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JUNE TO MAY.

THE SERMONS OF A YEAR.

PREACHED AT THE SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
IN BOSTON, IN 1880 AND 1881,

)WARL E. HALE.

<**

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS
1881.

599110

PREFACE.

This volume is the fourth in a series of sermons preached in
the South Congregational Church in Boston, and printed week by
week at the wish of some of those who heard them.

Every parish minister will understand that there is a certain
convenience in having in print a few copies of a sermon, which he
may wish to send to some who did not hear it. This convenience
has been enough to justify the continuation of this series.

For the additional convenience of preservation, a few copies are
now bound and published together, — not because they are on one
subject, but rather because they are not ; not because they have
any literary claim for preservation, but rather because they have
nor. They simply represent the affectionate counsels which a
minister who has spoken to one congregation for a quarter of a
century has a right to offer on every theme to the people who
come to hear him, — people most of whom have heard him long,
but who are, in general, younger than he is.

The sermons preached on Communion Sundays have generally
been reserved for another collection.

EDWARD E. HALE,

Minister of South Congregational Church.

July 3, i8Si.

CONTENTS.

The Sunday Laws,

Subsoiling,

Law and Gospel,

Men of Gadara,

These Three abide,

Christ the Giver,

Christ the Friend,

All Things New,

The Abolition of Pauperism,

Things Above,

Not Less, but More,

Christian Realism,

Thomas Carlyle,

God is a Spirit,

Send me,

The Religion of America,

Parable and Bible,

Indifference,

The Possible Boston,

Increase of Life,

The King's Work,

I must see Rome,

Honor and Idolatry,

The Unitarian Principles,

The Gldipus Tyrannus,

delivered June 27, 1880,

Oct. 31, "

Nov. 28, "

Dec. 5, "

Dec. 12, "

Dec. 25, "

Dec. 26, "

Jan. 2, 1881,

A, " Jan. 9, "

Jan. 16, "

" Jan. 30, "

Feb. 6, "

Feb. 13, "

104

Feb. 20, "

113

Feb. 27, "

122

Mar. 6, "

. 127

Mar. 13, "

'37

" Mar. 20, "'

. 146

" Mar. 27, "

• 154

" Easter Sunday,

. 162

" Palm Sunday,

. 168

" Apr. 24, 1881,

■ 185

May 1, "

. 192

May 8, "

• 199

May 15, "

. 20S

THE SUNDAY LAWS.

" The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath."— Luke vi., 5.
" The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." —
Mark ii., 27.

With the change of social habits, some curious difficulties
have appeared in the construction and use of our Sunday
laws, which will of necessity challenge the attention of all
conscientious people. That has happened which often hap-
pens,— that the part of a law which was once of little impor-
tance seems important, and that it is invoked in an interest
quite apart from that which passed it. The sections now
of special interest are the first six. The present revision
dates from i860.

SECTION i. Whoever keeps open his shop, warehouse, or workhouse,
or does any manner of labor, business, or work, except works of neces-
sity and charity, or is present at any dancing or public diversion, show,
or entertainment, or takes part in any sport, game, or play on the Lord's
day, shall be punished by a fine no't exceeding ten dollars for every
offence.

SECTION 2. Whoever travels on the Lord's day, except from necessity
or charity, shall be punished by fine not exceeding ten dollars for every
offence.

SECTION 3. Whoever, keeping a house, shop, cellar, or place of public
entertainment or refreshment, entertains therein on the Lord's day any
persons not being travellers, strangers, or lodgers, or suffers such persons
on said day to abide or remain therein, or in the yards, orchards, or
fields appertaining to the same, drinking or spending their time idly or
at play, or in doing any secular business, shall be punished by fine not
exceeding five dollars for each person so entertained or suffered so to
abide and remain; and, upon any conviction after the same, by fine not
exceeding ten dollars; and, if convicted three times, he shall thereafter
be incapable of holding a license; and every person so abiding or drink-
ing shall be punished by fine not exceeding five dollars.

SECTION 4. Whoever is present at a game, sport, or play, or public
diversion, except a concert of sacred music, upon the evening of the
Lord's clay, or upon the evening next preceding the Lord's day, unless
such game, sport, play, or public diversion is licensed by the persons or

board authorized by law to grant licenses in such cases, shall be pun-
ished by fine not exceeding five dollars for each offence.

riON 5. No person licensed to keep a place of public entertainment
shall entertain or suffer to remain or be in his house, yard, or other places
appurtenant any persons not being travellers, strangers, or lodgers in such
house, drinking and spending their time there, on the Lord's day or the
evening preceding the same; and every such innholder or other person
so offending shall be punished by line not exceeding five dollars for each
offence.

Section 6. No person shall serve or execute any civil process on the
Lord's day ; but such service shall be void, and the person serving or
executing such process shall be liable in damages to the party aggrieved,
in like manner as if he had no such process.

Section 7. Whoever on the Lord's day, within the walls of any house
of public worship, behaves rudely or indecently, shall be punished by fine
not exceeding ten dollars.

These statutes are in substance those of the year 1791.
I believe their history will be found to be that in the in-
creased liberty and liberality of the new-born State it was
resolved to give to the citizen every privilege on Sunday,
except that of annoying other people, or forcing them to
work for him. You will observe that here is none of the old
Puritan law, so called, enforcing church attendance. In fact,
that was English law, as well as Puritan. It appears as dis-
tinctly in Charles I.'s proclamation, as it does in any New
England statute. I should like also to say, in passing, that
the attendance on worship of the old times is, as I believe,
generally greatly exaggerated. The first meeting-house in
Salem — the only one for a generation — was twenty feet by
twenty-five. There is not a village of that size to-day which
would not have two or three churches four times as large.
And, though these would not be half full on Sunday, we can
hardly believe that the fathers wholly failed to provide for
such attendance as they had on days of public worship.

It is no longer with the desire to compel people to go to
meeting or to church that our present statutes are devised.
All that effort has been weeded out from them. It is rather
with the intention to leave everybody free to go to public
worship, and free to rest if he wants to rest. It is an effort
to relax all chains on that day. I am old enough to re-
member when poor debtors, who had to reside in the jail
limits on week-days, availed themselves of this statute on
Sunday, and went where they chose on visits to their friends.
That liberation is -a type of the whole plan. The appren-
tice could not be compelled to work, nor the journeyman.
Stage-drivers, ferry-men, hostlers, and grooms even, were at
large. People who lived in and near taverns were not to be

annoyed by the racket of revellers. Churches were not to
be annoyed by the passage of vehicles. I am fond of telling
my children the story of the arrest by one of their ancestors
of the Russian ambassador and his party who had landed
in some seaboard town here, and were crossing the country.
Ignorant or indifferent to our laws, they pressed their way to
the seat of government on the Lord's clay. But they found
that a Connecticut tithing-man stopped them. He held
that the journey was not one of charity or of necessity. Of
which the latent desire was not that the ambassador should
go to meeting, but simply that those that did should not be
annoyed by the rattle of his wheels ; that the people of the
inns should have only the minimum of care, and, in general,
that everybody should be as free to rest himself as he chose,
on Sunday, as was possible, under every condition short of
a return to barbarous life. I hope you observed, when I
read the Old Testament lesson from Deuteronomy, that the
observance of the Jewish Sabbath is there put on the ground
of a memorial of the emancipation of the Hebrews from
slavery. "You shall let your slave be free from work one
day in seven. Remember that you were slaves yourselves."
Our Massachusetts statute is, in like wise, a statute for eman-
cipation from common caies. It is an effort to secure one
day, with as few mutual claims as possible. You may not
ask me to pay my money debts on the Lord's clay. And
you may not ask me to fulfil any other of my ordinary obli-
gations. So far as possible, the law makes me a free man
on that day. If I am a blacksmith, on other days I must
set your horse's shoes : on the Lord's day, you may not
compel me to. If I am an innkeeper, on other days I must
prepare your meals, when you travel : on the Lord's day, you
cannot compel me to. If I am a common carrier, on other
clays I must carry your trunk or your merchandise : on the
Lord's day, you cannot compel me to. And so through all
the ranges of human duty. Our present Sunday law was
made to secure human freedom, as far as human freedom can
be secured and the outward machinery of society maintained.
Nor was this so difficult in a little State, separated almost
by nature from other communities. It was when that separa-
tion ended, that the first difficulties came in. There is pre-
served among the memorials of this church the sign-board on
which the drivers of the Providence mail-coach were re-
quested to walk their horses as they passed our meeting-
house on the afternoon of Sunday, coming by with the New

York mails from Providence ; for it was very soon held that
the carrying of the mail was a work of necessity. And as
the Jews, under Judas Maccabaais, found that, in spite of
themselves, they must fight on the Sabbath, so the community
found that it had no right to stop any man's work in Maine or
in New York on Monday or Tuesday, under the pretext that
we were giving a Massachusetts man a rest upon Sunday from
carrying the mail. A kindred instance is that of the daily
newspaper, and it illustrates the whole difficulty. You do not
wish to have your newspapers sold on Sunday, and therefore
the custom came in of having no newspaper on that clay.
But the consequence is that, in the quiet of the printing-office,
the compositors and the editors are at work on the news-
paper which you read on Monday morning. Such exceptions
as come in under the justification of necessity and charity are
so frequent that it is unnecessary that I should repeat them.
The last real battle that was made in this community was in
the discussion regarding the opening of the public library.
Here the city solicitor said that the work of the attendants
on the library was neither a work of necessity or charity, and
that the library could therefore not be opened under the
statute. But, other legal advisers in other cities having held
that the work was both necessary and charitable, these libra-
ries were opened ; and we have followed their example. A
curious instance was that of the necessary labor at the public
baths. Here it has been conceded at the beginning that the
cleanliness and health insured at the free bathing establish-
ments were enough to justify the employment of the people
who serve them. Yet it is clear enough that these are all ex-
ceptional instances. They all run contrary to the theory of
the statute, which is that on the Lord's day we shall return,
as far as we can, to the condition which we suppose to be the
condition of Arcadian freedom and simplicity. Let me re-
peat it, there is no effort now on the part of people who be-
lieve in religious worship to secure by force attendance on
what they consider religious instruction. It is rather the de-
termination of a newly emancipated people that no habit or
custom shall come in on this clay of rest, shall break in upon
the rights even of the lowest and poorest of their number.
And granting that there must be certain persons, like lamp-
lighters, policemen, apothecaries, and preachers, whose duties
must be fulfilled on the Lord's clay, still the intention of the
statute is that for the world at large it shall be a clay of rest,
or a day when each individual may choose his own method of

