Religious Contrasts: Letters of a Pantheist and a Churchman

[IF the pantheistic philosophy of life, which has been with honest conviction developed and expounded by John Burroughs, has been unsettling to the peace and the beliefs of many good persons, which I much fear is the case, it is comfortable to feel — as I do after a study of it made since, about eighteen months ago, this brief correspondence was exchanged with him — that it is a wholesome unsettlement! Because we are not going to stop with it.

If mankind, whether now of Christian, of Mohammedan, of Buddhist, of Agnostic, or of other persuasion, knowing too well the incongruities of practice in all of those persuasions, shall in time take to heart the Burroughs philosophy against superstition and sham, against miracles and mysticism, it assuredly can, without material halt in its progress to the light, consider with him whether ‘we create a Creator, we rule a Ruler, we invent a Heaven and a Hell.’ For that is but a step. And the next step must be a realization of the absurdity of the concept that impersonal, unreasoning, blind Nature, which Burroughs finds merciless and cruel as well as good, and finds to be all he can conceive of God, can be itself the author of the marvelous and inexorable laws by which it is confessedly driven.

No; I have an abiding faith that we shall march forward, away beyond him, first clearing the path of doubts such as he raises, that hold back our thinkers, and of pearly gates and immaculate conceptions that hold back our unthinking; and shall know that out of an unreasoning and impersonal Nature cannot have been developed blindly a highly reasoning, dominating, if sinful, race of beings. And if our God is not unreasoning and impersonal, then it is fair to believe Him reasoning and personal. — HERBERT D. MILES.]

(From Herbert D. Miles)
ASHEVILLE, N.C., October 27, 1919.
Since reading your recent article, I have desired, and have several times resisted an impulse, to write you; I have hesitated, believing that you may have been annoyed by many a thoughtless critic or disputant. I am an ordinary, average American business man, with such a man’s inferior powers of analysis when compared with your own. Had the statements made by you in the article in question been made in something written by the late Robert Ingersoll, for example, they would have disturbed me not a whit, as my conception of him, rightly or wrongly, has always been upon a different plane from my respect for you. But since reading your statements it has seemed, unhappily, as if the Anchor to all that makes for hope beyond this life had suddenly been cut away.
It may well be that I have not comprehended the full meaning and intent of your article. The impression it gave me was, that you feel that it is rather childish in humankind to pray; to look to a sort of all-wise Father; to believe that any Power, higher than we are, cares for us individually; that in doing this, we are setting up a sort of Golden Calf for ourselves; and that there is but a slight and refined difference between ‘Church bells and good Sunday raiment’ and the ceremonies of the heathen; that Jesus Christ, and all that he has meant, is merely the product of an Oriental imagination and idealism, written, some generations after, into the presumably established fact of his life and crucifixion.
If it is not asking too much, will you let me know whether my interpretation of you, as above expressed, is substantially true?

(From John Burroughs)
RIVERBY, N.Y.,October 30, 1919.
I suppose my paper, to which you refer, is capable of the interpretation you place upon it. I have enough such essays to make a volume. Did you see one called ‘Shall we accept the Universe?’ In all these papers I attempt to justify the ways of God to man on natural grounds. If you attempt to do it on theological grounds you get hopelessly mired. I am a Pantheist. The only God I know is the one I see daily and hourly all about me. I do not and cannot separate Nature and God. If you make two of them, then who made and rules Nature? My God is no better and no worse than Nature.
Of the hereafter I have no conception. This life is enough for me. The Christianity you believe in is a whining, simpering, sentimental religion. The religion of the old Greeks was much more brave and manly. Christianity turns its back on Nature and relegates it to the Devil. I am done with the religion of Kings and Despots. We must have a religion of democracy, and find the divine in the common, the universal, the near-at-hand. Such is the religion of Science. The Christian myths have had their day. Only the moral and ethical part of Christianity, which harmonizes with Science, will endure. Its legend must perish.

