Morality as a Religion Part 12

Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they, --TENNYSON, In Memoriam.

The supreme value of the two great poets of the Victorian era is this, that they have attuned their song to the expression of modern thought concerning those transcendent realities which must ever possess an inexhaustible interest for mankind. Thus we see, in an age which acknowledges the complete emanc.i.p.ation of the human reason, the supremacy of conscience, the inviolable rights of private judgment, Tennyson has sung of an "honest doubt" wherein there "lives more faith"

than "in half the creeds" and councils of ecclesiasticism. Browning has faced the riddle of the universe, the bewildering mystery of a world of pain and sorrow, with unconquerable courage and hope. His musician, _Abt Vogler_, believes in eternal harmony, with Plato and Carlyle:--

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

And, being no dreamer or pessimist, seeing reason at the heart of things, and good the final goal of ill, he

At least believes in soul, and is very sure of G.o.d.

Here are the three imperishable realities--G.o.d, Soul, Hereafter. Of all the rest is it ultimately true which the weary preacher said: "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity," or, as the modern Ecclesiastes has it: _Tout pa.s.se, tout la.s.se, tout ca.s.se_.

In the words of the opening stanzas of the "In Memoriam," Tennyson is evidently affected by the spectacle the world exhibits to the thoughtful man in its mult.i.tudinous religious sects and segments, and the strange contrasts the national, political and ethical unities of mankind present, with their theological divergencies. As we have seen, the etymology of the word "religion" signifies that its intent and purpose is to bind men together, whereas, as we mournfully confess, it has. .h.i.therto proved a fruitful source of schism and division, national as well as individual. It is only since the much-despised and denounced "world" and its modern civilisation has effectually curtailed the offensive powers of corporations, synods and inquisitions, that religion has ceased to outrage the public conscience by repet.i.tions of the enormities of former times.

As the sweep of his vision ranges over past and present, the poet is enabled to estimate these fragmentary philosophies aright; he sees them in their proper perspective, in their relation to the infinite Reality behind them. He calls them "little systems," "broken lights": he is able to forecast their future; "they cease to be". There is but One Eternal, "without shadow of change or turning": "And Thou, O Lord, art more than they".

This is the fact which weighs so heavily with the thoughtful and discriminating minds of the day--that all the apocalyptic theologies and religious philosophies which purport to reveal the unspeakable mystery known to exist, though hidden from our sight, end only in belittling it. Doubtless an element of accommodation is discoverable and essential in the purest thought of the unseen order; our thoughts of the Soul of souls must be such as our spirits can supply. Men so divided in belief as Kant and Newman have both recognised this fact, the only difference being that, while the former understands the creeds and their tenets as symbols wherein man, striving to express the inexpressible, finds relief and rest to his spirit, Newman looks upon them as so much history, which if a man shall not accept as fact, "without doubt he shall perish everlastingly". To him, as to all who really stand by their order, the New Covenant is a revelation, complete and final, of all that can or will be known of the transcendental order. It claims that "a door was opened in heaven," and those mysteries made manifest "to little ones" which had been "hidden from the wise" and far-seeing philosophers of old. It claims to be "the tabernacle of G.o.d with men," "G.o.d manifest in the flesh," or in sacraments, rites and symbols--nay, it is the "city come out of heaven from G.o.d," it is the cathedral of humanity.

This was believed profoundly, almost universally, in the days before the flood--the flood of knowledge let loose upon mankind, beginning with the days of the Renascimento and continuing down to our own. But the philosopher-poet of the nineteenth century sees nothing of it in the altar and system set up in this Western world. Like the rest, it is, to him, a "little system," which ultimately ceases to be. The heavenly city fades into an earthly chamber, the vast cathedral of humanity dwindles to a spot on the horizon, it shrinks to the dimensions of "a chapel in the infinite".