filling the time. It follows, however, that he must choose
that method in such a way as shall not compel the attendance
or assistance of another. Strictly speaking, for instance, the
rule is followed out, when the father says to his son on Sun-
day : " Yes, you may go to ride ; but you must saddle and
bridle your own horse, and you must groom him when you
come home. For I will not, on the Lord's day, compel the
attendance of a servant, in order that you may be entertained."
It is now nearly twenty years since the practical question
presented itself in this community, whether among these ex-
ceptional cases, in which we certainly escape the old con-
struction of the Sunday laws, we were to include the use of
the street cars on Sunday. There were many people who,
in the cause of religion, wanted to say that the street cars
should not run on Sunday, as, if you will remember, the
street omnibuses had never clone. All that I have been
saying as to the rights of inn-keepers, hostlers, and common
carriers applied in this case. The man who did the neces-
sary work on the street railroad had unquestionably the
right to the same protection which under the law a black-
smith has, or a wheelwright. If the street railways were to
run, it was by an exception to the old interpretation. As a
matter of history, I think I may say that the permission to
the street railways to run was a permission in this commu-
nity caused by the intervention of people who saw their ad-
vantages for facilitating religious worship. We, who were
then clergymen in Boston, were approached both by the
president of the Metropolitan Railway and by an eager
Orthodox clergyman, who wanted to suppress the practice,
for our opinion upon the subject. Of course, we formed
that opinion with care. I think the experience of twenty
vears has justified it. We said that we thought church
attendance was a good thing, that we thought church attend-
ance would be increased by the Sunday use of the cars. We
said that certainly, if the rich man had a right to ride to
church in his carriage, the poor man had a right to go in
the street cars ; and we deprecated any attempt even to
obtain the decision of the courts on the question whether
the running of the street cars was a work of necessity or
charity. But such a decision was subsequently obtained in
a case where a woman received injury from an accident on
Sunday ; and the courts held that, if she had not been going
to attend worship, or for any purpose of charity which could
be proved, or other necessity, she could not have recovered

damage from a company which was violating the law,
if it carried her on Sunday for any other purpose.
Under the statute, therefore, now the running of the street
cars is justified, simply on the plea that it is a work of ne-
cessity or charity. I am quite sure that, as our civilization
goes, the running of these cars is not to be called travelling,
in the ordinary sense of that word ; but that it has become
one of the necessities of our social system, — a necessity as
distinct as that by which in a country town a farmer should
drive his wife from one part of the town to another, on a
visit to her mother or her sister.

What has followed from this has been that the public eye
is so familiar with the idea of public carriages on Sunday
that the public is gradually forgetting the steady effort of
the statute to protect people in their freedom on the Lord's
day. But we ought to remember that all these exceptions
have been taken under the plea of necessity. Necessity is
at best but the tyrant's plea. Nothing can be more certain
than that the laboring man, for whom Sunday is the only
free day, may, under the statute, use his Sunday with his
family to go where he pleases, whether to visit a sister or a
brother, or to spend the day in the open air. If he finds the
street car running, nothing is more certain than that he will
use it, and ought to use it. But he, of all men, is the man
who should be most careful how he removes from over his
head that very protection without which he would have no
holiday at all. Let not any workman try his separate power
at negotiating with his master, if no such law were behind
him. Let no man try to engage himself in a mill or work-
shop, with the condition that he is to have every Wednesday
free to himself. Yet that is the danger which impends, if
some such statute does not regulate the order of daily
occupation.

In one case, the next step now attempted is the most
natural in the world. Why not take one of the large steam-
ships, released from daily service, precisely because the stat-
ute will not let them go to sea for travellers on Sunday, and
because men's habits will not let them travel ? Why not fill
her with passengers for a Sunday excursion in the bay, land
somewhere at mid-day, and come home at night ? If you
have stretched the law so far as you have, will you not
stretch it thus much further ? The first result of this effort
which the general public saw was that a body of North End

roughs, enlisted in such an enterprise, stormed the town of
Marblehead one Sunday last summer. The Marblehead
people proved too much for them, and drove them back, like
so many pirates, to their ship. The incident was natural
enough and characteristic enough to show that the Sunday
law had an intelligible and defensible basis. These Marble-
head people have certain rights. One of them is to a quiet
Sunday. The law asserted itself at once to protect them ;
and, if anybody had supposed that it was a dead letter of
Puritan folly, he saw his mistake. I think the decision of
the good sense of the people and of the authorities, will be
to resist any change of law which will lead to making the
Sunday excursion more easy. I think so, and I hope so. I
think that is the true decision. The principle of the statute
is as good for 1880 as it was for 1790. We will hold this
one day in seven a day for as large freedom as we can have,
— we and everybody else. I will not buy my enjoyment by
compelling twenty other people to work for me. They shall
be free as well as I. And, by precisely the same sacrifice
with which my father ate a cold dinner rather than have his
cook work on Sunday, will I abstain from the voyage to
Marblehead and back, rather than have twenty firemen and
twenty deck hands work on Sunday. The principle shall
still be the principle of freedom, not to one, but to all. We
admit that there must be exceptions ; but we will hold to it
that these are necessary exceptions.

In the present vagueness of opinion on these points, I
think I must go much further. 1 think that every conscien-
tious man, or, as I said before, every leader of society, must
make up his mind whether he thinks public worship one day
in seven a good thing or a bad thing, and whether he con-
siders this Sunday rest, as protected by statute, a good thing
or a bad thing. As matter of feeling or theory, most men
agree here. Most young lawyers would say they are glad
there is one day when they need not go to their offices ;
most young clerks, that they are glad that on that day they
need not go to their stores, and so on. As matter of feeling
and theory, yes. Nay, as matter of feeling and theory,
almost all these persons would be sorry to have public wor-
ship abandoned, — -most, — not all. Some people would not
care. Addressing those who do care, I should say: "You
must make this a matter of action also. You have no right
to take the comfort of Sunday, and then to leave to the min-
isters, to your father and mother, and to the women of the

community, the maintaining of Sunday. When a club of
high-minded, moral, and intelligent young men mount their
bicycles on Sunday morning, by public appointment, and
ride to Newport on Sunday, they say far more distinctly
than any words or votes could say that, so far as they are
concerned, they mean that the next generation shall have no
Sunday. Courts are not to be closed, stores shut up, sheriffs
kept back from executing writs, in order that young gentle-
men may ride all day on bicycles. The institution of Sunday,
if it is to be maintained at all, will be maintained for the nobler
purposes of the higher life. And, while it is quite legitimate
to urge that the Art Museum, the Public Library, the concert
on the Common may tend to this higher life, nobody will
accept the plea which says that a feat of laborious athletics
is a bit of the higher life. Every such effort to get over the
line helps the way to the secularization of all days, when
there will be no time at all.

Some of you heard at the Music Hall the careful appeal
of Mr. Howard Brown to this point. I wish all those people
could have heard it who are not here to-day, nor in any other
place of public worship. A man says he does not go to
church, because church-going does him no good. Who said
it did ? What has that to do with it? Is my question to be
always that miserable question of my good? The doctor
asks me to hold an artery, while this man's life-blood is ebb-
ing away. Shall I say, " No, I thank you : it does me no
good"? The law sends for me as a witness, that justice
may be clone to two strangers. Shall I say, " It does me no
good"? You spent Friday in teaching a child her le'.ters.
What good did that do you? That man spent it in laying-
rails for the railway. What good did that do him ? Have we
come to- that sink-hole of hoggishness that we will do nothing
that we are not paid for on the nail ? What we say is that
public worship is a necessity to the noblest life of the com-
munity. If you say so, and I think you do, you must act so
also. You must visibly, and with personal sacrifice, enlist
yourself on that side. What good did it do you, when you
went to a ratification meeting and cheered for Garfield ? or
you, when you went to another and cheered for Hancock ?
Thank God, you went without any such mean usurer's ques-
tion. You went to show your colors, to throw yourself into
the common cause. You knew that your country wanted
more than your ballot. That, of itself, is a trifle. She
wanted more than your touch on a trigger in the very im-

1 1

probable contingency of her sending you to battle. She
wanted you. And, when you cheered for your candidate,
she found you. All the more she wants you to show that
you believe in the eternal laws on which all paper laws are
founded, on the eternal institutions without which her con-
stitutions are sand-heaps. She wants you to commit your-
self personally, heartily, regularly, to maintain those institu-
tions,— not for the good it does you, poor creature, but for
the good it does mankind. Central among these institutions
is the institution of public worship. She wants you visibly
and practically to maintain that institution.

And just at this moment, when people scatter to summer
homes, let me say a word in regard to our summer Sundays.
They are to be for rest, yes. To the men who work here all
the week, and run down to their families by a Saturday train
peculiarly for rest, yes. But days of religious obligation all
the same. In that little country village, where your holiday
is spent, there are a congregation and a minister who are
trying to level up the community around them. The church
bell on Sunday rings not for Orthodoxy or Methodism or
Unitarianism so much as it rings for public spirit, for mutual
regard, for human freedom. Into that town, you come for
Sunday. If you choose to go sailing all day, or to go off
to "worship God on the mountains" all day, — as I observe
is the cant phrase, — or to spend the Sunday in fishing or
hunting, you do practically all you can to break down that
institution. If, on the other hand, you and yours note the
Sunday also, just as you say you want these villagers to do;
if in the hotel parlor you sit at the piano yourself to lead the
hymn ; or if the wagon which on Saturday went to Paradise
or Purgatory goes on Sunday to the village church with
those who are spending their holiday, — you are doing your
share to keep that village what you found it, and to maintain
the social order which has made New England what it is.

I have refrained from any argument of the divine appoint-
ment of Sunday. I have been discussing the worth not of
the Hebrew Sabbath, but of the Massachusetts Sunday,
which is a very different thing. I do not urge that you
should rest from labor one day in seven, because God rested
after six acts of creation. But I ought to say that, so fat-
as history avouches law as divine, all the history of Sunday
pleads for the sort of rest which I am urging. More sugges-

tive than any thunder of Sinai, and more convincing than
any argument of Moses, is the steadiness with which the
seventh day of rest worked itself into the civilization of
Europe. Men despised the Jews : they ridiculed and carica-
tured them, they spurned them in the street, they degraded
them in society, but they took from them this institution.
Before Christianity got its hold on Rome, the one day in
seven captured Rome. A nation which gave masters power
to crucify their slaves was not strong enough to keep slaves
from the enjoyment of this rest one day in the week. No
movement of our times for a ten-hour system, for an early-
closing system, for the relief of children in factories, ever
approached this great determination of a working world, that
it would rest from its labors when a seventh day came round.
Observe, no statesman directed that movement. No philoso-
pher suggested it. Only a few dirty and despised Jews, on
the wrong side of the Tiber, if they were in Rome, rested on
the seventh day. The good sense of the thing, the good
effect of the thing, captured even the scoffers and the tyrants ;
and they accepted the boon, which proved to be the new life
of their social order. I only ask you to look round you to-
day, and see if that lesson is not. re-enforced on every side.
By their fruits shall ye know institutions as well as man. Is
not the town or village where workman and prince, boy and
man, rest heartily on Sunday, and make Sunday a day for
the refreshing of man's best nature, — is it not a place pal-
pably and certainly in advance of the other community, wher-
ever you find it, which struggles against this stream of a
world's experience, and tries to reduce Sunday to the com-
mon level ?

