. We have the idea of cause and effect which helps us to find our way in nature. We have also the idea of organism, not only the idea, but the experience of it. Now the idea of organism is a spiritual idea. This must be set down distinctly, that animals are only semblances of organisms. An organism is an assemblage of parts each of which is quick with some role it has to play in the whole, while at the same time (and this is vital to the idea) it prompts and quickens every other part to play its diverse role. Each is necessary to the whole, could not be spared, the whole is necessary to each. Life, imperfect as we know it, is found thus far only in connection with animal organisms -- yet the animal is only a most imperfect simulacrum of the organic ideal. For the parts of which it is composed are not irreplaceable, are not strictly necessary. They die, and this quasi-semblance of organism disappears. And therefore life as represented in the perishable animal is not true life, is not the divine life which we seek. For the divine is expressed in three synonyms -- divine and perfect and eternal. Hence my ideal of the divine life is that of an assemblage of parts, a society, a spiritual society, infinite, composed of infinite members infinitely diverse, each eternal, each necessary to the whole, the whole necessary to each. And it is this ideal of the perfect life in which I behold the symbol of the utter reality in things, of the powers and essences that work behind the screen.
The truth of this ideal I can discover in ethical experience, for ethical experience, as I interpret it, is nothing else than my endeavor to act toward my fellow beings as a member of an infinite spiritual society would act toward his fellow-spirits, seeking to quicken them, so as to express the eternal excellence that is potential in each, and thereby making actual the excellence that is in me.
The practical outcome of this daring metaphysics is usable by every one, whether he has a taste for metaphysics or a capacity to follow such speculations or note. I have put it into simple language: Seek the best in others, -- the best is the spiritual part in others -- and thereby you will bring to light the best in yourself.
In the theistic religions of the past, God stands for the individual soul exalted to the degree of the infinite. In this altered conception of divinity it is society exalted to the degree of the infinite, that stands for divinity. It is the social ideal of the divine that is here presented.
Are we then a religious society of this sort or of any other? I warn against the use of the pronoun "we," by an untrue insinuation committing others as well as oneself. That is a bad habit that clings to us from the heritage of the creeds. Some of us are religious and others are not. This society of ours is indeed a strange and new formation. It takes time even for those who belong to it to appreciate the novelty implied. Perhaps three classes of our membership may be discriminated. Some come only to hear, to listen. The gates are open. No one by joining the society is pledged to stay. There is an inflow and an outflow, thousands have come, other thousands have gone. There is an inner group, those who more or less accept the guidance to conduct, the rule of life which has been taught. Others, the innermost group, others unostentatiously, undistinguished from the rest, seeking by the contagion of their endeavor gradually to affect the lives of the others.
They do not affect to be the salt of the earth. They are not of the "holier than thou" kind. They are not puffed up with spiritual pride - the poorest kind of pride imaginable. No, they are characterized rather by a profounder humility, a more poignant sense of their own imperfection.
In a sublime passage, Isaiah exclaims: "Woe is me, for I have seen the vision of the Eternal, and I am a man of unclean lips, and dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!" The vision punishes the seer, condemns him in his own eyes. The grander the vision of the ethical ideal, the more poignantly does he who conceives it realize the almost infinite distance between himself and that grandeur, that separates his performance from that completeness.
How simple comparatively the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament, the Golden Rule of the New, how almost impossible the ethical effort demanded of us, namely, to see the spiritual nature in others despite the hideous appearances that mask it! How can we see it there unless it has become a convincing force in ourselves? And yet, he who sees the vision is akin to that which he sees. And the vision is not a floating ethereal dream, but power flows from it into the seer and necessity is laid upon him to strive to change his life and that of others in accordance with the sublime pattern which the vision holds out to him.
And so I say, turning to actual conditions, the mightiest task is before men individually and collectively -- to reconstruct the family, which is now at lowest ebb, to spiritualize marriage as a compact whereby to evoke reciprocally the excellence of women and men, to spiritualize industry by introducing the functional ethical principle as operative between its various factors, to create in time a corpus spirituale of mankind of which the various peoples of the earth shall be the members.
