the great facts of religion, that there are but two words in religion, "God" and "the soul"; and that all religion, in its history, philosophy, and services, has been the effort to bridge over from the one great pier of thought to the other, by virtue of which the soul alone may find God, and God may seek the soul. For, said Jesus, "The Father seeketh," seeketh: the searching God is on our path,-"The Father seeketh such to worship him as worship him in spirit and in truth." More and more we must hold, it seems to me, to the true democratic conception of religion; namely, the essential validity of the soul's own rights. What led Jefferson to protest against slavery, to protest for the rights of the States, as distinguished from the centralization taught by Hamilton? What led him to phrase the ideal of equality in the Declaration of Independence, of which it may well be said that it states not "glittering generalities, but eternal ubiquities"? What led him to turn with faith through all his life to the man next the soil, as distinguished from the man in the artificialities of the city? What made him feel that the farmer, not the trader, was the man who was likeliest to find his rights and independence under the general government? All these are but the aspects, in the domain of gov ernment, administration, and civic duty, of that fundamental thought in religion, that in the last analysis God and the soul are alone together; and all that abates from the soul's conscious personality, and all that interferes, whether in terms of pantheism or terms of impersonality of any kind, with the conscious presence of the living God with the living soul, must tend more and more to irreligion. Religion is an experience, and all vital experiences are personal. This, then, seems to me the lesson of the hour; namely, that, as Jefferson in every act of his life, even in the founding of the University of Virginia, which he regarded as his greatest service to the nation, put the responsibility upon the individual mind, so religion leaves the man shut in alone with God. In the organization of the University of Virginia we have a singular instance of faith in unrestricted liberty. The University of Virginia has no president, no obligatory schedule of studies, no entrance examinations; has no rules for its students as to the attendance upon study or absence from study. It makes but the one rule, that in the college and out of it, in the seat of learning or at home, each student is to bear himself as a gentleman. That much-abused term harks back to the meaning that old Thomas Dekker gave it in that play of which we sometimes quote these lines: "The best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer; A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit, The first true gentleman that ever breathed," This was the conception which Jefferson had of the University of Virginia, in which he felt such pride; and that conception runs parallel to the freedom of the religious life. Error cannot be made a sin. Mistake cannot be erected into a crime. Human nature cannot pray in phalanx. It is not possible to enhance the impact upon the mind, even by multiplying the agencies for approaching the shrines of worship. Throughout the whole range of thought the dignity of human nature and the sufficiency of each soul to its own task before God appears. And what was said by that great Democrat, that great Republican, that believer in his country, that emancipator of the slave,-"The government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," may be paraphrased, it seems to me, as to the religious life and its tendency among our American people,- that the time shall come when each man shall find God for himself, and shall tell his discovery to the next man with joy, but without insistence that he shall hear. |