“Friendship and association are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for some catholic object. Yes, excellent, but remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself, but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.
“But the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concert appears the sole specific of strength. I have failed, and you have failed, but perhaps together we shall not fail. Our housekeeping is not satisfactory to us, but perhaps a phalanx, a community, might be. Many of us have differed in opinion, and we could find no man who could make the truth plain, but possibly a college or an ecclesiastical council might. I have not been able either to persuade my brother, or to prevail on myself, to disuse the traffic or the potation of brandy, but perhaps a pledge of total abstinence might effectually restrain us. The candidate my party votes for is not to be trusted with a dollar, but he will be honest in the Senate, for we can bring public opinion to bear on him. Thus concert was the specific in all cases. But concert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then is concert for the first time possible, because the force which moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding whatever quantities of a different kind. What is the use of the concert of the false and the disunited? There can be no concert in two where there is no concert in one. When the individual is not individual, but is dual; when his thoughts look one way and his actions another; when his faith is traversed by his habits, when his will, enlightened by reason, is warped by his sense; when with one hand he rows, and with the other backs water, what concert can be?”
The disciples of New Thought lived in an age of rapid communication. There was no necessity for Association to demand the bodily presence of many believers in a communal life. The telephone and telegraph, the railroad and presently the motor car made Association simple. Besides this, New Thought was enchanted by another idea which it borrowed from Science. There were waves in the air, waves of sound and of light. Inanimate objects were found to give off emanations. Things radiated. There was the promise that even the human voice would spring from one center to another. These things were facts and not merely symbols; but it did not seem possible that the Omnipotent Good, which had created them, should deny their counterparts and parallels to the mind of man. French scientists had restored the reputation of Mesmer. There was such a thing as hypnotism and the mind, or something, of one man affected the soul, or whatever it was, of another. So New Thought made itself into an Association of people whose spirits radiated appropriate sentiments in all directions and unheard, unseen, even unknown, affected the lives of others. Merely to subscribe to a magazine was to expose oneself to the irradiations of good will from 20,000 other subscribers and, to gain success in life, one had only to join an invisible circle by repeating a magic formula:
“I hereby join the success circle of the Psychic Club of America, with the right to withdraw whenever I see fit. While I am a member, I pledge myself to join my brethren in sending out thoughts of love, encouragement, help, and success, to myself, my brothers and sisters of the success circle; and all mankind. I will do my best to refrain from all thoughts of fear, discouragement, failure, and hate, and I will do my best to add to the loving and helpful thought wave being sent out by the circle. May peace, harmony, and success attend our efforts.”
The triumph of New Thought is in its transformation of “evolution” into “progress.” For a generation, the Darwinian hypothesis had made dark the anxious days of thoughtful men; life was brutal, calculating, and unjust, and nature red with tooth and claw. Yet this was the same nature which the transcendentalists had worshiped. The new science had to be reconciled to the All-Truth. The process by which New Thought effected this “at-one-ment” is a little obscure. There was a strain of mysticism in it; of the conviction, unfortified by experience that, however ill may be the plight of an individual, a nation, or an era, “the total frame of things absolutely must be good.” There was a touch of German philosophy: this bit of evil and that bit of good together form a Good higher than Good. In the late 1890’s, there was added a tiny element of estheticism. Just as the portrait of an ugly woman paring her nails might be a beautiful picture, so squalor and misery might be composed into a spectacle that would give pleasure to the highest senses. But as far as Nietzsche went in his glorification of the beauties of hardness and brutality New Thought did not venture. It was too irredeemably pledged to the Good.
In this faith in divine Goodness it gained support from the liberal movements within the Protestant churches; and made the most of this support because, unlike Christian Science, it did not establish an exclusive church itself. Avoiding rigidity, avoiding even precision, in all things, it preferred vague organizations. Its adepts could pray in any church which had abandoned the religion of pessimism and of sin. The old theology had insisted that God was powerful and that his Goodness consisted in being just. The new theology was based on the more disputable assumption that God is good within the terms of the human conception of Goodness. But as human goodness finds no place for the murder of pious men, for rape and thievery and loss, for cancer and lingering death, there was left a blank in the new theology. At the right of the page was the rubric of eternal goodness; at the left, the record of man’s mortal unhappiness. The old theology balanced its accounts by adding the unutterable and incalculable sinfulness of man since the fall of Adam. The new theology having erased that item, was bound to look on the other side of the sheet for its equivalent.
Here Christian Science came in to suggest that unhappiness was accidental, wayward, and unplanned—in essence that unhappiness does not exist. And New Thought also more cautiously ventures upon the same ground. Unhappiness is only a symptom of man’s imperfect development; it is destined to vanish in the course of evolution. For evolution is always upward, since the soul of man is at its present apex, and the oversoul and the higher man are promised. Better and better, day by day is not an incantation, but a literal description of the actual workings of this great law of progressive evolution. One passes beyond the trust that somehow good will be the final goal of ill; what is ill will perish and all that remains must be good.