Little more than half a century of our movement is behind us. We are merely at the beginning. We have merely sketched the contour of the ideal and its structural principle. There must be a deeper psychology, richer experience to fill in the details. There must come a more adequate literature, speaking with a Biblical simplicity that goes through thought straight to heart and will. There must come new songs, texts that tell what we ourselves feel, not what others have felt, a new music perchance produced by some inspired composer who has caught the sense of the new religious conception, and who will create a new type of religious music -- not hallelujahs to the One, not Protestant chorales like those of Bach, however great these may be, not Catholic masses and requiems, but an incomparable harmony expressing the social conception of Divinity -- human groups answering and exciting in one another spiritual aspiration distinctive of each.
At the beginning of my address, I spoke of those who had trusted us in the belief that something great was to come of it all. And now, in closing, I turn to the future, to those to whom we commit our trust, to our unknown successors in the generations and generations. Across the gulf of years I send them my greeting, in the hope that long after my voice shall have been stilled, an echo of what has here been said on this anniversary day will reach them, urging them to carry on so as to bring nearer the day when the sublime vision which hitherto has been seen but faintly and intermittently shall shed its full radiance on a transfigured humanity.
May 15, 1876
New York Society for Ethical Culture
In 1876, the 25-year-old Felix Adler delivered this address in New York City to an audience gathered by a group of men who had organized around Adler's ideas for founding a new religious and philosophical movement.
FOR a long time the conviction has been dimly felt in the community that, without prejudice to existing institutions, the legal day of weekly rest might be employed to advantage for purposes affecting the general good. During the past few years this conviction has steadily gained in force and urgency, until lately a number of gentlemen have been impelled to give it shape and practical effect.
Conceiving that in so laudable an enterprise they may justly hope for the sympathy and co-operation of the friends of progress, they have invited you to join in their deliberations this evening, and upon me devolves the task of stating, as frankly and plainly as may be, the end we have in view and the means by which its achievement will be attempted. At such a time, when we are about to set forth on a path hitherto untried and likely to lead our lives in a new direction, it appears eminently desirable and proper that we should, in the first place, briefly review the public and private life of the day, in order to determine whether the essential elements that make up the happiness of states and individuals are all duly provided, and if not, where the need lies and how it can best be supplied.
On the face of it, our age exhibits certain distinct traits in which it excels all of its predecessors. Eulogies on the nineteenth century are familiar to our ears, and orators delight to descant upon all the glorious things which it has achieved. Its railways, its printing presses, its increased comforts and refined luxuries - all these are undeniable facts, and yet it is true none the less, that great and unexpected evils have followed in the train of our successes, and that the moral improvement of the nations and their individual components has not kept pace with the march of intellect and the advance of industry. Before the assaults of criticism many ancient strongholds of faith have given way, and doubt is fast spreading even into circles where its expression is forbidden. Morality, long accustomed to the watchful tutelage of faith, finds this connection loosened or severed, while no new protector has arisen to champion her rights, no new instruments been created to enforce her lessons among the people. As a consequence we behold a general laxness in regard to obligations the most sacred and dear. An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment.
