FREE PUBLIC MEDITATIONSY ON THE ESSENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. FIRST MEDITATION. NATURAL PROBLEMS. FROM the very origin of the human race, wherever man has existed, or still exists, certain questions have peculiarly and irresistibly fixed his attention, and they continue to do so at the present hour. This arises not alone from a feeling of natural curiosity, or the ardent thirst for knowledge, but from a deeper and more powerful motive. The destiny of man is intimately involved in these questions; they contain the 02668 secret not only of all that he sees around him, but of his own being; and when he aspires to solve them, it is not merely because he desires to understand the spectacle of which he is a beholder, but because he feels, and is conscious of being himself an actor in the great drama of existence, and because he seeks to ascertain his own part there, and comprehend his own destiny. His present conduct and his future lot are as much at issue as the satisfaction of his thought. These great problems are, for man, not questions of science, but questions of life: in considering them he feels himself compelled to say with Hamlet, "To be or not to be, that is the question." Whence does the world proceed, and whence does man appear in the midst of it? What is the origin of each, and whither does each tend? What are their beginning and their end? Laws there are which govern them: is there a legislator? Under the empire of these laws, man feels and calls himself free: is he so in reality? How is his liberty compatible with the laws which govern him and the world? Is he a passive instrument of fate, or a responsible agent? What are the ties and relations which connect him with the Legislator of the world? The world and man himself present a strange and painful spectacle. Good and evil, both moral and physical, order and disorder, joy and sorrow, are here intimately blended and yet in continual antagonism. Whence come this commingling and this strife? Is good or is evil the condition and the law of man and of the "orld? If good, how then has evil found admission? Wherefore suffering and death? Why this moral disorder? the calamities which so frequently befall the good, and the prosperity, so abhorrent to our feelings, which attends the wicked? Is this the normal and definitive state of man and of the world? Man is conscious that he is at the same time great and little, strong and feeble, powerful and impotent. He finds in himself matter for admi ration and for love, and yet he suffices not to himself in any respect; he seeks an aid, a support, beyond and above himself: he asks, he invokes, he prays. What mean these inward disquietudes, these alternate impulses of pride and weakness? Have they, or not, a meaning and an object? Why prayer? Such are the natural problems, now dimly felt, now clearly defined, which in all ages and among all nations, in every form and in every degree of civilization, by instinct or by reflection, have arisen, and still arise, in the human mind. I indicate only the greatest, the most apparen I might recall many others which are connected with them. Not only are those problems natural to man; they appertain to him alone; they are his peculiar privilege. Man alone, among all creatures known to us, perceives and states them, and feels himself imperiously called upon to solve them. I borrow the following admirable observations from M. de Châteaubriand: "Why does not the ox as I do? It can lie down upon the grass, raise its head toward heaven, and in its lowings call upon that unknown Being who fills this immensity of space. But no: content with the turf on which it tramples, it interrogates not those suns in the firmament above, which are the grand evidence of the existence of God. Animals are not troubled with those hopes which fill the heart of man; the spot on which they tread yields them all the happiness of which they are susceptible; a little grass satisfies the sheep; a little blood gluts the tiger. The only creature that looks beyond himself, and is not all in all to himself, is man."* From these problems, natural and peculiar to man, all religions have sprung. The object of them all is to satisfy man's thirst for their solution. As these problems are the source of relig ion, the solutions they receive are its substance and foundation. There prevails in our days a very general tendency to regard religion as consisting * Génie du Christianisme, vol. i, p. 208, edit. of 1831. |