" To labor is to pray," the monkish proverb says. Some-
times it is, sometimes it is not. The motive makes it
prayer — or devil service. Of course, I may say the same
of rest from labor. It may be the nastiness of Circe's style.
But every one of us knows it may bring the closest vision, it
may bring the noblest resolution, it may bring the highest
life. To leave the clalter of my own anvil; nay, to turn
from the echoes of my own thoughts, to go away from friends
or disciples, it may be, as the Prince of Men retired in his
need, — this is to seek God. And they who seek him, surely,
they shall find him, if thus they seek for him with all their
hearts.

SUBSOILING,

Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? — Matt, vii ., 16.

No, they do not; but they try to. They are always try-
ing to obtain their grapes and figs by some such short-hand
process. But the only successful way is to dig deep the
trench, to manure it richly, to plant well-selected roots, to
train carefully the vine, and to prune the leaves and the
branches. People are always hoping to find some other
way. And they will even sell you wine made out of all sorts
of substitutes, and hope to persuade you that it is from the
true grape of a true vine.

Thus, when this nation was born, men thought that farm-
ers from the plough, so they had only guns in their hands,
could meet and conquer soldiers. But they could not. It
was not till a Continental army of trained soldiers was made
by all the care of Knox and Greene and Washington that
the work of an army was done. When the Rebellion was
to be crushed, and the first enthusiasm of loyalty seemed
chilled, men thought by large bounties you could bribe mer-
cenaries to fill the vacant places of brave men who had
been killed. Figs from thistles, indeed ! The brave soldier
is not to be had at that price; and so many a failure proved.
Experiences in history these, which only confirm every man's
experience in manufacture, agriculture, or trade. If you
want fruit, you must have root and stem. If you want a
good table or chair, you must have seasoned wood. If you
want oats or wheat, you must subsoil your land, drain it,
pulverize the soil, clean out the stones, and weed. You
must begin at the beginning.

In the relief of local poverty, which is the duty we are to
consider to-day, this same preparation is necessary, unless we
mean always to do the same thing to-morrow as to-day, and
the next year as this year. Child's play to relieve poverty,

unless we mean to prevent pauperism. It is to break off the
thistle-head or the blossom of white-weed, and to suppose
that the root will not trouble you next month or next year.
Aims-giving in itself, therefore, is not charity. Your charity
only begins with alms-giving; and unless you go forward to
eradicate your thorns, to cut the tap-roots of your thistles, and
to plant grape-vines in soil which you have underploughed,
it is not a charity which deserves the name. To these sub-
soiling processes, therefore, the church directs its effort
with the most zeal. It is in such work as this that Channing
and the other liberal leaders of this community led the way
fifty and sixty years ago, and the results have been encour-
aging. While every effort to reduce pauperism and crime by
any mere economical process fails, every effort to reduce them
by levelling up men and women, by raising the quality of
the material, has steadily succeeded. The way seems open
for larger successes in the same directions.

Statistics are not attractive. But you must let me give you
the figures which show how far, both in England and in New
England, the steady work of men and women, who have ap-
plied pure ideal methods of relief to the diseases which we
call crime and pauperism, have succeeded. Of England I
will take the last, twenty years. In that period, the annual
number of boys and girls committed to prison for crime has
been reduced from 8.801 to 6.810. The population of Eng-
land, in the mean time, has increased almost as rapidly as
the juvenile crime has decreased, so that the gain is forty
per cent, in twenty years. I must not go into detail. But it
is known to all the students of the subject that this gain is
due to the work of such people as Miss Carpenter and the
rest, who have been establishing and improving the reform
schools and similar establishments. They undertook simply
and squarely to abate the amount of crime among the young,
and they have so far succeeded. They have had also the
great help of the enlargement of the public system of com-
mon school education. The diminution of crime punished
by imprisonment is so great that they have been able to sell
some of their prisons in England, and use them for other
purposes. We are apt to say that this is because they send
the criminals over here ; and this is one reason. But the
other reason, and the greater reason, is that they have cut
off the root so largely as they have, and have reclaimed so
many of their juvenile offenders.

When we ask how much has been done here, the answer

is embarrassed by two difficulties. There is no question
but that everything is improving. But we cannot, tell, first,
how much the improvement is due to the return of the
nation to the habits of peace from the habits of war ; and,
second, we cannot tell how far the emigration to America of
criminals from Europe affects our condition unfavorably.
Both these causes have a large effect; but, as you see, they
operate against each other. That I may not claim results
due only to the present prosperity in business, let me go
back before the financial depression, — to the prosperous
year 1872 and the beginning of 1873. We had then in
Massachusetts thirty-six hundred prisoners in all. After
four years of famine which then followed, and three years
of prosperity which followed them, — with a large emigra-
tion out of Massachusetts, and another large emigration in, —
we have now only thirty-five hundred prisoners in all. The
number of prisoners has diminished one hundred, while the
population has increased about twenty per cent. In the last
year alone, the number of paupers in our pauper establish-
ments has fallen from thirty-one thousand to eighteen thou-
sand. But this decline must be ascribed mostly to the
return of business prosperity. The diminution of crime
does not follow the same law. On the other hand, petty
crime — such as stealing from shops, stealing from the
person, and the like — materially diminished in Boston
during the year of the most severe business depression.
The Chief of Police assured me that this was because
people were so poor that they were more careful. He said
there was less to steal, more care taken of it, and therefore
less stolen. He said, also, that men had less spending-
money ; that they therefore drank less, and there was less
crime produced by intoxicants.

I hope I have not tired you with these figures. I want to
show that we who are idealists, we who are called dreamers,
fanatics, and unpractical, have all along known what we
were about, and that we have done what we tried to do. We
are at work all along on the subsoiling process. We want
real figs and real grapes, and are not satisfied with thistle
figs or thorn grapes. We do not permit ourselves to be dis-
couraged when an avalanche or land-slide stops almost every
factory in Boston, and for a year, perhaps, throws out of
employment laboring men. But in such years we cannot
speak of results. For me, I do not want to claim all the
gain of commercial prosperity as being clue to the intelligent

supervision of public and private charities. But I do want
to encourage those who have liberally forwarded such chari-
ties, by showing that they have not labored in vain.

Now, I am going to ask you to contribute for our charity
work of the winter ; and, though we shall make other appeals
to you, this is our principal appeal. By the contribution of
to-day, we are to gauge our scale of work for the winter.
You know sufficiently well by what enginery this work will be
done. I have, thank God, no such statement to make to
you as I had in the winter with which 1875 began and
ended, — when the great workshops were all stopped; when
every honest merchant and manufacturer was reducing the
numbers of his hands ; when this church had more families
on its poor-list for relief than it had since it was a church.
All that has changed. What is' more, the sister-churches,
and the different private and public charities of the town, are
now knit together in an organized system, which grew out of
the necessity of a period of famine ; and in the Associated
Charities there is a working power for the relief of poverty,
simply, that the city has never had organized before. Pre-
cisely this improvement of system leaves us free to some
details of the work of a church which I have never dared
undertake before, but which I believe are now within our
power.

They run in this line of subsoiling of which I spoke. It
is our duty, and I believe it is in our power, to reduce the
causes of pauperism and crime in this district which is in-
trusted to us. This work falls first of all on the Church of
Christ; and, in our case, it falls particularly on this church.

It falls on us, because we are the Established Church for
this region. These Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, —
excellent good people, all of them, — came in after us. They
are not to the manor born. The Congregational Church
made Boston and the institutions of Boston. The South
Congregational Church — this church — is the first church
established this side Castle Street. Glad as we are to
see new-comers entering on our field, all the same we ac-
knowledge that they are new-comers ; and for one I do not
scruple to say that we understand the field and the methods
of working it better than they do. By this, I mean to say
that Boston is still an American city. Its institutions,
through and through, are democratic. To train men to its
life and to raise that life as it is lived by the mass of its peo-

pie is to continue the work laid out by the men who made
Boston. According to this doctrine, the subjects of an Ital-
ian prince, though he be an ecclesiastical prince, will not
succeed in developing that life. Nor will men succeed who
are studying English patterns. Nobody will succeed who
turns his back on the future and worships any setting sun.
We of this church ought to have peculiar facilities in dealing
with the duty which in this town the church has in hand.

So far as one of those duties is the mere relief of hunger
and cold, I have said already that I think it is well done.
The city system of relief is admirable, the system of the
Associated Charities is admirable. Less and less of such
work devolves on a separate congregation. Where we spent
a thousand dollars for such a purpose, in the war or in the
panic, we do not need to spend a hundred dollars now.
We are able to leave that unsatisfactory work of picking
thistle-heads, as I called it, and to address ourselves more
to the subsoiling processes. By this, I mean that we can
study the district assigned to us by our conference, and see
how we can prevent pauperism and crime.*

I shall be glad this winter, if we can so clearly follow the
proceedings of the criminal courts as to know the circum-
stances of each arrest and conviction for crime in our dis-
trict. I think we ought to be nble, on the day when a man is
imprisoned, to go to his family and see after them. Then is
the time for that sort of care which shall see that his children
do not follow the father's example. When he returns from
his imprisonment, we ought to be able to meet him, to watch
over him, and to be sure that he does not fall into bad com-
pany again. The second imprisonment is the disgrace of a
Christian civilization. I think we can do a good deal — by
sympathy arid care, acting in regular system — to make such
relapse of crime unnecessary.

Again, I want to have that kind watchfulness through the
district that we may set on foot a system of home nursing,
when sickness invades the poor man's dwelling. The
dispensary gives medicine and medical advice. The diet
kitchen gives food. But care, the proper care of the child
in diphtheria or the mother in typhus, is just what our pres-
ent charities do not give. The Sisters of Charity in the

*The " District" is bounded on the north by the Albany Railroad, on the south by
Northampton Strtet, on the east tide Washington, and by Pelhani Street on the west
side. In the other direction, the " District" extends to Tremont Street on the west, and
to the harbjr on the east.

older countries supply this work to a certain extent. I
believe it is possible so to organize it here as to relieve sick-
ness, when it comes to the poor, of its worst horrors.