Far be it from me, indeed, to disparage the importance of commerce or to slight its just claims as an agent in the service of humanity. In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown. But all the more on this account it is necessary to provide a powerful check and counterpoise, lest the pursuit of gain be enhanced to an importance never rightfully its own, lest, in proportion as we enhance our comfort and well-being, comfort and well-being become the main objects of existence, and life's grander motives and meanings be forgotten. We have already transgressed the limit of safety, and the present disorders of our time are but precursors of other and imminent dangers. The rudder of our ship has ceased to move obedient to the helm. We are drifting on the seething tide of business, each one absorbed in holding his own in the giddy race of competition, each one engrossed in immediate cares and seldom disturbed by thoughts of larger concerns and ampler interests. Even our domestic life has lost much of its former warmth and geniality. The happy spirits of unaffected content and simple endearment are sadly leaving our low-burnt hearth-fires. Ragged and careworn the merchant returns to his home in the evening. He finds his children weary. His own mind is distracted. In these troublous times business cares not unfrequently dog him even into the seclusion of the family circle,. How, then, is he to discover that tranquil leisure, that serenity of soul which he needs to be a true father to his little ones. He cannot form their characters; he cannot justly estimate their needs. Perforce he leaves their educations in part to the wife - and modern wives have their own troubles and are often but little fitted to undertake so arduous a task - in part he must abandon it to strangers. It has been said that the modern world is divided between the hot and hasty pursuit of affairs in the hours of labor, and the no less eager chase of pleasure in the hours of leisure. But even our pleasures are calculated and business like. We measure our enjoyments by the sum expended. Our salons are often little better than bazaars of fashion. We wander about festive halls, chewing artificial phrases which we neither believe nor desire to be believed. We breathe a stale and insipid perfume from which the spirit of joy has fled. The brief exhilaration of the dance, the physical stimulus of wine and of food, the nervous excitement of a game of hazard, perhaps these make up the sum total of enjoyment in by far the majority of our so-called parties of pleasure. Surely, of all things melancholy in American life, American mirth is the most melancholy! And were it not for Music - that divine comforter which sometimes wins us to higher flights of emotion and speaks in its own wordless language of an ideal beauty and harmony far transcending the prosy aspirations to which we confess - our life would be utterly blank and colorless. We should be like the bees that build, they know not why, and hive honey whose sweetness they never enjoy. There is a great and crying evil in modern society. It is want of purpose. It is that narrowness of vision which shuts out the wider vistas of the soul. It is the absence of those sublime emotions which, wherever they arise, do not fall to exalt and consecrate existence. True, the void and hollowness of which we speak is covered over by a fair exterior. Men distill a subtle sort of intoxication from the ceaseless flow and shifting changes of affairs, and the deeper they quaff the more potent for awhile is the efficacy of the charm. But there comes a time of rude awakening. A great crisis sweeps over the land. The sinews of trade are relaxed, the springs of wealth are sealed. Old houses, whose foundations seemed as lasting as the hills, give way before the storm. Reverse follows reverse. The man whose energies were hitherto expended in the accumulation of wealth finds himself ruined by the wayside. His business has proved a failure. Is his life, too, therefore a failure? Is there no other object for which he can still live and labor? Nor need we turn to such seasons of unusual disaster in order to exhibit the instability and insufficiency of the common motives of life. There are accidents to which we all are alike exposed and which none, however favored by fortune, can hope to avoid. A blight comes upon our affections. The dearest objects of our solicitude are taken from us. Our home is darkened with the deep darkness of the shadow of death. In such hours, what is to keep our heart from freezing in chill despair, to keep our head high and our step firm, if it be not the deep-seated, long and carefully matured conviction, that man was set into the world to perform a great and unselfish work, independent of his comfort, independent even of his happiness, and that in its performance alone he can find his true solace, his lasting reward? To arouse such courage, to build up and buttress such a conviction, would not this be a loyal and much-needed service?
Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt.
When on the 30th of April, 1789, General Washington was for the first time inducted into the presidential office in this city of New York, he declared that "the national policy would be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality." And he appealed to the wisdom and integrity of those first legislators whom the country had chosen under its new constitution, as a pledge and safeguard of the Republic's future welfare. Could he return to us now in this season of jubilation, how sadly altered would he find the condition of our affairs! There is not a morning's journal that reaches us that is not besmirched with tales of theft and perjury. The very names that ought to be held up as luminaries of honor have become bywords of villainy, and the foul stench of corruption fills our public offices. See how the Nation, in this the festal epoch of her marriage to Liberty, stands blackened with the crimes of her first dignitaries, and hides her head in shame before the nations! And for what have these miserable men bartered away their honor and that of the people? For the same unhallowed and unreasoning desire of rapid gain which has brought such heavy disaster upon the commercial world: to support the extravagance of their households; to deepen, perhaps, the potations of a carousel! Statesmen and Philanthropists are busy suggesting remedies for the cure of these great evils. But the renovation of our Civil Service, the reform of our Primaries, and whatever other measures may be devised, they all depend in the last instance upon the fidelity of those to whom their execution must be entrusted. They will all fail unless the root of the evil be attacked, unless the conscience of men be aroused, the confusion of right and wrong checked, and the loftier purposes of our being again brought powerfully home to the hearts of the people.