(From Herbert D. Miles)
ASHEVILLE, N.C., November 6, 1919.
Thank you for your very clear letter of the 30th October. It answers my inquiry perfectly, and I am sure that you do not wish from me any attempt to dissuade you from your position, even should I have the temerity to attempt such a thing. But I do feel that I possibly have a more or less fortunate detachment, in that I have not read any of your former papers pertaining to religion, nor on the other hand have I indulged in the reading of any books, higher criticisms, or papers of a controversial nature defending either broad or narrow views of Christianity. So I believe it possible that we might find a common ground and even concede each other something — which might do each of us good.
I wonder if you have ever asked yourself whether our civilization would get us anywhere if we were all Pantheists, like you? It seems to me that, as we cannot all be distinguished naturalists, and cannot all have your firmness of character, those of us who are merely average men would be apt to be wholly without an ‘Anchor’ save human law; and as we make human law, that would easily become changed. We should have a feeling of ‘after us, the deluge’; and license, rather than self-control, of the majority, would rule.
And I wonder if you state more than a half-truth when you say that the Christian religion is a simpering, sentimental thing, and that the religion of the ancient Greeks was much more brave and manly? I know professing teachers of our Christian religion to-day who are as brave and manly as any Greek who ever lived; I have no doubt there were simpering sentimentalists in ancient Athens. Indeed, as you know, Socrates encountered some. I would as soon admire the religion of a tiger, if it comes to that; the tiger is as brave as, and less sensual than, the old Greek.
If I knew you better, I might make fun of your saying that you are done with the religion of Kings and Despots. Plenty of these in history, you will recall upon reflection, were essentially Pantheists. I know you are thinking of the recent war — after quoting the Greeks, who were never at peace! I agree with you that the Christian myths have had their day.
You say you cannot separate Nature and God; if we make two of them, you ask, then who made and rules Nature? The obvious answer is, ‘God.’ Surely you, of all persons, respect Nature too much to believe it capable of making itself? And are you not, indeed, unfair, when you say that ‘Christianity turns its back on Nature and relegates it to the Devil’? How does that look to you, in quotation marks? Is the teaching of Christ’s brotherhood turning our back upon Nature? Or are you in this referring merely to Christian myths, or failures? Did Roosevelt turn his back upon Nature — and was he a Pantheist?
Before I heard from you, I kept, turning over in my mind, ‘What have I left, as an “Anchor,” after stripping all myth and sentiment and unanalytic belief from Christian theory and practice?’ As a result, I wrote for myself the enclosed, entitled ‘My Anchor.’ I hope you can agree with it, and that it may even modify some of your preconceived conclusions; you are, I know, too big a man to receive it with other than an open mind and heart.

MY ANCHOR

I MUST HAVE AN ANCHOR. In the midst of cold storms of skepticism and realism, my little ship of life must be stripped to the bare mast of indisputable Fact; my good old sails of childlike faith and inspiring tradition must be furled, if I am not to drift upon the shoals of Doubt. I must have an anchor to my belief in God and in Immortality, that shall make it unassailable by Atheist or Agnostic, unshakable by Dogmatist or Pharisee, understandable by Child or Hottentot; that will encourage me to pray.

I know that the Seed is the child of the Flower, as much as the Flower is the child of the Seed: in each is life; in each is death. I know that power is given the Sun to transmit its light and heat; to the Moon to draw our great oceans; to Man to think and to dominate; to the Bird to sing and to fly; to the infinitesimal Pneumococcus to destroy our bodies; it is unthinkable that all of this can be self-made.

I know then, that a Higher Power does reign, stronger than its own creations; indestructible by them, and so immortal. I know that this Higher Power operates only through Law; that — though it seem cruel

— law, being higher, takes precedence over life; as sacrifice, being higher, takes precedence over self-preservation.

I know that the Man of Sorrows, whether divine or human, was not a myth; that his doctrine of brotherhood has gone farther and deeper than that of any other teacher, and is truer. I know that our Bible, whether or not more than an imperfect, Oriental, man-made exposition of the law and history, is for the most part an inspiring and a beautiful thing. Each must take that as does him most good, but must not make doubts of it, or of the common sense of some of its devout acceptors, an excuse for pride, or for abstinence from worship or from prayer.

I believe, through deduction from what I know, that the Higher Power, called God,

— and dreamed of in all lands, among all races, at all times, in some form plural or singular, — does assume to us, as pledged for him by the Man of Sorrows, a relation of Fatherhood. I cannot know how he qualifies this to the very young, the savage, or the misguided. It does not matter. I believe that this gift makes natural and logical both prayer and a hope of a share in his love and immortality.

THIS IS MY ANCHOR.

