We must release the investigation and treatment of religion from all tyranny of authority, and throw it open to the investigation of great minds, as something which is not settled but has to be now taken up de novo. Where may we procure them? 

Call for new great masters—plenty of them, male and female,
To comprehend new arts, new perfections, new wants.
There is nutriment here today for artist souls, great as humanity can know,
Derived from the general buoyancy and intensity of the spirit of life,
From the action of humanity in larger, far larger masses than ever before,
Impossible to resist, like the whirling of mighty winds,
To be carried along by which is glorious.

From a point of view sufficiently over-arching, the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature.
In its highest aspect, essential poetry expresses and goes along with essential religion—has been and is more the adjunct, and more serviceable to that true religion (for of course there is a false one and plenty of it,) than all the priests and creeds and churches that now exist or have ever existed.
Why tower, in reminiscence, above all the nations of the earth, two special lands, petty in themselves, yet inexpressibly gigantic, beautiful, columnar? Immortal Judah lives, and Greece immortal lives, in a couple of poems.

The priest departs, the divine literatus comes,
A boundless field to fill!
A new creation, with needed orbic works launch’d forth,
A hundred, a thousand other saviours and mediators and bibles to revolve in free and lawful circuits,
To move, self-poised, through the ether, and shine like heaven’s own suns! 

To take expression, to incarnate, to endow a literature with grand and archetypal models, those forms of majesty and beauty, to achieve spiritual meanings, and suggest the future—these, and these only, satisfy the soul. Wo to the age or land in which these things, movements, stopping at themselves, do not tend to ideas.
Man, so diminutive, dilates beyond the sensible universe, outcopes space and time, meditating even one great idea. Thus, and thus only, does a human being—his spirit—ascend above, and justify, objective nature.

The devotion which belongs to any well-developed man,
The most ethereal and elevated spirituality—
Stronger than the propulsion of this globe,
Ecstatic as the closest embraces of the god that made this globe,
Fiercer than the fires of the sun around which it eternally swings,
More faithful than the faith that keeps it in its company and place,
Divergent and vast as the space that lies beyond—
This seems to be what subordinates all the rest.

The true adoration is without words and without kneeling,
Bibles may convey, and priests expound,
But it is exclusively for the noiseless operation of one’s isolated self to enter the pure ether of veneration.
Alone, and silent thoughts and awe and aspiration,
And then the interior consciousness, like a hitherto unseen inscription, in magic ink,
Beams out its wondrous lines to the sense.

Mask with their lids thine eyes, 0 soul,
The standards of the light and sense shut off,
To darkness now retiring, light and the senses abdicated.
The objective world behind thee left afar,
Exalt thyself to musing—from thy inward abysms speed thy flight!

All statements, churches, sermons, melt away like vapors,
The soul emerges, the spirit rising in vagueness,
To reach the divine levels, pass to the vast unknown, and commune with the unutterable.
Religion, freed from fables, spangles, trickeries,
From the painful constipation and poor narrowness of ecclesiasticism,
Mounts flying to the skies,
Above all else, like the stars shining elusive, eternal,
Infinitude the flight, fathomless the mystery.

I and this mystery here we stand,
Sure as the most certain sure, affectionate, electrical,
Joys of the thought of time and space and death, like waters flowing,
Bear me indeed as through the regions infinite,
Whose air I breathe, whose ripples hear, floating on vast and mystic currents—
Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.

Wonderful how my thoughts play subtly at the spectacles around,
To pore with ceaseless fervor over the myth of the infinite—
If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing.

If you have those moments released from all cares and soaring to the idea of God—
A soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things,
All history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous—
Rapt, sublime, elate with immortality, realizing the divine of man,
Then you have religion,
The curious something, the crown of life, the lumine of the soul, without which all else is darkness.
O the blest eyes, the happy hearts,
That see, that know the guiding thread so fine,
Along the mighty labyrinth.