I have spoken of our private needs and of the larger claims of the public well-being. But another question now presents itself, fraught with deeper and tenderer meanings even than these. The children, the heirs of all the great future, what shall we do for them? Into this world of sinfulness and sorrow, with its thousandfold snares and sore temptations, shall we let their white souls go forth without even an effort to keep them stainless? Do you not struggle and toil and trouble, that you may leave them, when you die, some little store of earthly good, something to make their life easier, perhaps, than yours has been - that you may turn to your long sleep, knowing that your children shall not want bread? And for that which is far more precious than bread shall we make no provision? When your bodies have long been mouldering in the grave, they will live, men and women, fighting the world's battles and bearing the world's burdens like yourselves. Would you not feel the benign assurance that they will be true men and noble women? that the fair name which you transmit to them will ever be clean in their keeping? that they will be strong even in adversity, because they believe in the destiny of mankind and in the dignity of man? And what efforts do we make to attain this end? We teach them to repeat some scattered verses of the Bible, some doctrine which at their time of life they can but half comprehend at best; and then at thirteen or fourteen, at the very age when doubt begins to arise in the young heart, when in its inefficient gropings towards the light, youth stands most in need of friendly help and counsel we send them out to shift for themselves. Is it with such an armor that we can equip them for the hard hand-to-hand fight of after-life? Or do you conceive a magic charm, a talismanic power to guard from evil, to reside in these empty words which you teach your children's lips to spell?
Already complaints are multiplying on every hand that that most gracious quality of all that adorns the age of childhood - the quality of reverence - is fast fading from our schools and households; that the oldtime respect for father and mother is diminished, and grown rarer and more uncertain. Twenty years ago, what high prophecies did we not hear of the future of the generation that was growing up! What inspiriting promises of the full bloom into which the still closed petals of their life would one day open! Have the young men of the present day fulfilled these pledges? Has the passive reverence of the child developed into the active aspiration of the man? Do you find them in the higher walks of their professions - I say take them as a whole, and set aside a few brilliant exceptions - have they illustrated the sterling qualities of the race they sprang from, the dearer virtues of our common humanity? We have sown the seeds of long neglect. We are but reaping the bitter Sodom fruit of dead hopes and fair promises turned to ashes. And now I need not appeal to your business instincts to show that any change, if it is to come - and a change must come - can be brought about only, first, by united effort; secondly, by applying that great principle which has been the secret of the enormous progress of industry and commerce in the past century - the salutary principle of division of labor.
You do not build your own houses, nor make your own garments, nor bake your own bread, simply because you know that if you were to attempt all these things they would all be more or less ill done. But you go to the builder to build your house, to the baker to bake your bread, because you know that in limitation there is power, that limitation and combinations are the essentials of success. On this account you limit your own energies to some one of the many callings which society has marked out, and by combination with your fellows, are certain that in proportion as your own part is well performed, you may command the best services in every department in exchange for what you offer. What is true of material wants is also pertinent in the case of intellectual needs. If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts. But you apply to some one in the profession in whose abilities you see reason to confide. The same holds good in every department of knowledge. In every case you turn to the specialist, trusting that, if from any source at all, you will obtain from him the best of what you need. Nor is it otherwise in education. For though you possess a sufficient knowledge of the branches taught in our schools, yet you are well aware that it is one thing to know, and quite another to impart knowledge. And so again you step aside in your own persons to entrust the office of training your children in the arts and sciences to an instructor, to a specialist. And if all this be true, then it follows that, if the moral elevation of ourselves, the moral training of our children, be also an object worth achieving, ay, if it be the highest object of our life on earth, then we dare not trust for its accomplishment to the sparse and meager hours which the busy world leaves us. Then, here as elsewhere, society must set apart some who shall be specialists in this, who shall throw all the energy of temper, all the ardor of aspiration, all the force of heart and intellect, into this difficult but ever glorious work.