(From John Burroughs)
WEST PARK, N.Y., November 25, 1919.
The arranging of a trip to California for the winter has imposed so many new tasks upon me that my correspondence has been neglected. I have received many letters of approval concerning this article and others of similar import, and very few of disapproval. I am no more moved by one than the other. Some former articles of mine you might find interesting. ‘Shall we accept the Universe?’ — ‘Is there Design in Nature?’ and so on. The aim of them all is to justify the ways of God to man on natural grounds. The theological grounds do not make any impression upon me. I am much less interested in what is called God’s word, than in God’s deeds. All bibles are man-made; but we know the stars are not man-made, and if they are on our side, why bother about anything else? Pantheism, as Emerson says, does not make God less, but makes him more. If you look into the matter, you will find that we are all Pantheists. If I were to ask you what and where God is, you would say he is a Spirit and that he is everywhere. The good church people would be compelled to say that, too. Is not that Pantheism? A person cannot be everywhere. Personality is finite.
Our civilization is not founded upon Christianity — would that it were in many ways! The three great evils of our age, of most ages, — war, greed, intemperance, — would then be eradicated. How much of the real essence of Christianity — love — the heathen Chinese could teach us in such matters! There is vastly more of the essence of Christianity in Chinese civilization than in ours. We live by the head, the Chinese by the heart.
Our material civilization is the result of our conquests over Nature, or of the discovery and application of natural law, or Science. Christianity as a system has lost its moral force. Our scheme of salvation rests upon the dogma of the fall of man. But man’s fall has been upward. Evolution gives the key to his rise, and not theology. It is a wonder to me that man has survived his creeds — Calvinism, Buddhism, Roman Catholicism, and all the other isms. If science failed him, his creeds would not save him. Do you not suppose that such a man as Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, or Darwin would be a safe man to administer our human affairs? And these men were Agnostics or Pantheists. Yet do they not uphold our ethical system? The truth alone — moral and scientific truth — can make us free and safe.
I can subscribe to most of the articles in your creed, or ‘Anchor,’ if I put them in the language of naturalism.
As soon as I try to think of the universe in the terms of our experience, I am in trouble. The universe never was made, in the sense that my house was made. It is eternal — without beginning and without end; or, say, self-made, if you prefer. It is the God in which we live and move and have our being.
You and I are only a drop in this ocean of being.
I believe the Man of Sorrows was an historical fact, and that I would have loved him had I known him; but he is no more to me now than Socrates is. All his alleged miracles are childish fables. If he really died on the Cross, he never rose from the dead. Natural law, which is the law of God, cannot be trifled with in that way.
I do not cherish the dream of immortality. If there is no immortality, we shall not know it. We shall not lie awake o’ nights in our graves lamenting that there is no immortality. If there is such a thing, we shall have to accept it, though the thought of living forever makes me tired, and the thought of life, without my body as the base for my mind’s activities, is unthinkable. What begins must end. The flame of the candle goes out, though not one of its elements is lost. My consciousness, which is the flame of my body, ends at death, as a psychical process ceases. But whatever of energy was involved in it goes on forever. The sum of energy of the universe is constant.
I think as highly of the Bible as you do. It is the Book of Books, yet it is only a book — man-made. I fail to find any anchorage in any creed, or book, or system, but only in Nature as revealed to my own consciousness. I shall have a paper in the Atlantic Monthly by-and-by, in which I combat what Professor Osborn calls a biological dogma, namely that Chance rules in the world of life as in the world of dead matter. I cannot escape the all-embracing mind or spirit that pervades all living things. I have no purpose to convert you to my views of these great problems. Every man must solve the problems of life and death for himself. He cannot accept those of another.