The first great shock to the pretentious dogmatism of the Western world came with the discovery of Copernicus and Galileo that the current astronomy was fundamentally wrong. No sun-star or swarm of worlds in the infinite azure could be so precious in G.o.d's sight as this earth of ours, it was believed, for had it not been chosen as the scene and stage of that transcendent act whereby the Deity had consecrated humanity for ever to himself? Now it turns out that the physical origin of this world of ours is precisely that of others, while, so far from being the centre of the universe, it is but a speck in infinity, positively invisible from any of the million suns that light the eternal way from our own central orb to the infinities that range beyond. The ecclesiastical mind of those days astutely fastened on the charge of impugning the sacred record of Moses--itself a phenomenal instance of incompetent infallibility--but the real explanation of Galileo's persecution lies in the fact that, with this earth in a dependent position and in ceaseless motion, the whole system of theology suffered a serious shock. Where were heaven and h.e.l.l in the new version astronomy gave of things? Where did Jesus' spirit go on his death? Where is limbo, and where is purgatory? Whither did he go when he ascended bodily into the air? Since this earth is uncounted myriads of miles from the spot in s.p.a.ce which it occupied this morning when we awoke, what became of the inspired geography of the _terra incognita_, according to which the several receptacles of spirits were mapped out with such unfaltering precision?

With the vanishing of the pre-eminent claims advanced by a rudimentary science on behalf of this earth, and supported by the unsuspecting theology of the childhood of the world, the earth-born philosophy of things wrapped up in its fate must also disappear. While the earth dwindles into a spot in endless s.p.a.ce, its "little systems" share its fate, and our Western cathedral shrinks to the dimensions of "a chapel in the infinite".

Or, look at the matter numerically. Jesus, who avowedly confined his missionary efforts to his own race, "for to them only am I sent," is made by the writer of Matthew's Gospel to give a world-wide commission to his disciples on the very eve of his mysterious disappearance from earth: "Go ye and teach all nations," he is reported to have enjoined upon them. Peter, doubtless, was present upon this occasion, or, at any rate, we cannot conceive him ignorant of the commission; and yet we find him refusing point-blank to admit Cornelius the centurion--the first candidate who offered himself--into the Church, and, according to the Acts, a sheet full of animals had to be let through the roof of his house before he could be turned from his purpose of confining the new religion exclusively to Jews. The explanation, of course, of such universality as Christianity has attained is mainly due to the influence of the cosmopolitan Saul of Tarsus, though the idea of an Oec.u.menical Society was by no means his original thought. The Stoics were full of the ideal, and the Cynics before them, while Socrates refused to describe himself as a citizen of Athens, but claimed the whole world as his fatherland, and the outer barbarians, as the exclusive Greeks styled them, he called his brethren.

And, now, how many of the human family are enrolled as "citizens of the holy places"; what numbers a.s.semble for worship in the great cathedral?

Statistics are unnecessary, but we cannot but remember the temples to G.o.d raised in other ages and other lands, which endure to this hour, imperishable witnesses to a truth which is "the light of life". What that truth is, we shall see later. But when we remember the great pre-Christian systems of the East and of Egypt, and the very stones dug out of the earth cry aloud in witness to the eternal truths, G.o.d, Soul, Hereafter; when we realise the devotion of martyred Israel to the faith of their fathers, and the great Mohammedan revolt against the dogmatical puerilities of the sixth century; when, I say, we remember that one and all endure to this hour, and in unimpaired vigour, and still more, when that absorbingly interesting study known as the science of Comparative Religion has shown us that of orthodoxy is true what is true of all religious systems--that it enjoys a monopoly of nothing save of errors peculiar to itself, and that of its doctrines, all that is true is not new, and all that is new is not true--we are in a fairer position to estimate its precise place and influence in the world and the sources from which it has drawn its inspiration.

Even of the comparatively few in the vast family of humanity who own its supremacy, how many can repeat its shibboleths in common? And if disunion, the true mark of error, be at work among them, can we believe that the future is reserved for it? It is unquestionable that the cultivated intellect of the Continent is profoundly estranged from the version prevalent there, while it is only the spirit of compromise, so characteristic of the race, carried into the domain of dogmatism which prevents a similar insurrection in England. If the sacerdotal lion can lie down side by side with the Broad Church lambs, it is only because the wicked world, symbolised for the moment by the strong arm of the law and the public sense of decency, curbs the ferocity of heresy hunters and bids them look to their manners lest some worse thing befall them. It is felt instinctively that the popular phylacteries, the peculiar trappings in which Divine truth has been set forth in England, are not worth discussion among serious men.

