The Chief End of Man | Page 9

of gratitude.
In France, the highest intelligence was at war with established
institutions,--the Encyclopaedists, Voltaire, Rousseau, against the
Catholic church and the reigning authorities: on the one side
persecution, but growing feeble; on the other side derision or evasion or
attack. In England, a large measure of civil and religious freedom gave
the intellectual combatants a fairer field and a milder temper. The
English genius showed itself as practical, matter-of-fact, and moderate.
Supernatural Christianity was attacked and defended; against the
assault on the miracles the defense was really a shifting of the ground,
and an insistence as by Butler on an ethical order in the observed
workings of the world, which gives a sort of analogue and support to
the Christian scheme of future retribution. In speculative thought the
prevailing school, as in Locke, approached reality from the side of

sense-knowledge, till Hume showed how this road led to a denial of
miracle and in philosophy to a fundamental skepticism. Berkeley
reverted to the ideal philosophy, and there seemed but a continuance of
the eternal seesaw of metaphysics.
In Germany, Kant sank his plummet deeper. He found indeed in the
working of the pure intellect an outcome of self-contradiction. But he
recognized, as the most certain guide to reality which man's inner world
affords, the commanding sense of duty,--the "moral imperative;" and
through this he found the presence and the authoritative voice of a
moral deity.
Goethe lived through a rich and various experience, of book-culture,
emotion, conversance with men and affairs, in the attitude of an
explorer and observer, unbound by creeds, but open to all teaching
from past records or present impressions. The projection of this
experience was an ideal of life which gave large scope to all human
faculties,--to knowledge, pleasure, passion, service,--under a wise
self-control, and with theoretical allegiance to a moral law and a future
hope not unlike the law and the hope of Christianity. It was an ideal
which appealed only to the man of intellectual habit, and which lacked
the note of heroism and self-sacrifice.
It was the opposite quality, the passion of self-forgetful service, which
won for Christianity its most notable triumph in this century, in the
movement led by John Wesley. In Wesley, Protestantism came back to
the rescue of the poor, as Catholicism came back in Francis of Assisi.
Among the peasants and colliers of England, among the
backwoodsmen of America, swept an uplifting wave of love, joy, and
hope.
Jonathan Edwards did Christianity the service of carrying Calvinism to
its logical extreme, and showing what it really meant. He started in the
New England ministry a strenuous speculation, which was not to rest
till it destroyed the foundation from which he worked. The hell as to
which comfortable churchmen were getting silent, he painted in such
lurid colors that reaction and ultimate revolt were necessities of human
nature. The life of holiness and love--in himself a most genuine

reality--he defined in such terms of introspection and
self-consciousness, that there opened a wide gulf between the forms of
religion and the most sturdy and natural virtue of the time.
That sturdy and natural virtue was embodied in Benjamin Franklin,--in
all this eighteenth century the best type and herald of the coming
development of man. Franklin inherited the characteristic virtue of the
Englishman and the Puritan; he started in ground which Puritan and
Quaker had fertilized, and when the fire of the early zeal had cooled; he
worked out the problem of life for himself with great independence and
entire good sense. After a few vagaries and some wholesome buffeting,
he determined that "moral perfection" was the only satisfying aim. But
instead of proclaiming his discovery as a gospel, he quietly utilized it
for his personal guidance. He had a keen eye for all utility; he carved
out his own fortune; he early identified his own happiness with that of
the people around him, and served the community with disinterested
faithfulness through a long life. That unselfish beneficence, of which
Goethe thought a single instance was enough to save his hero from the
fiend to whom he had fairly forfeited his selfish soul, was the habit of
Franklin's lifetime. He found the ample sanctions and rewards of virtue
in the present world, though he held a cheerful hope of something
beyond. In the study of this world's laws, he saw, lay the best road to
human success. He recognized the homely virtues of industry and thrift,
on which the young American society had worked out its real strength,
and assigned to them the fundamental place, instead of that mystic and
introspective piety which the Calvinist made his corner-stone. He took
the lead in penetrating the secrets of nature, and not less in moulding
and guiding the infant nation. If his virtue was prudential