I speak of these two lines of work in detail, because they
involve certain novelties for our charity work here, in which
we shall need the sympathy and help of every one who is
here. I need not speak in detail of the familiar methods of
work for those who are in need, which have all along occu-
pied the South Friendly Society and your Board of Chari-
ties. The principle is fixed. As Dr. Ellis states it: "You
do a man no good, unless you make him better." If you
think it worth while to cut out garments and give out sew-
ing, it is not in the foolish wish to compete with dealers :
it is simply that you may teach the woman to sew well who,
when she comes to you, cannot sew at all. You try to do
her good by making her better, — abetter seamstress; and,
in short, our effort is by calling on as large a number of
kindly people to help as is possible ; to infuse, wherever we
can get a chance, the light and life which the spirit of God
carries, wherever a kind heart goes. The loneliness of life
in cities makes the curse of cities. To break up that lone-
liness, to bring about sympathy, friendliness, mutual support
between the old resident and the stranger, between the sick
and the well, between the ignorant and those who know
something, this is the application of Christian principle.
When I was asked to speak on this subject at Philadelphia,
I said: "There is the whole story. If, by such agencies as
I have hinted at, those to whom much has been given have,
without condescension, but in the real spirit of Christian
brotherhood, opened the doors for an easy intercourse with
those to whom less has been given ; if the rule of give and
take, teach and learn, lend and borrow, help and be helped,
fairly works itself into the society of large cities, as it already
exists in the simpler social order of the country, — there will
be no socialism but Christian socialism, and no communism
but the communism in which a man bears his brother's
burdens." And I asked, What is the spell on life in cities
which does not exist on life in the country, which compels
us to deal only with people whose clothes are bought at the
same shops with ours, while in the country we are permitted
to deal with all the sons and daughters of our Father, God ?

And no one answered me.

I do not believe that that spell is omnipotent. Love is

omnipotent. The man who has once engaged in setting on
his feet the puzzled exile from another land finds that his
work is well worth pursuing, and that life itself has enlarged,
from the moment when he left the daily rut of horse-car,
office, exchange, and club, for the wider duty in which he
lent a hand to this exile, because he was his brother, entered
into his life and bore his burden. The woman who left her
novel that she might be sure that the beef-tea was rightly
made for a girl in fever, was quite sure as she came home
at night-fall that the romance she had played a part in was
the better worth of the two. It was more artistic, and it had
more of the divine life. Both of them won the Christian
victory. Each of them learned that the quality of mercy
blesses him that gives as him that takes. Or, as the same
truth stands in an older text,

" Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."

With ever)r exercise, the power grows.

LAW AND GOSPEL.

All things work together for good to them that love God. — Romans
viii., 29.

It is only one of the outbursts of delight of which this
letter and, indeed, all Paul's letters are full. To us, such
enthusiastic joy is indeed remarkable. It contrasts sharply
enough with the grave decorum of our religious exercises.
As you came to church to-day, you did not see people hur-
rying, thronging, singing, and cheering, — eager to be first
at the place of service, and in whatever way to attest their
joy that they have found an infinite Father and a Saviour
of perfect love. Yet that is the tone of feeling recorded
here. And it has been recorded again and again through
history. The memory of the campaign of Francis Davidis,
in Transylvania, has lately been recalled. He was one of
the first of the Unitarian preachers. He was a foreigner,
who could not have spoken the Magyar tongue very well.
He was not a priest, and he spoke in a Catholic country.
But so well he spoke, with such transport did he show to
men what it is to have a Father in heaven, and no one
between us and him, — what joy and blessedness it is to know
that the Saviour of mankind is indeed one of ourselves,
that God himself asks nothing better than man who is man
indeed, when he has a revelation to make, — with such joy
and enthusiasm did Davidis speak, that the people thronged
about him, wherever he went. He should not speak in the
open air at street corners. They stormed the churches.
They turned the priests out-doors. This was purer religion,
and better, than their religion. He and his with their simple
creed — God is our father and Jesus is our brother — were
bidden to enter into those churches and to preach there,
in place of the Roman priesthood. And so it has been
there to this day.

There is, in truth, nothing in the nature of the Christian

religion to make people shy in the proclamation of it, sad in
their profession of it, doubtful about its future, gloomy in
their general view of life, or in any sort low-toned or de-
pressed. True, the decorums of establishments — nay, the
fear of making sacred things seem trivial — all unite to
give seriousness and often dulness to our religious state-
ment and profession. But there is every reason now,
which existed in the beginning, why the common people
should hear Jesus Christ gladly, why the gospel should be
regarded as glad tidings, why men should exult, with what-
ever expression of their enthusiasm, in the liberty with
which Christ makes them free. Indeed, the Church has
probably given itself no blow so dangerous as by the effort
— which it has made so often, as fast as it achieved secu-
lar power — to restrict general or popular amusement. Nor
does it ever make a greater mistake than when it insists
that its own exercises — as its meet.ngs, its music, its books,
its exhortations — shall be sorry rather than glad, or hope-
less rather than cheerful.

" Religion never was designed
To make our pleasures less."

The distinction between sombre religion and joyous relig-
ion is likely to underlie all the distinctions drawn by the
theologians. There is every reason why it should. For,
whether the theologians say so or no, here is the root of the
matter. Either God loves all his children, and means that
they shall all be saved, or, in the midst of a certain technical
love for all of them, he has predetermined that the greater
part of them shall be damned. According as the one of
these suppositions is true, or the other, we can well imagine
that men shall be very sad or very cheerful. Or, again,
either all men are my brothers, with whom I may and ought
to seek communion, — in which case my life will be social
and glad, — or, on the other hand, the greater part of man-
kind is incapable of good, unable to pray even, — in which
case I ought to be reserved, and shy of society. Or, once
more, I have in Jesus Christ really a brother of my brother-
hood, a friend, a well wisher, a teacher, an example, an
inspirer, who knew really my temptations, and gives me prac-
tical guidance and common-sense help, or I have in him a
being wholly unlike all other beings, whom my imagination
must not depict, whose life I cannot conceive of, at whose
very name I must bow my head, and who, in a word, is to be to

me the most unreal person in history. It follows, of course,
that as I take one of these views or the other will my relig-
ion be cheerful or the other. Our own poet, Dr. Holmes,
notes an essential distinction, and not a mere superficial
badge, when, in discribing a Sunday in Boston, he contrasts

"The cheerful Christian of the Liberal fold "

against him whom he meets in the street,

" Severe and smileless, he that runs may read
The stern disciple of Geneva's creed."*

It is six years since I received a letter from a stranger,
which I read, with my answer, in this pulpit, because I
thought he probably expressed the feelings of others. He
said: "I want light. . . . What is the truth? I was brought
up amid the strictest orthodox surroundings. My parents,
my wife, and my intimate friends are strong Calvinists. I
cannot doubt but they are sincere and happy in their faith ;
but it does not satisfy my heart. ... I wish I might believe
as you do ; for you seem to have faith in your faith. ... If
you will tell me what you believe to be the truth, or refer me
to books (not very expensive ones, for I cannot afford to buy
them) from which I can learn it, you may help me out of the
darkness, and will certainly earn and receive my gratitude."
To this letter, I replied at once. I told him he needed no
book but the New Testament. Even if he could not read
that, it was enough to know that God is our Father, and that
we all are brethren. I told him that from this truth all other
truth, religious or social, flowed ; that, as for faith, he must
use such faith as he had, and, using it, he would find more.
I heard no more of my correspondent for six years.

It happened a few weeks ago that I lighted on his let-
ter ; and as I have often thought of him, and as often
prayed God for him, I wrote to him again, now I had found
the address, to ask him how he fared. In reply, I have a

*'• By the white neck-clo:h, with its straightened tie,
The sober hat, the Sabbath-speaking eye,
Severe and smileless, he that runs may read
The stern disciple of Geneva's creed.
Decent and slow, behold his solemn march :
Silent, he enters through yon crowded arch.
A livelier bearing of the outward man,
The light-hued gloves, the undeveut rattan,
Now smartly rai-ed, or half-protanely twirled,
A bright, fresh twinkle from the outward world,
Tell their plain story. Yes: thine eyes behold
A cheerful Cnristian from the Liberal fold."

[The arch was the entrance to Marlboro chapel, since destroyed.]

cordial letter. Perhaps I had better not read it to you, even
with the omission of his name. It is simply a little autobi-
ography, which gives a short account of the moral experience
from boyhood. It is clear enough that -he was a good boy,
who wanted to obey his father and to please him. And
the pathetic thing is that his love for his father wrought
the misery of his "life. For his father was a sincere member
of the Presbyterian Church. When the boy was fourteen
years old, a revival swept along, and all his young compan-
ions joined the church. He also knew that it would please
his father, if he would do the same, — nay, he also wanted to
serve God and to please him. Now, it is here that the old
oppression of a Law comes in. For the minister told him,
his father told him, everybody he loved told him that he
must assent to a covenant which carried all the Westminster
Confession with it. Of course, he did not understand it.
Why, nobody understands it, far less a child of fourteen.
What he did understand he did not believe. But all the
same he was told that this was not his affair. I suppose he
was told that he would come to it. At all events, he was told
that great and good men had determined on it, and that a boy
like him must not set up his own will. So he assented to it,
— that is, he said he believed it ; and in that moment his
moral fall began. He traces the steps distinctly in his letter.
The efforts that he made to silence his conscience there
taught him how to silence his conscience in other things.
The purity of decision and the strength of will were gone.
He traces the moral decline till he actually violated a trust
committed to him. Then, in the horror for what he had done,
he lied from his family, fled from his friends, he changed
his name, if I understand him, and exiled himself from all
he loved.

It is in this exile that this man finds out that God is his
Father, and that all men are his brethren, and comes at
the clear sight that this is really the whole of religion. In
this exile, he sees what is the Liberty in which Christ makes
him free. He sees that God never meant to have him strain
his conscience or force his will by those old creeds and cate-
chisms. Yes ; and, in this exile, his father's love follows
him. His father covers his crime, so that it shall not be
known by the world. His father promises him welcome
among the friends he . had deserted. He joins his family
again, in another city. And for all of them a new life
begins.

But why does it begin ? Here is the moral of this story.
It is because, in this city, the pastor of the Evangelical
church which he seeks, in the true spirit of Christ, meets
him and welcomes him. The poor repentant tells him,
squarely, that he can make nothing of the covenant and
does not believe the creed. He believes God is his Father,
and man his brother, and in that belief rejoices. And this
friend says, as Paul would have said, that this is all he
wants, or any man wants, as assurance of religion. From
that welcome, forward, the poor fellow has found his life
happy and his steps sure. Sorrows ? Yes, plenty of sor-
rows ; but, all along, the heavenly strength which bears
sorrow. His wretchedness and failure began in this horrid
struggle to obey a dogmatic law. His joy and peace begin
in the moment when he yields- to the loving-kindness of a
free gospel.

