Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/236

 2 26 S. E. Baldwin But one is of the earth : the other transcends the earth. Each has often turned the course of history. It has been suddenly and sharply turned by emotions that belong to the present, that awoke or were awakened by like emotion in another. It has seldom been permanently turned or permanently guided by these. That is the work of the emotions fed by the unseen ; emotions for which we owe nothing to our senses, nothing to ourselves. For if man is the measure of the universe, it is only because he sees that it is im- measurable, and feels that there is something immeasurable within himself which is a part of the immeasurable beyond himself. This feeling, this emotion of the heart, passing into a conviction of the mind, is the quickening spirit that makes our customs or morals flower into religion. Theologians, speaking for their realm of science, call it, as it appears there, faith — or perhaps faith in those who profess the doctrines to which they adhere; superstition, in other men. His- torians, as it appears in their realm of science, all see it in loyalty to national ideals, reverence for national institutions, veneration for the heroes of the past. All of them, I think it may be fairly said, have not been as ready to acknowledge its rightful power over a people when it turns their thoughts towards that transcendent energy which those call divine who feel that it brings them into a personal relation with the unseen and the unknowable. It may take the shape of pure theism. It may find divinity shining through a human form. It may find it in every man. The modern world, so far as the leaders of its thought can speak for it, is less confident than the world of a thousand or ten thousand years ago that there exists a being detached from all else so like ourselves that we can name it like one of us, a person, and presume to define its attributes in terms of human speech. It is more confident that there is a power in the universe that so controls or constitutes it in a settled order of relations and causation that all may safely trust in the continuance of that order without a break. It is more confident also that it is a power that, in the sum of things, makes for what is good as well as true and is worthy the highest name we can invent for it — the name of God. If there be anything in the theory of the monist ; if there be but one actuality in the universe, and that motion, or a force expressed in motion, the manner of that motion is, or seems to us, ruled by attraction. Attraction draws little things to great things : earths to suns ; men — for their bodies — to the earth ; but for their thinking selves it is still the dominating faith that these are in like manner.