(From Herbert D. Miles)
ASHEVILLE, N.C., December 1, 1919.
Thank you for your letter of 25th November. I had thought merely to write you an acknowledgment and wish you a happy journey to California. However, as you are open-minded, and Truth alone is what you crave, you will not mind my including some reflections upon your letter, without any expectation upon my part that you will care to continue the correspondence. I shall try to find your former articles to which you refer, and shall certainly read your coming one, in the Atlantic. I take it, however, that you have expressed to me the fundamentals of your beliefs or want of beliefs, and that all you have said, or shall say, must be merely elaborations.
May I say that I believe you are really a pretty good Christian? as you are, of course, a better citizen than most ‘professing Christians’ — not excepting myself. I can subscribe to, or pass as unimportant, your ideas as to the Universe being without beginning or end; that the Miracles are fables; that Man has ‘fallen upward,’ rather than as dogma has it; and, of course, that God is a Spirit.
But you jump from extolling the ancient Greeks to extolling the Chinese. You are not constructive. Perhaps you are not even fair to your own generation and people! Do not be merely destructive, I beg of you. Your views are good as far as they go, but are necessarily depressing. Do either create a better church, for unified work of its tremendously far-reaching kind, in ‘ anchoring ’ Society; create a better comfort than prayer; create a better instinctive hope than immortality; or encourage the Church, encourage our rising generation to stand back of it, encourage prayer, and encourage spiritual hopes and ideals! I wonder if you know what the Church is as a ‘stabilizer,’ in spite of its shortcomings; in spite of the slanders of it, often from lazy or misguided persons? What its real accomplishment is, in this country, and the sum of it?
What a responsibility, to print articles that may affect the rising generation against it, and to give nothing constructive in its place!
I want you to think again, as to your statement that civilization is not founded upon Christianity. I know you mean partly that Christianity is too good to recognize such a bad child; but, thinly watered as our practice of the Golden Rule is, civilization is founded upon Christianity. I do not think you believe that, if the chief part of the Aryan Race had originally drifted from Heathenism to Confucianism or Buddhism, — yes, or Pantheism, — instead of to the new Christianity, it would still have achieved, as now, the world-leadership in the arts and sciences which we call civilization. Perhaps you, and some other leaders in the sciences, do not know your own debt to Christianity.
Your letter which I am reviewing gives one an impression of a very good man striving to reconcile certain preconceived and rooted ideas, partly Agnostic, partly Christian, with life and history; trying to forget that the things material are the really temporal, and that there are things spiritual which, in the nature of what could constitute immortality, must be the things immortal.
I take it that you do not seriously consider things spiritual. You say the thought of life, without your body as the base for your mind’s activities, is unthinkable. Of course, that merely proves a personal limitation, and a regrettable one. I wonder if you give serious place to the world’s best Poets — who are unscientific, naturally — but spiritual? John Butler Yeats has recently written: ‘Poetry is the champion and the voice of the inner man. Had we not this champion to speak for us, externality would swamp the world, and nothing would be heard but the noise of its machinery.’ If the thought of living forever makes you tired, as you say, then perhaps the noise of the machinery, — very pleasant machinery, much of it, — being all you have listened to, has worn you out!
Pardon me if I say that I do not think your articles are ‘stabilizers’; or that they bring hope, or comfort, or happiness; or replace the want of these with anything more than ‘the noise of the machinery.’ I would not take seriously, if I were you, the approval you cite from the majority of your correspondents. If you will reflect, you will agree, I am sure, that after a speech upon, say, Tariffs, Temperance, or what not, — things upon which the world is divided into two or more camps, — those who rush up to grasp the speaker’s hand are those who always did agree with him, or those who wished uneasy doubts, or unstable convictions, bolstered up.
I am sincerely glad that you can subscribe to ‘most of the articles in my creed, or “ Anchor.” ’ But please do not call my Anchor a creed. Creeds, as you know, are not based upon ‘indisputable fact.’ That in my church was made in the third century; we have learned something since. They should be anchors. In mine are Church, Prayer, Immortality. I fear you leave these out. You apparently refuse to contemplate a world made up of Pantheists, which could, and would, say, and act, ‘After us, the deluge.’
No, I do not think that Darwin, Huxley, et al. would have been safe men to administer our human affairs, since you ask. Roosevelt, of a later civilization, knew all that they did and much more; he was a Christian and an administrator for you. Emerson may have praised Pantheists at one period of his life; hardly when he was at his best.
Well, a happy winter to you in California. I see that I am trying to tie you to all of my Anchor, believing that, in the winter of your years, you are still pliable. If you are, you are a wonder! But do consider the ‘ inner man ’ spoken of by Yeats; and the effect of your articles, if not constructive.