And this will help us to estimate at its true value the argument which lost John Henry Newman to rational religion and won him for Roman Catholicism. What finally decided him that the Ultramontane version of religion was the true one, was the famous _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_ of Augustine. The verdict of the world is against you, he had urged against the Donatists, and what was conclusive against them appeared to be conclusive against Anglicans, who could only appeal for support to their own kith and kindred. However that may be, what answer is forthcoming to the retort which the phenomena of to-day unmistakably suggest? If the universal consent of the fourth century, semi-barbarous, uneducated, profoundly credulous, and avowedly uncritical, serves to prove the truth of that form of Gnosticism known as orthodoxy, what are we to say of the uniform rejection of it, as such, by the decidedly cultivated intellect of the nineteenth century?

If the prior unanimity was adequate to prove its dogmatic truth, why should not the spectacle offered by educated Europe and America be sufficient to show its groundlessness? Whatever it may be to "babes"

and "little ones" to whom it loves to appeal from the "undue exaltation of intellect" which can see no basis whatsoever on which to rest the _historical_ Christianity of the Churches, certain it is to those who know, it is among those things which "have their day and cease to be".

It cannot be a cathedral vast as the race, it can never be more than a system among systems, a chapel isolated in the infinite.

The truth of this will be more clearly seen if we reflect on the nature of the claim of the Churches to be in exclusive possession of Divine knowledge, the sole revealer of G.o.d to man. Ever since the words of the Gnostic gospeller, "He shall lead you unto all truth," were written, it has been claimed that the authentic medium of Divine communications has been a corporation or a book, one or the other being affirmed to be an exhaustive and infallible philosophy of G.o.d and man.

Solomon is said to have had grievous misgivings as to the Lord of heaven and earth being enclosed within the temple he had built, but no such anxieties beset the framers of the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds, or their imitators in subsequent ages. What a spectacle for G.o.ds and men!

"All truth" summed up in Thirty-nine Articles, or a score of Oec.u.menical Councils! It is the profanity, I had almost said the sacrilege, of it, which is so shocking to the instinctive reverence of our minds. And what truths, too, are commended to our keeping in these canons and articles! Beginning with the natural depravity of human affections, purposely inflicted upon us because of another's transgression, we are taught, as a direct corollary from this, that the Deity is no more moral in his emotions than ourselves; for, in order to right the first wrong, he is made to perpetrate another which no one would hesitate to p.r.o.nounce immoral in us, _viz._, the chastis.e.m.e.nt of the innocent in the place of the guilty. We need say nothing of the lie direct and overwhelming which the unanswerable facts of science, in many of its departments, give to the whole story of "the fall" of a first man, and the consequent superstructure which the perverse ingenuity of man has erected upon it. We need only confine ourselves to the plain fact that the so-called scheme is an outrage upon the ethical nature of man, and therefore that it can never have emanated from G.o.d. In the latest explanations of "the Atonement," the Anglican theologians explain it away, "the redemption" of Jesus being no more than the example of his saintly life and his uncomplaining submission to death. The angry G.o.d, who will not relax his frown save at the sight of blood, is conveniently forgotten in the more refined circles of ecclesiasticism, and is now left to the meditations of Little Bethel or Breton peasants.

And this is a Divine revelation, a heavenly system of truth so far beyond human reason, and so intrinsically unrelated to any of our faculties, that it could never have been discovered by man's intelligence, but only preternaturally communicated from without! To Paul, who is alone responsible for the famous scheme, this is the "wisdom hidden from the ages, which none of the princes of this world ever knew"--his peculiar way of describing the superiority of his teaching to that of the Greek masters like Plato and Aristotle. But the civilised world--the _orbis terrarum_ of the nineteenth century--holds with Socrates that the moral law is supreme over G.o.ds and men, and believes that Mill and Carlyle are safer guides when they teach, that no less than the best moral emotion discoverable in man may be ascribed to the G.o.d of men. "Depend upon it," says the great man of his hero, Frederick the Great, "it is flatly inconceivable that moral emotion could have been put into him by an ent.i.ty which had none of its own."

Meanwhile, if the universe be good at heart, if reason be indeed its soul, the tendencies of modern thought must be leading mankind to some predestined end. The movements known to history as the Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution, accomplished results which must endure to all time; they marked the great stages in humanity's onward march.