There was still an obligation: to hasten this benevolent process by which evil will disappear. Fortunately, when cosmic duty says “thou must,” New Thought answers “I can and I will.” The mystic and the practical adept are assured of one thing: that, through the higher self, “we are partakers of the life of God . . . in essence the life of God and the life of man are identically the same.” Until we become aware of our natural oneness with the divine power, we wander helplessly through the world suffering evil and doing no good. But:
“The great central fact in human life is the coming into a conscious vital realization of our oneness with this Infinite Life, and the opening of ourselves fully to this divine inflow. In just the degree that we come into a conscious realization of our oneness with the Infinite Life, and open ourselves to this divine inflow, do we actualize in ourselves the qualities and powers of the Infinite Life, do we make ourselves channels through which the Infinite Intelligence and Power can work.”[1]
As we drink in this infinite power for Good, we arrive instantly at a state, not of drunkenness with the exaltation of knowing ourselves infinite, but of extremely desirable practical satisfactions:
“In just the degree in which you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit, you will exchange dis-ease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength. To recognize our own divinity, and our intimate relation to the Universal, is to attach the belts of our machinery to the p
ower house of the Universe. One need remain in hell no longer than one chooses to; we can rise to any heaven we ourselves choose; and when we choose so to rise, all the higher powers of the Universe combine to help us heavenward.”
It is worth noting that “all the higher powers of the universe” work in our favor, for this gives us a clew to the astonishing success of New Thought. For centuries the effect, if not the intention, of science had been to destroy the illusion that man is the center of the universe. The great astronomers had literally done this by proving the earth a satellite to the sun. The evolutionists had completed the work by indicating how coolly indifferent nature is to our ideals and our well-being. The armies of inexorable law did not protect man so much as confine him and 1900 years after God had sent his only begotten son to save mankind, humanity found itself where the psalmist had left it, a withered blade of grass, a dust cloud in the wind. New Thought miraculously restored man, and raised him to the stature of a God. It made him think that the indiscernible laws of the universe coincided with the laws of his own existence. It gave him dignity and an unparalleled power. He had only to think himself God in order to be God. For the weak-minded even thought was dispensable. They had only to say.
The proof of power was in the destruction of everything evil. New Thought, according to a trivial magazine bearing the name, was “sweeping away antiquated dogma, crass materialism, bigotry, superstition, unfaith, intolerance, persecution, suppression, fear, hate, intellectual tyranny, and despotism, prejudice, narrowness, poverty, disease, yea, perhaps even death,” and bringing in its place, among other things, freedom, courage, advancement, development of latent powers, success, health, and life. The method of attaining power was resolutely to banish pessimism and fear, to think no more of sin, to be confident that all was, or shortly would be, for the best. From the moment one became receptive to these happy invasions, not only the higher powers would coöperate, but every thought sent out by every other happy person would inundate one’s being.
New Thought has had its miracles, no less than Christian Science. They were for the most part miracles of right thinking, but they were effective. Before they had heard of Freud, the practitioners of the mind cure were suggesting that sometimes a lame leg, or a blind eye, was due to some warping of the nervous system, some obstruction to the strong will and the healthy mind. For the most part, New Thought left actual physical cures to Christian Science and to its gentle counterpart, the Emmanuel movement. To itself it took other ills: awkwardness, and lack of confidence, fear, and thwarted ambitions, and frustrated lives. It called for a certain courage. It did not pamper its patients nor encourage them to dwell on their symptoms. If it failed to say “bear the pain,” at least it did not say “enjoy the pain.” It imposed no discipline on the mind and it made no fetich of facing reality. It did not deny the existence of what it disliked; it only denied its significance. The mind cure, in New Thought, is generally applied to the things of the mind. The method has its source in the direct spiritual healing of Quimby, for New Thought, holding that pain is in our consciousness, advises us to divert our attention, to shift it from what is painful to what is pleasing. According to an unfavorable critic, there is in New Thought even the idea that suffering is the result of struggle and, in fact, New Thought is always urging men to relax, to let beneficent spirits conquer us. Thus America’s peculiar contribution to philosophy takes on the dim hues of an oriental nirvana.
Of necessity, New Thought is liberal in its social doctrines. While established Christianity taught that all men might partake of the grace of Jesus Christ if they were converted, if they lived the Christian life, it also noted the existence of the wicked and the unregenerate. In the vision of New Thought the latter were only individualized portions of the infinite spirit which had not yet become aware of their identity with God. In other words, all men are brothers and, potentially at least, all are equally good and noble and pure, since they share equally in the divine nature. The religions of altruism and communism found supporters in the ranks of New Thought and, just as it drew its doctrines from Transcendentalism, it drew its sociology from the altruistic spiritualism of the last century. For its comparatively feeble denial of the reality of death, it had roots in spiritualism. Its doctrine that all things are progressing to perfection and that, merely by thinking, we become part of the inviolable harmony of the universe, approached the mystic perfectionism of Finney and of Noyes. Thus we read that “the time is coming when man cannot suffer” and “the perfection of our individuality is at hand.” A healing affirmation in the Complete Christian Divine Scientific Philosophy asserts, “I am one with health, wealth, and love . . . there is one mind in God (good) and that mind is my mind now. I am one with the gifts of God. . . . I am perfect in love, truth, and life eternal. . . .”[2]
So, in spite of its vagaries, New Thought is a culmination of the radicalism which marked American thought from the very beginning to the very end of the nineteenth century. For that reason, New Thought may be made a point of departure for a résumé of the development of Calvinism in the period.