A man is living in light and cheerfulness, who was
in darkness and wretchedness. What was it which made
him wretched? Simply, it was his effort to conform to a
religious statement which he did not believe. This not
only made him wretched, it made him wicked. It broke
the moral sense with which he started. How does he regain
this moral sense ? He regains it by repentance and by
squarely giving up the effort to hold on by these old stand-
ards, which were, after all, only so much inherited lumber
which had come down to him from his fathers. The case
is precisely like the case of Paul, and those of so many of
Paul's converts. This man has tried to be saved by a
law. It is the law of the Westminster Confession. A very
stiff law it is. For my own part, having been born, thank
God, quite outside both of them, I think I had rather take
my chance to obey that old Jewish law — which Paul hated
so — than to try to conform to this system of John Calvin's.
This man had tried to live by this Westminster law ; and he
had wholly failed. It had made him a hypocrite. It had
made him a bad man. Then he found out that God was
his Father and all men were his brothers. When he found
this out, he found that this is enough. He found that this
is the liberty with which Christ makes men free. And his
whole letter has the jubilee ring of Paul's enthusiastic words
about the deliverance from that old bondage. And his life,
according to his own account of it, is all lighted and fired
by the gladness of true religion. I do not say by its peace,
merely: I mean more than peace. Here is a man who has

found out that, if you live with God, and live for man, it is
joy and gladness and victory to live.

Now, I do not tell that story for any good that it may do
to the chiefs of the Presbyterian Church. I have no doubt
that they hear such stories themselves, and have to consider
their morals ; and I do not suppose that any of such chiefs
are hearing me now. I will not descend to that cheap cour-
age which teaches absent people their duty. I think such a
letter as that has a warning and a lesson for us who are here.
I have a right to say, in passing, that every such letter shows
to every pulpit and every preacher the clanger of overstate-
ment, the terrible risk which teachers or counsellors run, when
they try to tune the strings too high which are given to their
care. If such a string cracks, it is not the maker of the
string who is guilty. The North American Review, a few
months ago, was bitterly assailed, by what is called the relig-
ious press of the country, for asking me to warn the preachers
of this country of the danger of insincerity, the danger of
overstatement. The Review was told — and I was told —
that we must mind our own business ; that, if we were insin-
cere, we must mend our ways, but that we must leave other
people to theirs. Now, I think a letter like this shows how
far this clanger travels, and how the penalty for the over-
statement strikes far away from the preacher. This man had
done his best to profess a creed which was unintelligible to
him. There is no doubt he had been told that he must
profess it or be damned. He did profess it, and found he
was damned then. And not till he disowned it before God
and man did he escape the penalty. At last, observe, he
found in the pulpit a man who told him that this creed of
the Church was of no sort of consequence. He found a
man who was satisfied with his love of God and love of man.
He found a man not guilty of the overstatement which had
ruined years of this poor fellow's life and made the name of
religion hateful to him. Surely, that is a warning to you and
to me that, when we attempt to lift others into a religious
life, we never substitute what we would be glad to know for
what we do know, what we wished men believed for what
they must believe, what is supposed for what is proven.

Do not say that there are not five preachers in this house
now. There is not a person here who has not some duty
in the inculcation of religion ; and every parent here, every
elder brother and sister, every Sunday-school teacher, and

every day-school teacher, quite as much, has a great deal to
do in this line. Now, just this experience of Paul's, between
the religion of law and the religion of love, is an experience
by which you ought to be warned in the every-day religious
teaching, where you have chances worth a thousand-fold the
chance which the pulpit gives to me. Your child or your
pupil may grow up in the love .of God and in the love of
man, or he may grow up in the dread of God and the
fear of man. That is, he may grow up under the law, in-
stead of growing up under the gospel. It is your business
to see that his whole notion of religion is gospel. He ought
to have no sense of terror in his prayer, in his Sunday, in
his reading of the Bible, or in his notion of duty. Duty is
not to be something which he does because he will be beaten
or burned, if he fail to do it. Duty is his glad part in the
joyful work of a joyful world. A Father, who is full of love
in the midst of his blessings to the world, is glad to have his
children round him all the time, helping in his work, and
taking their little share. That is the child's privilege, which
we call his duty.

And surely we have a duty to the world. When we know
that half Christendom is still groaning under this pressure
of a law, of a written creed or code which somebody this
side of Jesus Christ has established, surely our duty is
clear to do something that they may enjoy the liberty to
which we were born. I had a letter from the mountains
of Tennessee the other day, admirably written, — as well
written as any man could write. But the writer told me
that he had had to fight his way through alone, from the
hardest shell of strict Baptist theology. He had little
enough help from the thirty-nine articles, of course, — he
had no help from the Westminster Catechism, — as he came
into the real freedom of the real gospel. No difficulty, of
course, if he had been left with his simple gospel, to read
it. But every authorized expounder of it told him that it
did not mean what it seemed to mean. Every authorized
expounder told him that he was wrong in taking its apparent
simplicity for the truth. He did fight his way through.
And, after he had got through, some accident, some scrap
in a secular newspaper, told him that some people called
Unitarians believed the Bible when it said that man was
made in the likeness of God, and believed Jesus Christ
when he said we might all trust the Holy Spirit. So he

wrote for some of our books, and he wanted to know it we
had no preacher who would go there. I confess I was not
well satisfied with the attitude of our Church toward a man
like that. I wondered he did not say : " Why did you leave
me to fight my own battle ? Why was there no man of you
who was willing for the truth to come and tell us the truth ?
Why did no church of you take Tennessee for a field, where
you might scatter at least the seed of printed truth, that
those of us who were under this bondage of a man-made
law might rejoice in the same liberty in which Christ had
set you free ? " The man did not say so. He was too
good a Christian for that. But when, a few weeks after,
a member of this church, an old Sunday-school teacher of
ours, wrote to me that he was going down to East Tennes-
see to preach the real glad tidings there, I did not feel quite
so meanly as before in writing to my unknown friend. It
is a good thing to live in a city like this, where a man may
enjoy his religion and have faith in his faith. But it is a
good thing which we owe to the courage of men who lived
long ago. And it seems to me a very mean thing so to live,
if we do not forecast the future, if we do not study the world
outside of us all the time, and, while we enjoy the love of
God, do what we can that others may. While we take the
comforts of our freedom, we are bound — in mere honor
bound — to lift others into the liberty in which Christ wants
to make them free. Shall we sit upon our rocks of safety,
and be all indifferent while the shipwrecked vessels there
go down ?

Nor is it for our own time only that we have this duty.
Who wants to leave his children in bondage from which
his fathers wrenched themselves free? Mrs. Wells is quite
right in the essay which some of you heard at the Second
Church. We do want to prejudice our children in favor of
good and truth and love. And, 'among the necessities for
these realities, we want to prejudice them in favor of simple
religion, of freedom. They will soon enough be tempted
the other way. But do we want them to yield to the
temptation? You send your girl to a great boarding-school.
With the first spring term, the inevitable revival comes
round, foreordained by the principal and led up to. And in
the throng of those, — first anxious, then inquiring with tears,
and then redeemed, your daughter is naturally enough swept
along, — swept along to say she believes this and that which

she does not understand, this and that of which she can
know nothing, and this and that, indeed, of which she never
dreamed. At first, of course, she has your tender sympathy,
because you see she is earnest and true. But her time of
trial is not now. It is by and by. Her time of trial will
come five years hence, ten years hence. You have let her
put on these pretty bracelets, because the other girls put
them on. And then her arms have grown, her wrists have
grown ; and the golden bands are agony. Nay : if they are
not cut off, they are death. Surely, it is your duty, before
that child leaves your house, that she shall know that she
is the free child of a loving God. She cannot be too young
for you to teach her that, with her own prayer, in her own
way, she may come to him. And, if you are wise, you will
early show to her what an escape was that in which such
men as Paul and his friends escaped the bondage of the
Jewish law ; how such women as you can tell her stories of
escaped the bondage of the Roman law ; how her own fathers
escaped the bondage of a ritual and ceremonial law; and
how people all around her have to struggle in agony and
tears to escape the bondage of a doctrinal law. Show to
her, too, that all these with a great price obtained this free-
dom, but that she is free-born.

Most of all, perhaps, does the duty press on us for our
own lives ; that with every enjoyment, every holiday, every
new book, every glad success, we so associate our gratitude
to God that religion shall come to mean joy, and joy religion.
Religion shall not mean the carving of reading-desks or the
embroidery of table-cloths or the architecture of steeples.
Religion shall not mean the meeting of a synod or the dis-
cussion of a catechism. Religion shall mean life, — life full
of God, and happy because full. It is the certainty, fixed in
one's own experience, that " all things work together for
good to those that love God."

THE MEN OF GADARA.

They began to pray him to depart out of their coasts.— Mark v., 17.

We persuade ourselves that we should have welcomed such
a Saviour as Jesus Christ. A child of God, so true to that
great name that we should be willing to call him the son of
God, — kinder than the kindest, stronger than the strongest,
braver than the bravest, wiser than the wisest, more practical
than the most practical, and all the time in perfect sympa-
thy with us all, — we know and we say that this is just what
we need. If he would come now, how he would bless us,
and how we would welcome him ! Hidden in the tangle of
the wicked prejudice against the Jewish race is anger that
they killed this Saviour. If it took form in words it would
be to say that they are people so stupid and so bad at once
that, when at last the prayer of all ages was answered, —
when men saw for once, for a few months, the divine order
of man's life, — these brutes could do nothing better than kill
him who showed it. For ourselves, so thoroughly has the
world learned in eighteen centuries that here is God's way
for man's life that we go to Palestine for traces of it. A
pebble from the beach at Capernaum is, and ought to be,
more sacred than any other pebble. And a picture of the
old olive-trees at Gethsemane is, and ought to be, a daily
benediction to the man who sees it. What, then, would be
the rapture of our greeting, if this Saviour took human form
again, — came to us in our Boston, and showed us how to
live?

There are different ways of finding answers to that ques-
tion. Nay, in different moods, we should answer it differently.
Little question what answer any of us would make to it, in
the hush of a darkened house, where lay the body of a child,
a sister, or a father, waiting for its burial. Different answers,

in different needs and in different moods, there would be.
Will you follow me now, in some thought as to the risks of
our repeating history ? Suppose we were in the old tempta-
tions, should we make the old answer ? And are the old
temptations clone away ?