To-day, when systems and schemes of religion are going to pieces like the dust of the dead, when mystery and miracle are becoming unthinkable things in a world where all is law; when the most imposing pretensions are subjected to so minute and pitiless an a.n.a.lysis; when every dogma of council or creed can be tracked and traced with an unerring precision to root ideas which govern the human mind in its undeveloped stages; to-day, when, in spite of the destructive work being done, a reverence and a true zeal for truth reigns as it never did before in this world's history, when the sense of the responsibility and solemnity of life weighs upon men so profoundly, there must, I say, be some goal towards which humanity is moving, there must be some synthesis which shall reconcile for them their aspirations and their knowledge, some harmony which shall resolve the discordant notes of life--in a word, there must be some

Far-off, Divine event Towards which the whole creation moves.

What is that event? Unless a man is prepared to say that the present chaotic condition of religious thought is to perpetuate itself, or that we are to revert to the ideal of mediaevalism--a world iron-bound by the dogmatism of self-appointed representatives of "all truth,"--or unless we are to expect a mental paralysis consequent upon a universal scepticism, there must be some definite bourne for which the forces now at work in humanity are making. We are not able to believe in the perpetuity of an unstable equilibrium in the world of mind any more than in the universe of matter, nor does history show any warrant for the expectation that the world will return to the discarded ideal of a mediaeval theocracy, nor does the language of modern agnosticism, with its hesitations and falterings, encourage one to believe that therein is a solution, complete and final, of those obstinate questionings which beset us. No; we believe with Kant in the indestructibility of the religious sentiment. We hold that if the soul of man have not whereon to feed, it will feed upon itself to its own destruction. We are persuaded that the Infinite which is necessary to _explain_ the finite, is alone adequate to satisfy its desires. Our faith is in a "religion within the boundaries of mere reason".

In the first place, its beliefs are the one element of truth in all the "little systems" of this and of all time. It is here they touch the confines of the eternal. It is in this centre of changeless truth that all their wandering, broken lights do meet. This is the one reality behind the phantoms and phenomena wherewith they have been perplexing and confusing man's thoughts; it is at the same time the great ideal, the pa.s.sion for which is the star of life.

What a majestic source of unity is there here! The soul positively thrills at the thought of the boundless possibilities of good which centre in this conception of religion. That which the faiths of the world aspired to do, might hope to become an accomplished fact did their votaries believe with Sh.e.l.ley that only

The One remains, the many change and pa.s.s;

did they obey the ancient prophet's command, "Depart from your idols".

For what are all the current creeds and orthodoxies of every age and land but so many "idols of the market place," veritable _simulacra_ or images of something ineffable, beyond the power of man's mind to completely conceive, or of his stammering tongue to utter? They served their purpose in the childhood of humanity, they were schoolmasters to train it to higher things, tabernacles of skins wherein to enshrine the Holy of Holies in rude and uncultured times. But now that humanity is reaching the full stature of its manhood, is it not time to preach from the house-tops what philosophers have been thinking ever since the emanc.i.p.ation of European intellect, aye and before it too, in the great Moorish schools, which sprung up before the scholasticism of the middle ages? Is it not time that intelligent clergymen of every school in Christendom should openly declare in their pulpits what they think, believe and discuss in the privacies of their studies?

If truth is the one thing which never yet did men any harm, tell them that the universe is not built upon the narrow plan they had been taught of old; that its age is immeasurable; that man has been an inhabitant of this fragment of it for a hundred thousand years at least; that there never was any such being as a first man, some seven thousand years old; that his existence, his history, is a myth, traced upon the cylinders of Babylon; that man never fell except to himself and his own conscience; that the "redemption" scheme is an idiosyncrasy of Paul; that a priesthood is avowedly a pagan conception, and sacrifice a relic of barbarism. Tell them this, for you know it is true, and that your creeds and confessions are false. Speak out as your conscience bids you speak, that yours is no temple of truth, no cathedral vast enough to hold the race, nothing but the dim shadow of a great reality, one of "the many which change and pa.s.s," a spot in boundless s.p.a.ce, "a chapel in the infinite".