If we look back from New Thought to Jonathan Edwards, we are conscious that somewhere there is a break in continuity. Between the Puritan’s pervading sense of sin and the attainable all-good of latter-day cults, there seems to be no connection. The break of course occurred when revivalists, in their greediness for saved souls, threw off the letter of Calvinism and felt free to develop the idea of a sinless and sanctified humanity. Finney and Mahan and the comparatively orthodox Perfectionists threw bridges of logic across this chasm but, by making a sinless life possible on earth, they changed the direction of man’s search for salvation and aided their enemies, the liberals in various Christian sects, and the infidels. They succumbed, in short, to the combined influence of French philosophers and Anglo-Saxon engineers and allowed the transposition of the golden age from the past to the future. They did not intend to do this; for them the fall of man was real enough. But they permitted their sense of Christ’s attainment to carry them to a restoration of Eden on earth at the very time when social philosophers, scientists, and engineers, were indicating the possibilities of unlimited progress for man.
Yet in another way the cults of New Thought march in a direct line from the religion of Edwards: the glorification of the Will. Here too we find a transposition; it was the will of God that Edwards so patiently adored; it is the will of man to which a thousand advertisements now address themselves. Yet, in spite of his theology, Edwards did exalt the human will as well as the divine. He called it stubborn and perverse and irremediably bent toward evil but, as he magnified the power of God’s Will, he could not help magnifying also the power of our own. It would belittle God for us to have puny powers and the very strength of our sinful will proved the superiority of our adversary. The moment the opposition of God’s will was withdrawn—in the general breakdown of Calvinism—the human will sprang up like a dampened fire when it has eaten its way into the air. In the era of revivalism the will had been put to enormous exercises of self-restraint and at the same time was allowed unnatural gratifications. As it conquered time and annihilated space in creating a new physical universe, so it was to triumph over fear and desire and establish man in the higher spiritual order of omnipotent nature. The alternation of despair and hope in the camp-meeting, abasing and then exaggerating the will, helped in this process. It did away with the necessity of knowing one’s normal powers and substituted for discipline a flow of external grace. Edwards had placed the raging beast of superhuman will in the cage of predestination. The later revivalists, after having prodded and pampered the beast, suddenly broke down the bars, letting the will run wild at the very moment when Force, regardless of its discipline or its objective, was beginning to be worshiped.
The simplest way to conceive the relation between the type of religion roughly known as mental healing and the Calvinism of the eighteenth century, is to think of the religion of universal good as a reaction against the relig
ion of merciless anxiety. “Our young people,” says Emerson, “are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like.” To cure this disease was one of the great functions of New Thought. It succeeded; but the malady had left ineradicable marks on the body of the victim. Calvinist theology was shattered, but Calvinist morality remained almost untouched. It was a morality always suitable to industrial democracy. It required men to be sober and women to be chaste. It exalted industry and condemned pride and envy. It offered no intermediary absolution for sins and its moral bookkeeping was complex and accurate. In a sense, it was a mercantile morality: the wages of speculation were bankruptcy. The only dignity it gave to man was in his responsibility.
The attacks on Calvinism have been noted. Owen with his “counteracting circumstance” and the phrenologists with their “faculties,” were as effectively hostile as the infidels who denied the story of Adam’s fall, and the Universalists who taught that all men are saved. The whole American experiment was opposed to the Calvinist theology. We see this marked in the extraordinary change of relationship between parents and children. The eternally damned infant might well be apprenticed to a tanner, or a printer, and brutally kept at work sixteen hours a day. Until he was saved by an act of grace, he was the devil’s property, not God’s. But the child, in America, escaped from perdition. Like America itself, its children were precocious and, from the 1820’s on, it is universally remarked that American children are encouraged and pampered. Foreigners, finding them independent and fearless, counted this a charm. And the charm worked on the preachers for, slowly, the grim chord of damnation was resolved by successive modulations. In spite of the protests of doctrinaires who disliked poetry in ladies’ parlors “about the angelic sweetness of infancy,” it became established that infants are not necessarily damned; later that, if they died before baptism, they are certainly not damned; and, finally, that all that died in infancy are elect. The bitter fundamentalist does not admit infant election even to-day, but fear of infant damnation has dropped entirely from the American consciousness. In criminology, the same attack was made on Calvinistic principles. President Humphrey of Amherst noted that the opinion seemed to be gaining ground in some respectable and influential quarters that punishments are rarely if ever necessary in family government and, as the Calvinist father came to imitate less and less the Calvinist God, the democratic state became more corrective and less vindictive in its dealings with offenders.
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