(From John Burroughs)<br/> LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA, December 29, 1919.
I with my son and four friends, have been here a week, and we are very happy. The world here is all sun, sky, and sea, never a cloud in sight, and the Pacific breaking its long roll upon the rocks one hundred yards below us. In February we go to Pasadena until spring.
Referring to our correspondence of a few weeks ago, and your statement that you did not think Huxley, Spencer, et al. would be safe men to administer our human affairs, and that our civilization is based upon Christianity — I wonder if you remember that the founders of our government, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, did not accept Christianity? They were Deists. Both Franklin and Jefferson spoke very disrespectfully, not to say contemptuously, of the Christian scheme of salvation; and Washington said in so many words in a message to Congress, ‘The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.’ The founders of the Republic were free-thinkers. Washington entertained the infidel Volney at the White House, and had the works of Voltaire in his library. He gave Volney a letter of recommendation to the American people, in which he said that, if men are good workmen, ‘they may be Jews or Christians, or they may be Atheists.’ Jefferson quotes Gouverneur Morris as saying that ‘General Washington believed no more in that system [Christianity] than I do.’
You confound our ethical system, which we all accept, with Christianity. Our ethical system is the growth of ages. What is true in Christianity is not new, and what is new is not true. Our civilization is founded upon reason and science. I have said in one of my printed articles that ‘a man is saved, not by the truth of what he believes, but by the truth of his belief.’ His creed may be perfectly absurd, like that of the Christian Scientists, but if it affords him an ‘anchorage,’ if he can fit it into his scheme of life, that is enough. The religion of the Greeks and Romans was not ours; but see what nerves, what poets, what philosophers, developed under it!
The religion of ancestral worship of the Japs and Chinese saves them. The mass of our own people believe in Christianity on Sundays (or used to before the automobile came in); but how few of them practise it in their daily lives. They practise the square deal, because it is good policy; it pays best in the long run.

(From Herbert D. Miles)
ASHEVILLE, N.C.,January 12, 1920.
My pleasure in having your letter of a few days ago was not unmixed with a certain feeling of guilt, in view of the possibility of our questions being too complicated, and your strength too limited, to attempt adequate discussion in writing — a view that is held I am sure by Dr. Barrus, from whom I have recently heard. It is charming, as you say, at La Jolla, with ‘never a cloud in sight.’ I am a little prejudiced, even in this January season, in favor of my home country here in Asheville; the clouds over the great old Blue Ridge mountains, which are falling back tier upon tier in the distance to the west, from my windows, are ever-changing visions of beauty, and fall upon real trees, in their shadows, — something that you have few of in California, except in spots, where you have the greatest in the world, — and our occasional rough and cold day serves to make even more delightful our usual bright and lovely days, of the temperature of the northern May.
Without prolonging what we shall not allow to degenerate into an argument which would convince neither of us, allow me merely to comment upon your new remarks. I have a feeling that you constantly miss something vital, in your line of thought and your conclusions; that may be characteristic of the Pantheist! You say, apparently in contradiction of my insistence that civilization is based upon Christianity, that Washington, Jefferson, and others did not accept Christianity; and you go on to quote Washington as to the government of the United States. Without going into any dispute as to all this, are we to assume that you consider civilization to have begun with the establishment of the United States? I would say rather that these gentlemen of history, without doubt virtuous and great, made the same error that John Burroughs — also without doubt virtuous and great — is making: that they wholly failed in realizing the debt they were under to that slowly developing, but none the less potent and true thing — Christianity! How many practise Christianity in their daily lives is beside the mark. Would you condemn a great physician because (as is usually the case) he fails to practise what he preaches? That is, would you damn his science? You say that civilization is founded upon ‘reason and science.’ Well, does that damn Christianity? You say that our ethical system is the growth of the ages. What of it? Do Christians claim that we would have no ethical system without Christ and the Christian principles? By no means. But we would have Athens and the Roman Empire over again — and the Hun.
In a nutshell, my dear Mr. Burroughs, — to put it in that perfectly frank manner at which neither of us has taken offense, — your writings upon religion have pleased you, and, as with anything you write, they have been received with respect; but they have shown us a God, near in the sense of his being in a spadeful of dirt, but billions of miles away and terribly nebulous, when it comes to having a Father to whom to pray. You may like that, but it is bad for the rest of us; you have, therefore, done much harm and disturbed much fairly earned peace of mind — innocent though you undoubtedly have been of any such intention. You have missed the bull’s-eye. This is: ‘Love the Lord thy God with all thy mind, and with all thy heart, and with all thy soul; and love thy neighbor as thyself.’ I do not mean to imply that you have not personally, in your life, done all of that; I mean that the teaching of Pantheism puts God, as I have stated, billions of miles away, — a nebulous thing, — regardless of the theory of his being in all Nature; a theory which Christianity embraces, for that matter. We cannot love, in that manner so completely pictured in the above quotation, a Pantheistic God — which is why I hold that you miss the bull’s-eye.