The Chief End of Man | Page 7

ritual,
dogma, and miracle, but which now when given freer wing find firmer
support and loftier scope.
Along with these forces has gone the steady push of human nature for
enjoyment, for ease, for power; the grasp of man for all he can get of
whatever seems to him the highest good. There have been mutual
injuries, degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of
human history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation,
and which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making."
Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action
of strong personalities.
No sharp line can be drawn between these various powers,--their
interplay is constant. The main argument of the drama, from the
mediaeval to the present phase, may be briefly shown.
Into the world as Dante knew it came Knowledge on three great
lines,--opening the material universe, rediscovering a lost interpretation
of life, and diffusing the secrets of the few among the many. The
astronomers, voyagers, and geographers found out a new heaven and a
new earth. The revival of Greek literature gave to the cultivated class a
"renaissance," a rebirth, of speculative thought, of intellectual beauty,
of delight in human activities for their own sake. It was a new birth in
some of the old pagan sensuality, skeptical of heaven or hell; worse
than the old sensuality because it trampled down the finer purity which

Christianity had bred. In others it was a new birth to the pursuit of
moral and social good, inspired by the master spirits of Judaism and
early Christianity. Then came the invention of printing, and the
aristocracy of intelligence widened rapidly toward democracy.
The foremost men of the new knowledge supported the Catholic church,
either as a covert for indulgence or as a spiritual agency to be
maintained and purified. The successful rebel against the church was a
peasant-priest, who revolted because the moral unsoundness which
long had sapped the hierarchy ran at last into open countenance of vice.
It was originally a moral revolt, and it was led by a man who knew in
his own experience that not only the ethical but the emotional life of
the spirit was possible without dependence on the church of Rome. But
neither Luther nor any of the reformers were men of spiritual
originality. Driven to construct a new creed, they simply worked over
the old dogmas, divesting them of the keys of priestly power--the Mass,
the confessional, absolution, Purgatory, and the like; and giving
infallible authority to the Bible only. A war of creeds followed,
mingled with a strife of ambitions and a struggle between the powers of
the secular state and of the hierarchy. To men of piety and peace like
Erasmus and Melanchthon it seemed as if religion were only a loser by
the long period of bloodshed and bitterness that followed. The gain, as
we see it, was that half of Europe was wrested from the dominion of the
Catholic church; that that church was driven to purify its morals; and
that in the Protestant states the liberty which at first was only a change
of masters spread gradually, as one sect after another established its
foothold, and as the secular temper in the state rose above the
ecclesiastical, until the religious freedom of the individual is at last
becoming generally and securely established.
Only by this overthrow of ecclesiastical authority was rendered
possible that unchecked freedom of intellectual inquiry which has been
the great positive factor in modern advance. Step by step men have
learned to know the condition, the history, the natural laws of the
material world in which they live and the social world of which they
are a part. The bearing of this growing knowledge on the conception of
the spiritual life has been various,--seeming for a while to lie wholly

apart from it; then at times menacing its existence or contracting its
scope; again arming it with powerful weapons and enlarging its ideals.
Of the latest chapters in the story of science, one has retold the origin of
Christianity, divested it of miracle and revelation, and translated it into
purely natural and human terms. Another chapter has fixed the general
trend of the universe known to man as an ever advancing and
broadening movement, under the name of Evolution.
Amid all these changes the Christian church has continued to present
its ideals, precepts, incitements; partly affirming them in contradiction
of all denial, partly adapting them to the changes of time and thought.
The moral and spiritual interpretation of life has not been confined to
the church, but has been voiced in each generation by poets, moralists,
reformers, statesmen, each after his thought. Out of the conflict and
confusion a substantial agreement and harmonious ideal is at last