In trying to work out any of these stories, we are apt to
be deceived by our own wishes and prepossessions. But, in
truth, these people were not all sitting, waiting for a Messiah.
They did not know that they lived in a crisis of history, —
excepting in this notion which men always have, that to-day
is all-important, and its sufferings intolerable. They were
about their daily work and daily play, just as we are ; and
daily work and daily play filled a very large place in their
eyes. These people of Gadara — "on the other side," as
they are always called — were perhaps less interested in Jeru-
salem politics and Hebrew jealousies than the people on
the Capernaum side. On either side, the population was
from all nations. It was "Galilee of the Gentiles " ; and the
old staple of Hebrewism had, at Capernaum, about as much
and about as little part in the web and woof of society, as
the old staple of English Puritanism has in Boston, among
Irish emigrants, Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians, people
who are attached to European habits and people who are
proud to be mistaken for Englishmen. From Capernaum,
Jesus crossed over to this Gadara, precisely because he
wanted to escape from the enthusiasm of those he knew at
home. There he found a population less Jewish and more
indifferent. There was more Gentile and less Hebrew. Yet
it was not far away. Only a sail of five or six miles.

But there are sickness and distress everywhere, and he is
Saviour. That is what he is for. Where there is suffering, he
must help. As he lands, here comes a poor wretch, laden
with fetters, — who shall say how long ? — living among the
tombs because no one will house him elsewhere. The tombs
are there to this day, caves in the rock that the poor wretch
had found refuge in. As Jesus lands, he comes rushing down
to abuse him. But the Saviour, with the inevitable power
which he carried with him always, soothes the madman to
gentleness, turns his whole life, indeed, till now so bedevilled
and dispirited ; and, where there was this wild outcast, there
stands a man, gentle and grateful, ready to be clothed again,
and all in his right mind.

So far, it is easy to see how we should welcome a visitor,

a Saviour, who came to us with such blessings. Let it be
announced to-morrow that a stranger had arrived here to-day
who met at once some howling maniac, had not avoided his
insults, had not sought to restrain him, but by the pure
majesty of his person, and the calm, overruling divinity of
all he said and was, had set this madman on his feet, had re-
stored him strong, cheerful, and all right to his friends, all of
us would want to know more. Some would not believe a
word of it, but even those would be curious. They who had
seen, and were sure, would be grateful, would be eager to
see more of the stranger, and would seek to give him wel-
come. All this, so far as we know, the people of the city of
Gadara would have felt. That is the way people felt in other
towns where Jesus came, and, in his commanding way, over-
awed evil in whatever form. Gadara might have felt so,
also.

But in Gadara the matter was complicated. In some way, —
we know not how, for the accounts are as confused as they
are fragmentary, — an immense herd of swine, feeding on the
table-land above the lake, rushed off into the sea, and were
drowned, at the moment when the poor maniac was restored.
He thought himself that his cure was connected with their
destruction. The bystanders thought so. Forty years after,
the evangelists, writing their narrative, thought so ; and, so far
as testimony goes, we cannot say they were not right. Two
thousand swine were lost. — The man was saved. Yes. But
the swine were lost. This loss, as I say, complicates the in-
cident in the minds of the people, and abates the warmth of
their welcome. " Two thousand swine lost ! " Where will
the rest of our swine and sheep and cattle go ? They seek
Jesus at once, respectfully, — timidly, very likely, — but they
beseech him to depart. They will have none of him. The
sooner he can go, the better ; and he goes. That is the way in
which, in fact, men received then a Saviour, in whose power
they believed.

We give the true colors to the incident, I suppose, if we
understand that on the western side of the Lake public
opinion was so strongly Jewish that men could not keep
herds of swine there. Still there would be a market for pork
in the Roman garrisons, and among other indifferent foreign-
ers. It is easy to see that that market would somehow be
supplied. On the other side is some stock-raiser who defies
Jewish law and Jewish prejudice at once, by raising swine for
this convenient market. I can remember when we had just

such a case here. Our police in Boston was so strong that
men dared not keep large numbers of stolen dogs together.
But our police had no authority in Cambridge, — indeed, Cam-
bridge was in another county. So unprincipled men found
it quite worth while to keep in Cambridge a corral of dogs
stolen in Boston, expecting that, when a man found his dog
there, he would buy him again. The success of liquor-deal-
ers in keeping up their business in face of prohibitory laws
gives a perfect analogy. The early critics of the Gospels were
swift to show that the destruction of these animals was prob-
ably a part of some vindication of insulted Jewish law.

From that day to this, their name has been used to denote
people who will not endure sound doctrine, unless it is pleas-
ant. The people who are indifferent about the saving of men,
if the saving be mixed up with the loss of swine, are called,
in many of the serious writers, Gadarenes. Instances will
occur to you at once. The Chinese government implores
England not to send opium to China. The Christian men of
England take up the appeal and bring it to Parliament. The
government and press acknowledge that the appeal is rightful
and humane. "But," they say, "we have ,£6,000,000 of
East Indian revenue involved. Do not talk sentiment. Tell
us how to find this revenue elsewhere." And so the opium-
trade goes on. You cannot save the men, and keep the swine.
Up till our civil war, our status regarding slavery was like
that. The enthusiasts said, —

" That on the day
You make a man a slave, you take his life away."

But the South said : " Yes, but you must have cotton. And,
if you free these slaves, you risk your cotton." Again, the
lives of men were measured against the value of swine. The
whole liquor-discussion is complicated in the same way. Loss
of revenue to government, ruin of vested interests, destruc-
tion of trade, — all these dangers press men's action, though
perhaps they do not dare express them in words, when we
who believe in men insist that the saving of men is the one
reality for which government exists, or laws. Nay, you see
it in the concerns of individuals. How often you see
a worn-out old farm which has thus been the curse of the
man who inherited it ! His brothers were so fortunate as to
have no inheritance. They went off to live as their training
or their tastes directed, or the providence of God. But this

man had this millstone of a farm around his neck, and has
carried it, round-shouldered, till he died. He has never been
able, alas ! to do anything but carry the farm. The man was
lost that the farm might be saved. Here are instances, in
the humblest affairs, or in the largest works of nations, of
the rejection of the Idea, of that which saves and makes
alive, that one may hold on to the thing, to what has been,
to the institution. Men send away a Saviour, that they may
keep their swine.

One's fancy hovers over Gadara a moment to ask what
it might have been, if only any ten men there had seen the
blessing that came to them, if they had welcomed this
master of men, at once so strong and so tender. What if
he had made his home with them, and to their children's
lives given a new spring! And, when the wider duty to a
world called him to other cities, or the fate of Jerusalem
compelled him there to die, what if some John or Philip of
his train, alive with all his life, glad with all his joy, had
remained there ! Think of fathers and mothers, brothers
and sisters in the little town, every day more glad, more
hearty, more manly, and more womanly. Social life becomes
more broad, gossip dies, impurity is forgotten. The petty
life of the village gives way to the large life of sons and
daughters of God. It is not one raving maniac only who
is clothed and in his right mind. It is that there are no
drunkards at the wine-shop. Nay, there is no wine-shop ;
there is no lewdness in the street • there is no cheating in
the market. Why, there is a new life at the theatre. There
is new music at the concert-room. Men walk with a more
manly step. The beauty of women is more true, and even
the play of children more happy. This is what might have
come, had Gadara welcomed the Saviour who had redeemed
a man. But, alas ! the butchers and pork-raisers of Gadara
drove that very Saviour away.

It is easy enough to see that every village and town has
the same choice to-day. Will it be distinguished only for its
trade in pigs, as Gadara has become and other cities ; or will
it be distinguished for its men and women ? Will it thrive in
its trade in liquors, as Capua throve ; or will it thrive in the
lives and honor of its men and women ! Will it be a place
of gambling, like Baden or Hamburg or Monaco; or will it
be known the world over as a place of true men and true
women? Or, for a nation, shall its policy be a policy for

bringing in gold and silver into its treasury, or shall the
whole drift of its policy be the training of manly men and
womanly women ? Village, town, or nation, which determines
on the nobler policy, not only admits this Saviour when he
comes and knocks, but seeks for him, welcomes him, honors
and obeys him. It is not as it teaches its boys to spell or to
multiply that it succeeds. But it is as they see him and
know him, as indeed a friend ; as they do as they would be
done by, as they bear each other's burdens. When they do
welcome him, then their rags fall off, and they are clothed;
their handcuffs drop, and they are free; the old selfish isola-
tion ends, and there is society. Thus indeed do men know
that they are his, when all men see that these people love one
another.

Nor is it cities and villages chiefly who have this choice to
make. You and I are making it every day. Is my first
object to-morrow to build upon yesterday's foundation of
things ? Stones, land, clothes, cotton, woollen, hemp, iron,
brass, or silver, or gold , — there are many of these things we
have to deal with, just as these Gadarenes dealt in pigs, and
thought they must deal in them. Have you and I come so
far that, when to morrow comes, we shall simply build on
these same foundations, or have we pluck and manhood for
something more ? This Saviour will certainly come to us
to-morrow. He is in town to-day. There are twenty propo-
sals, even, which he will make to each one of us to-morrow
morning. For the world is so far changed since this day of
the madman, that he has his plans laid everywhere now, and
he wants you and me to help him. Nay, we have received
so much from him, that it is sheer dishonor, if we do not help
his plans in turn. Can you lay down your pen and listen to
the story of this boy, who wants your help that he may go to
Colorado ? Can you give up your afternoon drive, that you
may help forward the Woman's Hospital ? Can you give up
the evening party, that you may spend the same hours with
such-a-one, who is blind, or with so-and-so, who is bed-rid-
den ? Can you set back, for a day, the contract for your own
building, lest the service of the city suffer, and this matter
be neglected, in which the interests of all of us are involved ?
Can you renounce the pleasure of the play to-morrow night,
if the credit of the town require your absence from a degrad-
ing performance? All these questions are just the same
question as the Gadarenes had before them, under which
they broke down. It only simplifies the form a little to

say, " Will you have a man saved, — well, and in his right
mind? or, Will you have so many pigs sunk in the sea?'
And these illustrations are only from outward things. The
Saviour's own questions and demands are on a grade yet
higher.