The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. What its great thinkers have thought and written on the deepest problems of life, shall we not hear and enjoy? The future calls upon us to prepare its way. Dare we fail to answer its solemn summons?
And now for all these purposes we propose to unite our efforts in association, and to set apart one day of the seven as a day of weekly reunion, - a day of ease, that shall come to repair the wasted energies of body and mind, and whereon, in the enjoyment of perfect tranquility, the finer relations of our being may find time to acquaint us with their sweet and friendly influences. What that day shall be it is not for us to determine. The usages of American society have long since settled that practically it is, and for the present at least can be, only the Sunday. This is the sole day of respite whereon the great machine of business pauses in its operations, and leaves you to direct your thoughts to other than immediate cares. In the ancient synagogue the Monday and Thursday, in the early church the Wednesday and Friday, were set apart for purposes of higher instruction, over and above the stated Sabbath meetings. If the Monday, the Thursday, the Wednesday, or the Friday had in our community been eliminated from the week of labor, we should accept any one of them with the same willingness. The name of the day is immaterial. It is the opportunity it offers with which alone we are here concerned. And how others see fit to spend the day is foreign to our consideration, and whatever mischievous construction may be placed upon our work will quickly be dispelled, depend upon it, by the character and testimony of the work itself. The young men, at all events, can desist from labor upon no other day than the Sunday. Heads of firms may, if they see fit, incur the risk of taking an exceptional position in the business community; but the young men, who depend upon others for patronage and employment. cannot in this matter select their own course, and if they attempt it will be met by innumerable and insuperable obstacles at every step. But it has been urged by some that the Sunday should be devoted to the intimate intercourse of the domestic circle, from which our merchants are so often debarred at other times. This is an honorable motive, surely, which we are bound to respect. But is it, indeed, believed that a single hour spent in serious contemplation will at all unduly infringe upon the time proper to the home circle? Rather will it give a higher tone to all our occupations, and lend a newer and fresher zest even to those enjoyments which we need and seek.
The exercises of our meeting are to be simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism. They are to consist of a lecture mainly, and, as a pleasing and grateful auxiliary, of music to elevate the heart and give rest to the feelings. The object of the lectures shall be twofold: First, to illustrate the history of human aspirations, its monitions and its examples; to trace the origin of many of those errors of the past whose poisonous tendrils still cling to the life of the present, but also to exhibit its pure and bright examples, and so to enrich the little sphere of our earthly existence by showing the grander connections in which it everywhere stands with the large life of the race. For, as the taste is refined in viewing some work of ideal beauty - some statue vivid with divine suggestion, some painting glowing with the painter's genius - so, in the contemplation of large thoughts do we ourselves enlarge, and the soul for a time takes on the grandeur and excellency of whatever it truly admires. Secondly, it will be the object of the lecturers to set forth a standard of duty, to discuss our practical duties in the practical present, to make clear the responsibilities which our nature as moral beings imposes upon us in view of the political and social evils of our age, and also to dwell upon those high and tender consolations which the modern view of life does not fail to offer us even in the midst of anguish and affliction. Do not fear, friends, that a priestly office after a new fashion will be thus introduced.