For the truth of rational religion is that into which all that is true in lesser faiths resolves itself. Where they agree with it they are in agreement amongst themselves. Where they depart from it, there begins discord--sure sign of error--the confusion and strife of tongues, the jangling contradictions of men. Are we then dangerously out of the way in believing that that wherein all the sons of men unite is the veritable goal towards which they are consciously or unconsciously reaching--

_Tendentes ma.n.u.s ripae ulterioris amore?_

And there is one other unmistakable evidence that the stream of tendency is in our direction. I allude to the predominant influence in our age of science, not merely physical, but science in all its departments. It is welcome to us as the very handwriting of the Eternal, as a revelation of the workings of the Infinite Mind. Every new discovery is welcomed by us as a further revelation of the Being who "is for ever reason".

But to the "little systems" science can only be welcome in so far as it fits in with the petty scale upon which their theologies and theosophies have constructed the universe. At first, everything is pa.s.sionately denied, a cry of horror goes up in the land that science is engaged in an attempt to dethrone the G.o.d of their theology. And then a few years elapse, and for very shame's sake they set about explaining how that the "G.o.d of knowledge" [1] has much in common with their theosophical Deity, and that by a dexterous manipulation of infallible texts and articles of religion, a _modus vivendi_ may be arranged between the two. This is the kind of dialectic that goes on at every Church Congress--men who know in their hearts that the "inspired" anthropology of the Bible is contradicted, fully, flatly, irreconcilably, by the undeniable facts discovered by science, continue to mystify themselves and their hearers alike by all the pleadings, glosses, evasions and refinements at their command, with a view to what they call a "reconciliation between science and religion".

Science and religion, we protest, need no reconciliation, for they never were at war. Not religion, but pseudo-philosophy and so-called theology--this it is to which science is an implacable and irreconcilable foe. And she will never cease from her determined opposition until the ecclesiastical idol vacates the very last niche it occupies in its "chapel," clothes itself with the white robe of contrition, and sits humbly upon the stool of repentance awaiting a scientific absolution.

For us, such reconciliation is an unmeaning phrase. We never professed to follow aught but reason's kindly light, for that we _know_ to be the Divine Light in us. And, therefore, all that comes to us in reason's name, comes accredited, as though from the innermost court of the Great Presence itself. We discard nothing but what offends reason and its ascertained laws; we bring everything before its bar. Science is to us a Divine revelation, its teachings are among our inspired literature.

No need therefore of reconciliation between religion and science when we resolve both, as in a final synthesis, into the root fact of all this wondrous universe--eternal reason. And because of this, a faith such as ours is part of the order of imperishable realities, for the kingdom of reason, like the throne of the Eternal, is for ever and ever.

[1] _Deus Scientiarum Dominus._

XVII.

"THE OVER-SOUL."

The most serious errors in the philosophical and religious domains are generally found to be nothing but the exaggeration, or the minimising, of a truth, very much as evil, physical and moral, is often the privation of a corresponding good, the absence of something which ought to be present. Year by year the vast majority of religionists in this Western world are seriously engaged in the commemoration of a transcendent mystery, the humanisation, or incarnation, of the Deity in the person of the Prophet of Nazara. As might be expected, the upholders of this belief are by no means all agreed as to the manner in which this momentous event came about, and, while there are many prepared to speak of "Our Lord Jesus Christ"--and we certainly feel no difficulty in so speaking of an elevated and saintly spirit such as he--all are not prepared to subscribe to the precise formulation of the mystery as given in an Athanasian creed, or a homily of a fourth century father. Beyond admitting in a general and rather vague way that Jesus is "Divine," many people are not prepared to go. They would shrink from saying that he was the Infinite and Eternal, from whom all things derive their being; they see no necessity for believing in the story of his miracles, or the legendary account of his appearance in this world; above all, his virginal conception and birth they often repudiate in terms. They are coming to see--these open-minded men and women of the Anglican body--that the pre-eminence of Jesus must rest, not upon miracles, but on morals; that it is not his mystic offices, but his moral grandeur, which makes him to be so great a figure in history. In a word, that it is not his miracles which prove his teaching, but his teaching must authenticate his miracles.