He bids you — yes, while you are caring for the swine, as
those swine-herds were on the cliffs — to be looking on the
clear blue of heaven, and thinking of the Father who made
heaven and you, who makes heaven and you to-day, and is
the wisdom and the tenderness which you call Nature. This
Saviour asks you, as you add up the figures and as you write
the letters, to use the ready help of your Father and his, — so
to write and so to add as one who bears his brother's burdens.
Your boy is at school, your husband is away, your daughter
has gone out on the day's duties, and you are alone. But
this gospel is everywhere now. Into your lonely room this
Saviour comes, to every purpose. For it is his voice which
asks you to be sure that home shall have its brightest greet-
ing for all of these, when they shall return. It is he who says
that home is God's present kingdom, and that we are to find
God there, nor seek him on mountain or in temple. It is he
who tells you that the very sacraments of religion are the sac-
raments of every morning's greeting. Now, in all these ap-
peals of' a Saviour, there is just the temptation before which
the men of Gadara failed. You and I have their example.
You and I know that he has word to speak which is life and
strength to all who will listen. The more shame to you and
me, if, at whatever moment we hear his voice or see his face,
we ask him to leave our coasts, that we may plod on in our
dirty, mean, and selfish way.

THESE THREE ABIDE.

"And now abideth Faith, Hope, Charity, these three." — I. Cor.
xiii., 13.

We observe every day that the great words of religion
wear out, if it were only from too much use. Perhaps the
use is reverent. Perhaps it is careless. Take these words.
If I went into any reform meeting, as of temperance men,
of independent voters, of friends of abused children, and
told them they needed more Faith, they would take the
phrase as professional. They would be glad to have me say
it, so far as it added to the respectability of the meeting.
Then they would want me to sit down, that some " practical
man " might speak. All the same, the real thing, "Faith," is
what they all need, and without which they fail. What they
are tired of is a worn-out word. Our Latin word Faith, in-
deed, was but a poor word at the beginning. As for the
word "Charity" used in this text, it was always a bad word for
the purpose. It never really meant, to the common ear of
Englishmen, what Paul meant. It owes its place here to a cer
tain shyness of the translators, — first of the Greek into Latin-
then from both languages into English. Paul, and the other,
writers of the Testament, used the same word for God's love
toward men and man's love to other men. To their mind,
it was the same relation ; the whole gospel, indeed, being
founded on the identity of all spiritual essence. Man is of
God's nature. God's love and man's love are therefore
expressed in Gospels and Epistles by the same word. But,
from the shyness of the translators, this word is sometimes
rendered love, and sometimes charity ; for they quailed before
showing to us, who read English, the oneness of nature of God
and man. The same pen, therefore, which writes, " God com-
mends his love to us," and " the love of God which passeth

knowledge," and " to know the love of Christ," or " the love
of the Spirit," when it comes to apply the same word to the
relations of men, speaks of "charity which abides; charity
which suffers long, and is kind." I need not analyze this
uneasiness of the translators. Perhaps they did not quite
dare say that man's pure feelings are just like Christ's and
God's, as in fact they are. Or perhaps they thought the word
" love " was mixed up with human passion, with the love of
man for woman, and did not well apply to the universal love
which the Christian religion demands. Anyway, in these
critical passages, they substituted the more technical word
"charity" for the broader words "friendship" or "love."
And to us this is a real misfortune. For, to Bible reading
people, it lets down badly the whole plane of what is meant
and needed. That plane should always be kept up to the
level of what Jesus said, that the whole of life depends on
two commandments : —

I. That one love God, and
II. That he love his neighbor as himself. In both these
directions, the love spoken of is nothing less than such ten-
der and all-embracing* love as that in which God himself
loves all his children.

As for the third of the great words, Hope, although Paul
puts it midway between the other two, it has fared worse
than either. For, between two schools of theologians, it has
fallen to the ground. There is on one side the school of
Luther, who insist on Faith ; and, on the other, the school
which cites St. James, and insists on Love. But Hope, which
Paul places between the two," has as yet had no school and
no sect. Yet Jesus Christ insists on what Paul means, — nay,
he presupposes it. For what Paul means is that a man shall
look outside time and beyond the world. He means that
man shall live and move as an immortal, and Jesus Christ
takes this for granted. It is not of Palestine that he states
the laws. He states the laws of the universe for all children
of God. It is not for to-day that he states them : it is for all
life, for men and women who live beyond time, who are
eternal. So is it that Paul, when he names the eternal ele-
ments of life, between faith in God and love of man places
man's certainty of his own eternity. He bids man look
beyond the line of time. That forward look is what the word
" Hope " stands for, midway of the three.

And it is by another calamity — even worse, as I think —
that the three have been spoken of as the " three Christian

Graces." Graces indeed they are, but they are only debased
by that association, in either the modern or the ancient use
of the word " Graces." For the three graces of the ancient
literature were simply three adorners of life. They lend
"the grace and beauty to everything that delights and ele-
vates gods and men." Now, while it is perfectly true that
Faith and Hope and Love do this, this is, by no means, all
that they have to do. And when, therefore, a sentimental
world, or an ignorant world, call Faith, Hope, and Love the
three Christian Graces, and so mix them up with the three
old Graces of Homer and Hesiod and the other Greek poets,
they do great injustice to Faith, Hope, and Love. Poor Paul
would have groaned in spirit, — indeed, he would have torn this
immortal word to tatters, — had he supposed that the outcome
of what he wrote was to be only a confusion of his three
eternities with the gay and sportive Thalia, Aglia, and
Euphrosyne, the three Greek Graces, whom you may still see
in some alabaster mantel-ornament, clasping each other in
amiable affection. What Paul says is that Faith, Hope, and
Love are three eternal realities. He says that while all
marbles and granites crumble, while all institutions are
buried in sand-storms, while laws become obsolete, while
idols fall from their thrones, and empires are ruined, there
are three eternities. These three abide. They do not change.
They cannot change. They are man's knowledge of God,
man's love of man, and, midway, man's sense of eternity.
To call these three rocks merely three "graces " of charac-
ter is to confound the foundation of a palace with the
sculptured playthings in its queen's boudoir.

This statement of the text is not Paul's statement only.
It is his epigram, condensing into the fewest words the dis-
tinctive peculiarities of the Christian system. And, if any
one care much for a scientific definition of Christianity,
that definition would take its form from this epigram. For
all religions involve faith, or man's sense of God. And all
humane or altruistic philosophies involve man's care for
man, or love. The distinctive character of Christ's religion
is, that while he insists on these two. as essential to each
other, he compels man to regard himself and his brethen as
eternal.

They are the immortal children of an eternal God, just as
Christ is the immortal son of an eternal God. These three
certainties all intertwisted together, so that each becomes
a part of the other, make up the Christian system, if anybody

care for a statement so abstract and dry. This, and no talk
of decorative art, this statement of reality, and no upholstery
of graceful adornment, is what Paul means when he says,
of Faith, Hope, and Love, these three " abide." Prophecy
fails, preaching fails, signs fail, miracles fail, tongues cease,
and knowledge vanishes away ; but these three abide, these
are everlasting.

The late Ephraim Peabody, one of the wisest as he was
one of the loveliest of those preachers who have led forward
this city in a higher life, used to say of preaching that there
are but eight possible subjects for sermons. He said that
after a preacher had preached once on all of these eight, he
had simply to do the same thing again, but to do ft better
than he did it before. I long since accepted the statement
as being substantially true. And, in advising young preachers,
I have sometimes gone so far as to tell them what the eight
classes of sermons are. There are the three simple state-
ments of God, of heaven, and of our relations to man. Then
we want to know, and want to show, how faith quickens hope,
how faith compels love, and how hope or the sense of heaven
leads man up to his full duty to his fellow-men. Here are
six of the subdivisions. The seventh would show what I
call the intertwining of all these three elements of life with
each other, and under the eighth head would come the
immediate application of either of these themes in the for-
mation of character or the improvement of the world. Under
one or other of these heads, I believe you could classify
every Christian sermon you have ever heard. Besides these
there are heathen sermons, aesthetic sermons, sermons drawn
from personal experience, or from the occasion of the mo-
ment, of which perhaps you have heard many- but those
are not Christian sermons as such, nor is the memory of
them important, or their classification.

I had occasion to speak here, last Sunday afternoon, on
what are known among several thousand young people as the
Four Mottoes.

They are the mottoes above the speaker's desk in our
Sunday-school, where they were placed by the superintendent
ten years ago. Around those mottoes, mostly through the
agency of Miss Mary Lathbury and Miss Van Marten, has
been formed a large organization in the Sunday-schools of
the Methodist Church, called the "Look-up Legion," the
name being taken from the first of the four. To this organi-
zation there now belong six or seven thousand young people,

scattered in all parts of the world. These young people, let
me say in passing, take their interest in the Legion wholly
from their interest in the principles of the four mottoes. For,
when Miss Lathbury founded the order, she had never heard
of the book from which the}- are taken, nor of the young
hero whose life inspired it. Now, those four mottoes are
simply the translation into modern language of the central
words of Paul and of Jesus. They state in the familiar
words of our time these eternal principles of the Divine Life.
Faith is the determination of man to "look up," — to look to
a higher law than his own impulse. Hope is his determina-
tion to " look forward rather than backward." Love is his de-
termination to " look out rather than in " ; and, because Love
must show itself in practice, Love is the determination also to
" lend a hand."

The business of the Look-Up Legion, of any of the.
Wadsworth Clubs, as of every man who wants to live in the
Christian or Divine order of human life, is to intertwine
these principles in one life. That man is a fanatic, and he is
sure to fail who rests on any one alone.

For an illustration of what Faith would be and is to
any church or man tempted'to rest on it alone, take the
legend of Abraham's Faith ; reported and preserved perhaps
tor this very purpose. To the venerable chieftain, in his old
age, is born this only son. The craving wish of a lifetime is
gratified. The authority, the wealth which he has achieved
in this new land, shall now be transmitted to a descendant, as
are those of other sheiks less powerful and less wise. Noth-
ing is left indeed for the old man's heart to wish. But it is
in this moment of happy pride — is it because of this happy
pride ? — that the temptation comes. I suppose the same
false temptation or trial comes now, where any one-eyed
Job's comforter tells you that you love your child too much.
As if God were not best pleased when we love our children
with that single love with which he loves his own ! " Take
thy son Isaac," says the voice, " and offer him for a burnt
offering." And the poor old father obeys. He takes the
wood, of the burnt offering and binds it upon Isaac. He
takes the fire in one hand, and the knife in another. "My
father," says the boy. "My son," replies the father. " Be-
h> ild the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb?" And
Abraham said, " My son, God will provide." Till this mo-
ment, in this dreadful scene, you have a religion of Faith,
without hope, without love. And it is only in the moment

when the boy's life is spared, and Love comes in, — in the
moment when Abraham looks down through the ages, even
to a world made glad through the life of that child,— when
Hope comes in, it is only when Hope and Love are inter-
twined with that crude Faith of the beginning, that there is
even a foundation laid for the system of Christianity, which
is Absolute and Positive Religion.