The office of the public teacher is an unenviable and thankless one. Few are there that will leave the secure seclusion of the scholar's life, the peaceful walks of literature and learning, to stand out a target for the criticism of unkind and hostile minds. Moreover, the lecturer is but an instrument in your hands. It is not to him you listen, but to those countless others that speak to you through him in strange tongues, of which he is no more than the humble interpreter. And what he fails to express, what no language that was ever spoken on earth can express - those nameless yearnings of the soul for something better and happier far than aught we know of -- Music will give them utterance and solve and soothe them.
We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing religious sentiment, are dear. And on the other hand we shall be just to those who have ceased to regard them as satisfactory and dispensed with them in their own persons. Freely do I own to this purpose of reconciliation, and candidly do I confess that it is my dearest object to exalt the present movement above the strife of contending sects and parties, and at once to occupy that common ground where we may all meet, believers and unbelievers, for purposes in themselves lofty and unquestioned by any. Surely it is time that a beginning were made in this direction. For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith. The earth has been drenched with blood shed in this cause, the face of day darkened with the blackness of the crimes perpetrated in its name. There have been no direr wars than religious wars, no bitterer hates than religious hates, no fiendish cruelty like religious cruelty; no baser baseness than religious baseness. It has destroyed the peace of families, turned the father against the son, the brother against the brother. And for what? Are we any nearer to unanimity? On the contrary, diversity within the churches and without has never been so widespread as at present. Sects and factions are multiplying on every hand, and every new schism is but the parent of a dozen others. And it must be so. Let us make up our minds to that.
The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect. But if difference be inevitable, nay, welcome in thought, there is a sphere in which unanimity and fellowship are above all things needful. Believe or disbelieve as ye list - we shall at all times respect every honest conviction. But be one with us where there is nothing to divide - in action. Diversity in the creed, unanimity in the deed! This is that practical religion from which none dissents. This is that platform broad enough and solid enough to receive the worshipper and the "infidel." This is that common ground where we may all grasp hands as brothers, united in mankind's common cause. The Hebrew prophets said of old, To serve Jehovah is to make your hearts pure and your hands clean from corruption, to help the suffering, to raise the oppressed. Jesus of Nazareth said that he came to comfort the weary and heavy laden. The Philosopher affirms that the true service of religion is the unselfish service of the common weal. There is no difference among them all. There is no difference in the law. But so long have they quarreled concerning the origin of law that the law itself has fallen more and more into abeyance. For indeed, as it is easier to say. "I do not believe," and have done with it, so also it is easier to say, "I believe," and thus to bribe one's way into heaven, as it were, than to fulfill nobly our human duties with all the daily struggle and sacrifice which they involve. "The proposition is peace!" Peace to the warring sects and their clamors, peace also of heart and mind unto us - that peace which is the fruition of purest and highest liberty. Let religion unfurl her white flag over the battlegrounds of the past, and turn the fields she had desolated so long into sunny gardens and embowered retreats. Thither let her call the traveler from the dusty high-road of life to breathe a softer, purer air, laden with the fragrance of the flowers of wonderland, and musical with sweet and restful melody. There shall he bathe his spirit in the crystal waters of the well of truth, and thence proceed again upon his journey with fresher vigor and new elasticity.
Ah, why should there be any more the old dividing line between man and his brother-man? why should the fires of prejudice flare up anew between us? why should we not maintain this common ground which we have found at last, and hedge it round, and protect it - the stronghold of freedom and of all the humanities for the long years to come? Not since the days of the Reformation has there been a crisis so great as this through which the present age is passing. The world is dark around us and the prospect seems deepening in gloom. and yet there is light ahead. On the volume of the past in starry characters it is written - the starry legend greets us shining through the misty vistas of the future - that the great and noble shall not perish from among the sons of men, that the truth will triumph in the end, and that even the humblest of her servants may in this become the instrument of unending good. We are aiding in laying the foundations of a mighty edifice, whose completion shall not be seen in our day, no, nor in centuries upon centuries after us. But happy are we, indeed, if we can contribute even the least towards so high a consummation. The time calls for action. Up, then, and let us do our part faithfully and well. And oh, friends, our children's children will hold our memories dearer for the work which we begin this hour.