Now, all this is, of course, very hopeful, and makes directly for that reconstruction of religion on an ethical basis which we conceive it our duty to press upon the attention of our age. Venerable to us is the memory and teaching of the last of the n.o.ble line of Jewish seers. Not one of the masters of the Church ethical, whom we obediently follow, but has exhausted, one might say, the possibilities of speech in their reverence and admiration for the great spirit of Jesus. When Immanuel Kant published the _Critique of the Practical Reason_, old men and thinkers of the Fatherland were moved to tears at the thought that the great deliverance had come at last, that a man had at length arisen who had penetrated to the core the significance of the great prophet's teaching. The only true commentator on Jesus and his religion is Immanuel Kant. Heretofore, men have followed Paul, Athanasius and Augustine; it is high time the ethics of Kant were subst.i.tuted in colleges and seminaries of the clergy, and our ministers of religion taught to interpret the Gospel from the standpoint of the moral law instead of the imaginary dogmatics of Paul, and the dialectics of Athanasius and Augustine.

But the doctrine of incarnation unquestionably embodies a great element of truth, which it were our very serious loss to overlook. It supplies us with an admirable ill.u.s.tration of what was a.s.serted in the beginning, namely, that an error is but a truth misstated, either by excess or defect. The Christian, or rather the ancient, orthodox presentation of the dogma errs in both ways. By excess, because it proclaims a man to be the personal Deity, that the flesh and blood of a mortal being is adorable, as is the highest Being, with the supreme offices of religion. It proclaims that Jesus was not a human individual or person at all, but a Divine being energising in two natures, the Divine and the human, so that when he used the p.r.o.noun "I," it was the Deity himself, not a man, who spoke. I say this is a gross misstatement by exaggeration, unknown to the prophet himself, unknown to his followers and biographers, and unknown to many Christian writers before the fatal epoch of Athanasius, who emphatically a.s.sert that Jesus is not to be worshipped as the Father.[1] The doctrine errs also by defect, because it fails to recognise the divinity of all the sons of the Supreme. Jesus is made to be exclusively Divine, the sole possessor of Divine sonship, and only through him are others put in the way of attaining to the same privilege. "But as many as received him,"

says the Alexandrian rhapsodist who wrote the prologue to the fourth gospel, "he gave them the power or the faculty to be made the sons of G.o.d, as many as believe in his name."

This account of the matter we conceive to be immeasurably below the truth. No mediator is needed between the soul and the Soul of our souls; no intercessor or redeemer. This perverse conception originated in the supposition that man was, and is, a fallen and a falling being, owing to the fatal legacy bequeathed by our presumptive parent, Adam; but Genesis being wholly and avowedly mythical in its opening chapters, the Pauline dialectic in the fifth chapter of the Romans falls to the ground, and with it the laborious argumentations of the epistle to the Hebrews, which essays to prove that the most sternly anti-sacerdotal prophet who ever lived was a full-fledged priest; the man who never conducted a ritualistic service in his life set forth as "a high priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedech," the only and eternal redeemer of humanity from the consequences of the misdeeds of an aboriginal parent who had no existence. No; before Agamemnon men were brave, before Aristides they were just, before Jesus they were in their innermost selves divine, and this in essence is the doctrine of the "Over-soul," a.s.sociated, as far as this expression goes, with the name of the latest of the prophets of ethics, Emerson.

We are all incarnations, flesh-takings, of the infinite. Not only so, but the very unconscious universe, the silent, but ever-living nature is but the garment which clothes the Invisible, and in clothing reveals him; the beauty of nature is the veil, growing slenderer with every fresh access of knowledge, which scarce conceals the Great Presence.

Vanini was thrust into the dungeons of the Inquisition at Naples on a charge of atheism. "Atheism!" contemptuously retorted the wretched captive, "I could prove G.o.d from that straw," picking up with his feet a fragment of the bed on which he lay in fetters. For the universal Life was in the straw. The life in that slender ear is one with the mighty pulsations of the ocean, the growth of the forest, and of the world of men, and the illimitable stars beyond. The being is one, the life is one, and above all, the mind, the exclusive endowment of man, is one too--one in us, one in the Supreme; we share it, for "we also are his offspring". There is only one Soul--the Divine, and the souls of the sons of men are, not so much images of that, made in its likeness, as it itself, in essence one, yet, partic.i.p.ately, in every human being. "I have said, ye are G.o.ds, and sons of the Most High, every one," quoted Jesus with approval. So says Emerson, and this is his doctrine of the "Over-soul".