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No matter how fervently he may have been praying supernaturalism, he preaches pure cause and effect. His text may savor of old Palestine; but his sermon is inspired by New York and Brooklyn; and nearly all that he says, when he is most himself, finds an approving response in the mind of every well-disposed person, whether orthodox or heterodox in his creed. What is religion?
The prestige and all the supernaturalism contained in the ideas of divine rights and divine descent that have become attached to the idea of kings are transferred to the government, or extended to the government or state. The illusion of superiority and remoteness is kept up by various forms and ceremonials.
Virtue rewards the virtuous by making them more virtuous. Vice punishes the vicious by making them more vicious. So long as the rewards for which we hope and the punishments which we dread are conceived of as inward and spiritual, we are on safe ground. But such a scheme of rewards and punishments is wholly foreign to the genius of supernaturalism.
Upon this basis was reared a vast intellectual and imaginative structure embodied in many creeds, pictured in visions of Dante and Milton and Bunyan, enforced by multitudinous appeals to emotion and reason, to love, hope, and terror. It is the dissolving of this elaborate supernaturalism, and the growth of a different conception of the spiritual life, which is now going on before our eyes.
The minds which have reached the doctrine of immanence are incomprehensible to the fanatics of transcendence. They will never understand these last that the panentheism of Krause is ten times more religious than their dogmatic supernaturalism. Their passion for the facts which are objective, isolated, and past, prevents them from seeing the facts which are eternal and spiritual.
Indeed, as Huxley and scores of others have pointed out, it is only the religious view of man that builds up civilization. A great community is the record of man's supernaturalism, his uniqueness. It is built on the "higher-than-self" principle which is involved in the moral sense itself.
They might have suffered their Christianised paganism to fade with time; worldly prosperity and arts might have weaned them gradually from their supernaturalism, and science from their myths; but how were they to abandon at once all their traditions, when challenged to do so by a foreign supernaturalism so much poorer and cruder than their own?
Had he lived in our times, he would have belonged to the most progressive schools of thought and inquiry, probably a rationalist, denying what he could not prove by reason, and scorning all supernaturalism; a philosopher of the school of Hume, or Strauss, or Renan.
Were this real, then was his steamboat adventure a dream, the revelation of the ring a delusion, and his water-stained haversack a phantom. He wandered clewless in a maze of mystery. Nor was this the first paradox he had encountered since overleaping the brick wall. He began to question whether supernaturalism had not teen too hastily dismissed by lovers of wisdom!
If, on the other hand, what I had been taught by the supernaturalism of my ancestors were true, to commit suicide might be but to play finally into the hands of that same unknown pitiless power with whom my love had all along been striving.
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