Went over to the religious services at the main insane asylum. O the looks that came from those faces! From every one the devotional element radiating. That there was a good deal of real devotional feeling, there could be no doubt. Mirror’d from those crazed faces, yet now temporarily so calm, like still waters, was it not, indeed, the peace of God that passeth all understanding, strange as it may sound?
Even if it all were without the formality and literary refinement of some other devotional outpourings—as it came thus fresh and genuine from the heart, why can we not suppose that it was as effective in the estimation of the Deity as even the most polished and elegant supplications?

Subtle, vast, electric is the soul, even in present relations, and restless and sad,
Until it gets some clue to the relations between itself and the outside world, and all the processes and objects that fill them,
Because final and paramount to all is man’s idea of his own position in the universes of time, space, and materials,
His clue to the relations between himself and the outside world,
His ability in intellect and spirit to cope and be equal with them, and with time and space.

Realize where you are at present located—the point you stand, that is now to you the centre of all—Look up, overhead—think of space stretching out—think of all the unnumbered orbs wheeling safely there—think of the sun, around which the earth revolves—the moon, revolving round the earth—think of the different planets belonging to our system—spend some minutes faithfully in this exercise.
Then again realize yourself upon the earth, at the particular point you now occupy—Which way stretches the north, and what countries, seas, etc.? Which way the south? Which way the east? Which way the west?
Seize these firmly with your mind—pass freely over immense distances—fix definitely in your brain (turn your face a moment thither) the directions, and the idea of the distances of separate sections of your own country—also of England, the Mediterranean sea, Cape Horn, the North Pole, and such like distinct places—though personally in solitude, travelling all over the world.

Only in the perfect uncontamination and solitariness of individuality may the spirituality of religion positively come forth at all,
Only here, communion with the mysteries, the eternal problems, whence? whither?
Only here, and on such terms, the solemn and visionary meditations, the devout ecstasy, the soaring flight.
The mind, raised upward, holds communion with angels and its reach overtops heaven,
And yet then it stays in the meshes of the world too,
And is stung by a hundred serpents every day.

In the making of a full man, all the other consciences, (the emotional, courageous, intellectual, esthetic, etc.,) are to be crown’d and effused by the religious conscience, toned and colored by that something out of which prayer and worship arise. This inner light—only another name for the religious conscience, the inward Deity-planted law of the emotional soul—is moral power and ethic sanity, antiseptic to the real inmost disease of our times, probably any times—the huge inflammation call’d society, and that other inflammation call’d politics.

The ripeness of religion is doubtless to be looked for in this field of individuality,
And is a result that no organization or church can ever achieve.
But not that half only, individualism, which isolates—
There is another half, which is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, fraternizing all,
As boundless, joyous, and vital as nature itself,
Yet prov’d by its practical outcropping in life, each case after its own concomitants.
Both are to be vitalized by religion.

True religion consists in what one does square and kind and generous and honorable all days all the time—especially with his own folks and associates and with the poor and illiterate—and in devout meditation, and silent thoughts of God, and death—and not at all in what he says nor in Sunday or prayer meeting gas.

True religion (the most beautiful thing in the whole world and the best part of any man’s or woman’s character) consists neither in rites or Bibles or sermons or Sundays—but in noiseless secret ecstasy and unremitted aspiration, in purity, in a good practical life, in charity to the poor and toleration to all.

The sky up there—yet here or next door, or across the way?
The important immediate thing to us now,
The daily, hourly, job right here, right now—yours, mine,
Is the life here—the people here—the earth struggle.
Our responsibilities are on the earth,
Our effort, our task, here to build up our human social body into finer results.
The rest will come—the beyond—we are not called upon to bother about it at once,
It is best we should not know too definitely what is to come—it would only confuse matters,
We can make our declaration about it, say our yes, then stop.

To do good is my religion; that is the whole gospel of life. (Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.)
Religion means moral development, duty, the idea of man’s duty in the abstract, and duty toward his fellows. (But duty is a free word and it is a slave word. Mothers make it a free word; preachers make it a slave word.)
If you have that in you which makes you realize the deliciousness of visiting the sick in hospitals and the poor, then you have religion.

NEXT: EMOTIONS

The texts in this anthology should NOT be cited as direct quotations from Whitman. If you want to quote from this site for something you are writing or posting, please read this first (click here).