n race was doomed to endless perdition. Now there is
no trace of this religion in Whitman, and it does not seem to have left
any shadow upon him. Ecclesiasticism is dead; he clears the ground for a
new growth. To the priests he says: "Your day is done."

He sings a new song; he tastes a new joy in life. The earth is as divine
as heaven, and there is no god more sacred than yourself. It is as if the
world had been anew created, and Adam had once more been placed in the
garden,--the world, with all consequences of the fall, purged from him.

Hence we have in Whitman the whole human attitude towards the universe,
towards God, towards life and death, towards good and evil, completely
changed. We have absolute faith and acceptance in place of the fear and
repentance of the old creeds; we have death welcomed as joyously as life,
we have political and social equality as motifs and impulses, and not
merely as sentiments. He would show us the muse of poetry, as impartial,
as sweeping in its vision, as modern, as real, as free from the morbid and
make-believe, as the muse of science. He sees good in all, beauty in all.
It is not the old piety, it is the new faith; it is not the old worship,
it is the new acceptance; not the old, corroding religious pessimism, but
the new scientific optimism.

He does not deny, he affirms; he does not criticise, he celebrates; his is
not a call to repentance, it is a call to triumph:--

"I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough,
None has ever yet adored or worship'd half enough,
None has begun to think how divine he himself is, or how certain the
future is."

He accepted science absolutely, yet science was not an end in itself: it
was not his dwelling; he but entered by it to an area of his dwelling.

The flower of science was religion. Without this religion, or something
akin to it,--without some spiritual, emotional life that centred about an
ideal,--Whitman urged that there could be no permanent national or
individual development. In the past this ideal was found in the
supernatural; for us and the future democratic ages, it must be found in
the natural, in the now and the here.

The aristocratic tradition not only largely shaped the literature of the
past, it shaped the religion: man was a culprit, his life a rebellion; his
proper attitude toward the unseen powers was that of a subject to his
offended sovereign,--one of prostration and supplication. Heaven was a
s