CHAPTER XIX

SACRAMENTS

The belief in a Divine Person necessitates prayer and sacraments-Man not perfect without feeling-the religious passion-its expression prayerits satisfaction sacrament- Prayer a liberation of force-a necessity of man's nature-Sacraments-The object for which they are designed— Purificatory sacraments-Baptisms-Sprinklings with water and blood -Baptisms of fire-Confession-Communion-by sexual union-by dreams-by partaking of a sacrifice-Omophagic rites-Soma ritesCannibalism-Theory of sacramental communion.

PANT

ANTHEISM, when it represents God as absolute, divested of attributes, and without personality, does not require prayer and sacraments to complete its scheme. But it is not so with theism. Theism represents God as an immaterial person, delivered from all limitations and all conditions which disagree with His nature. In Him there is neither beginning, nor middle, nor end; He is at once all that He is throughout eternity, all that He ought to be, and all that He can be. He is the unity of existence and of essence, of idea and of reality, of will and of action. The personality of man demands the personality of God. Pure essence, bare existence, absolute idea, do not satisfy man; for these qualities are too abstract to meet the wants of his strong individual nature. The more personality there is in a man, the more desire he feels to find

a personal God. The dry thinker, the philosopher, the student of abstract sciences, who feel satisfaction in the contemplation of the relations of things, in divesting every object of its attributes, and in penetrating to the ultimate essence,―such men have no natural impulsion towards a personal or objective God, and they require the Supreme Being to be the ultimate substance, or the law of harmonious development. An abstract God is the object of intellectual theosophy, but a personal God is the object to which sentimental religion gravitates.

If man is perfect as an intellectual being without feelings, well and good; an impersonal God is all that is wanted to satisfy his intellectual requirements. But man is not perfect without sentiment, and that is abundantly evident from a contemplation of the great achievements of the race, which are due, every whit, as much to feeling as to thought. A man without feeling is not good for much as a man. He may make an admirable machine, or motive force to set machinery in motion, but he will leave the great tract of beauty and goodness waste. It is the power of feeling as well as thought which gives the orator force to sway, control, and elevate the mass of men. Mere thought convinces; feeling persuades. Thought sees beauty; emotion takes it to heart and cherishes it. Every great poet has been distinguished as much for power of feeling as for depth of thought. It is the secret of the painter's art. Half the odds between Raphael and a Chinese painter is in the power of feeling, says Theodore Parker. "It is equally necessary for the common life of men. Thought and feeling both must go to housekeeping, or it is a sad family. The spiritual part of human beauty, man's or woman's, is one-fifth an expression of thought, four-fifths of feeling. The philosopher's face is not handsome. Socrates, John

Locke, John Calvin, and Emanuel Kant, are good enough types of mere thought, hard thought, without emotion. It is the power of feeling which makes the wise father attractive, and the strong-minded mother dear. This joins relatives nearer than kindred blood; it makes friendship actual; it is the great element in philanthropy; it is the fountain whence flows forth all that we call piety. Philanthropy is feeling for men, friendship is feeling with men, and piety is feeling with God." 1

This feeling for God, whose personality is postulated by the desire, is a veritable passion, and it demands intercommunion between the soul and God, a means of expressing its desire to God, and a means of union with God. This passion is as pronounced in man as is the sexual passion, or the passion to know. This passion must have expression and satisfaction. It finds its expression in prayer, and its satisfaction in sacraments. Prayer and sacrament are the two poles of the religious battery, whose union completes the circle. Sacrament without emotional action is formalism. Emotional action without sacrament is mysticism. Prayer is the imperative of love. The most superficial view of prayer is to regard it as an expression of the sentiment of dependence. It expresses this indeed, but more than this: it testifies the confidence of a heart above all disquieting doubt-a faith in the objective reality of that to which the desires tend, and in the sensibility, sympathy, and power of that Personality, so like man, and yet so much above man, which the passion of the soul insists upon addressing. Human nature is conscious of this craving, whether it believe in a God or not; it exhibits itself in restlessness, in the quest after novelty, in the desire of action. The man whose ideas are limited to the world, 1 Parker: Lessons from the World of Matter, p. 110; Lond. 1865.

and who regards all phenomena as linked together into one chain of successive causes which cannot be broken through, -who holds that a desire can only be expended by muscular or mental action,-does not pray; he works with hands or head, and transforms his desires into objects practical and material. He limits his being by the idea of the world, of which he knows that he is a member, and his desires by the idea of necessity. The man who prays, on the contrary, withdraws his mind from the world of phenomena, and projects it into that of ideas. He affirms the infinity and absolute value of the object to which he conceives his desire stream. Prayer is the faith of the heart in the identity of the ideal with the real, the certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of nature, that the wants of the heart are an imperious necessity, the destiny of the world.

Prayer is a liberation of force. When the emotions are excited, rapid combustion of nervous tissue ensues, and the desire that inevitably follows to do something is the signal that an amount of power has been generated, and equilibrium is disturbed. In times of strong emotion, we instinctively seek by strong muscular action to relieve ourselves. Such relief is a discharge of force. The passion of anger is relieved by revenge; the passion of avarice, by hard labour; the passion of suffering, by prayer. When we are tortured with a passion, and the attainment of its object is not permitted us, we seek to divert our attention; the man in love with the woman who refuses him, travels, climbs the Matter-horn, or does some other desperate act-not, as he supposes, to forget the object of his affections, but to expend those affections on a thousand other objects. The poet fired with an idea seizes his pen,

the excited musician expends his energy on the piano keys, and the artist plasters it into his canvas. Take from the poet his pen, from the musician his instrument, and from the painter his brush, and their feelings are pent up and become suffering. Prayer is a means of relieving this torture, and restoring the balance, without which provision of nature man would be dependent on the materials corresponding to his passion, and without which his mind would consume itself. The disappointed lover cannot always afford to make the ascent of the Matter-horn; but prayer will produce the same pacifying effect without costing him a penny.

The personal God, which is the object demanded by the heart of man, must be a God of love, from the simple fact that it is the heart which appeals to Him. In his sufferings, man does not turn to Nature, or only does so to meet with disappointment. We instinctively feel that those addresses made by impassioned writers of the last two centuries to sun and moon, flowers and trees, rocks and streams, are unreal. Equally hollow is any appeal to physical forces and hypostatized laws. Nature does not hear the complaints of man-it is insensible to his sufferings; and man instinctively turns from her, from visible objects in general, and he seeks in a personal God for one conscious, sympathetic, compassionate, who can not only hear him, but can console him. In prayer, he confesses to God as to a Being who knows him and who loves him. He expresses to Him his most intimate desires, lays bare before Him his most secret thoughts, with a confidence, a certainty of being heard.

Prayer is a necessity of man's nature-that is, of the nature which is not mere intellect, but is sentiment as well. There are other modes of relieving the excited