So you may see all by itself the habit of contemplating
man's infinity, — the habit which looks beyond the veil, and
is careless of place and time. This is that element of life,
necessary to all true life, which Paul calls Hope. You find it
all by itself, where Nathaniel sits in his garden. You find it
in those orders of monks or nuns, for whose convenience
Mr. Byrne wants us here to reconstruct the Christian law of
poverty. A man sits on a pillar for fifty-six years, looking
bevond the veil, and contemplating the infinite. Or, in a
Carthusian convent, he takes a vow of silence, and lives his
life through without speaking aloud either to God or to
man. Far from striving to help his brethren, he retires from
towns and from travel, builds himself a hut in the woods
where no beggar even may find him, and there meditates
on God and (loci's perfections. But this is no Christian med-
itation. This is not Paul's foundation. To any such muser,
there ought to come the same word which spoke to Elijah in
such solitude : " What dost thou here, Elijah. I have yet
seven thousand left me who have not bowed the knee to
Baal." Mere aspiration, mere culture, the mere contem-
plation of eternity, is imbecile and idle, unless it is knit in
with the Love of God and the Love of Man.

Of Love, the third foundation, I doubt if it can be so often
found alone. But there are instances here, which show you
a like one sidedness. In human passion, how often does the
fanatic of love cry out, as Leonora to William in the ballad,
" You are my only God, and you my only Heaven " ! The
French Revolution of 1848 was founded on the one founda-
tion stone of Fraternity. " Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,"
was the cry. But " Liberty " is merely negative : that only
means that restriction is thrown off. " Equality" meant only
that all men's rights are the same. " Fraternity " meant
Love, — that each should stand by each, that each man should
bear his brother's burdens, — Love without faith in God above,
Love without the heaven of an infinite life. Yes. And I
know nothing more pathetic than this effort to work out a

rejigion as one-sided as Abraham's, as one-sided as any
Mark's, in the midst of sceptical Paris herself, and in the
very echoes of the ridicule of such austerity as Abraham's
or such asceticism as Simeon's. Immense workshops were
arranged in the spirit of fraternity, where brothers should
work with brothers, — brothers, alas! who had no father. The
success of these looms, the beauty of these stuffs, was to be
the proof that better than the task-work rendered at the
demand of greedy capital, is the free-will offering rendered
by willing man to willing man. Alas for that experiment, if
willing man be taught that he is only a beast that perishes,
or a watch that can run clown ! Wretched the failure, unless
willing man work as a child of God ! Banners displayed on
the walls and hanging from the ceiling taught spinner and
weaver what is true, that " every shirk is a thief." Very true,
very true. "And what if he is ? " was the practical reply.
The chaos come again of those workshops has never been
fitly described. The trial balance of their failure has never
been fitly struck. The shirks and thieves they assembled
appeared next as the conspirators behind barricades ; and
the repetition of the lesson, a thousand times repeated, of
the " whiff of grape-shot " in the streets of Paris, ended the
experiment. So the experiment serves us as a memorial, like
the others. You can make no system out of human love
alone. For a system, for an institution, for something that
abides, it must be knit in with the sense of God and the
surety of eternity.

You remember the pretty story of the old age of St. John.
Coming one day to a place which he had not visited for years,-
he asked for a certain boy whom he had watched with pleasure
then, and whom he had led in the early steps of a manly
life. They told him the boy had gone to the bad, had indeed
joined a band of brigands in the mountains, whose plunder-
ings and ravagings were the terror of the region where they
were. The old apostle said, at once, that he must go and
find him, and would not be deterred by any tale of danger.
He laid his plans with his Master's own energy, found the
band of robbers, and confronted the young chieftain. Nor
had the flint lost its old fire. The old man, after his century
of life, could still speak of life, — of what life demands, of
duties and of pleasures, — nay, put it as this text puts it, he
could speak of Faith and Hope and Love, so as to compel
even these lawless young roughs of the Lydian mountains to
listen to him ; yes, and to obey and follow. For this is the

last recorded miracle of the apostle's life : that he leads back
his young friend, restored from crime, to the home he had
deserted. Now that triumph tells the story of the union of
the three powers in a life really manly or divine. It is not
that John loved this young brigand. People enough who
loved him who had never cared to go after him. It is not that
John could look beyond the line of time, and believed, as
our modern long words put it, in the infinite possibilities of
human nature. Plenty of people who believed that, all the
elders of the Church believed it ; but that belief had not
made them bold enough to go away into the mountains and
find this sheep that was lost. No ! And the courage which
belongs to a child of God, — who believes that God is, and is
here, — this courage alone is not enough, unless it be inter-
blended with such spiritual insight and such perfect love. It
is the union of Faith and Hope and Love which give to the
old apostle the joy of his victory.

Yes, there are crowds of worshippers every Sunday in the
churches of the world. But worship is not all. Under the
vines and fig-trees of the world there are a thousand musing
Nathaniels, thinking of a higher life. But aspiration is not
all. And in the activities of the week there are, thank God,
a thousand thousand kindnesses between man and man. But
kindness is not all. It is when worship, aspiration, and kind-
ness are united, when Faith, Hope, and Love all inspire one
life, that you see the firmness as well as the grace of Chris-
tian living. These three abide, and are eternal.

CHRIST THE GIVER.

" He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men." — Ephesians iv., 8.

The cant of our time is fond of saying that we can now
go along very well without Jesus Christ. People ask : Why
should we pray to God as Christians ? Will he not hear us
if we pray as his children? Why meet in church on Christ's
day? Can we not meet any other day? Has not Jesus
Christ himself s'aid that we are all sons of God ? Why sin-
gle out with special honor The Son of God, Well-beloved ?
Such is one form of the cant of our time.

It is Christmas Day. Let me answer these questions by
repeating a child's story, which I will extend a little further
than the old English ballad takes it.

An English gentleman of Norfolk, dying, left his two

children and their fortune to his brother's care. If they

should die before they came to age, the uncle should possess

their wealth. The boy was "a fine and pretty boy," the girl

was younger than he, and "framed in beauty's mould." The

uncle took them to his home, as he had promised. But, as

the children grew, his passion for their fortune overmastered

him, and

" For their wealth he did devise
To make them both away.

" He bargained with two ruffians strong,
Who were of furious mood,
That they should take these children young,
And slay them in the wood."

The ruffians took the children, as they promised. But so
sweet was their prattle as they rode, that their pretty speech

" Made murder's hand relent,

And thev that undertook the deed
Full sore did now repent."

Rather than carry out his promise, the kinder of the two
fights with his comrade and kills him. In the midst of the

duel, the frightened children stray away into the wood and
are lost. The night comes on,

" As hand in hand
They wander up and down,
But never more could see the man
Approaching from the town."

Darker and darker grows the forest. The little girl sobs
herself to sleep, and the chivalrous boy tries to keep awake
to protect her ; but he, too, gives way as midnight comes,
and he is only wakened at morning as he sees a great
light. The level rays of the morning sun pierce between the
bare tree 'runks, and shine full in the face of the boy who
sat in darkness. And. just as he rouses his tired sister, help
comes. A friend in need ! A young man crossing through
the forest paths, so strong, so cheerful, so kind, takes the
little sister in his arms and leads the boy by the hand.
Five words of sympathy, and hunger and night and sorrow
are all forgotten. Hardly a minute, and the little fellow
knows that here is a friend, — a friend not for a minute only,
but for a day ; nay. for all his boyhood ; nay, for life. And,
only to trace along the story, this new-found friend cares
for both the orphans. It proves that he is himself a prince,
— nay, the trusted son of the king, viceroy of all the land.
With all a father's power and all a brother's tenderness,
he trains both the little ones till they can care for them-
selves. Then he takes them back, youth and maiden, to
their father's castle, which is renewed in beauty and splen-
dor. They can just remember the sad parting from their
father at his death-bed, but all is now alive and glad and
wonderful. It is then that the orphan boy and the orphan
girl, who have been thus rescued from abject misery, turn
on this prince and saviour, who was light to them in outer
darkness, to say : —

" We can do very well without you now. Possibly, indeed,
we should have pulled through without you. This castle
belongs to us ; and, if you will go your way. we will go ours.
We don't want to remember you, and we shall never think
of you or speak of you any more."

The world of Herod's time and Caesar's is the dark forest.
The men and women of the world are the lost children.
Thank God, the world of to-day does not know and cannot
be made to understand what we mean when we say "Herod's

time and Caesar's." The world of to-day is convulsed with
anger, if it thinks one of its rulers spends a week at a water-
ing-place when he should be in his capital. It cannot imag-
ine a tyrant who would kill wife and child as carelessly as
the prince of to-day plays a game at tennis. To say " Herod's
time," therefore, means little or nothing now. It helps, per-
haps, for the description of that dark forest, if we people it
with the assassins of Caesar, if we renew the memories of the
lusts of Greece or the suicides of Rome. If we could read only
some one story of the agonies of some one tortured slave, dy-
ing in slow martyrdom, because he had placed a napkin of
the wrong color on his master's dinner-table, we should have
some notion of it. If we recollect that Claudius and Nero
and Caligula were bright particular stars in its darkness,
that will help our imaginations. ■ The word "darkness" is
the best description, because, as Paul said, the people in
it had come so far that they did not like to retain God in
their knowledge. What way lust led, that way they followed.
What diversion the moment's whim suggested, that diversion
they secured. And blank, dead wretchedness was the out-
crop of that planting. There is literature enough to show
that. For these toys and follies of a moment, they had bar-
tered away everything which other times had valued. Civil
liberty was gone, which Greek heroes, and Roman and Jewish,,
had died for in better days. The glories and greatness of
art were gone. Men looked on the work of Phidias only to
know that there was no such power left to them. The purity
and tenderness of home were gone. It was not in these
days that Cornelia showed her jewels so proudly. The sim-
ple pleasures of freemen were gone. Men's tired taste could
only be roused when they saw other men dying in the arena,
in the gripe of beasts of prey. Courage was forgotten,
honor and truth. It was the heyday of lust, of wretchedness,
and of suicide.

In that world, Jesus Christ lives and dies. In that world,
while the memory of his disgraceful execution was as fresh
as to us is the outbreak of the Rebellion, Paul wrote of him
these words, which he quoted from an old Psalm of Triumph,
" He took captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men."

He save nifts unto men. It is no accidental custom of
Germans, nor a tradition of the Latin races, no habit of our
island ancestors transmitted to our times, which crowds the

streets with eager contrivers who want to celebrate a Saviour's
birth by gifts of love/ He is the great giver of history. And
so Saint Paul commemorates him. For our lesson to-day, we
will set in order a few of these gifts which he has been load-
ing upon us, ever since he found his brothers and his sisters
in that outer darkness of the forest ; ever since that Rising
Sun waked her from her cruel dreams, and him from his stu-
pid rest. The first is that which Paul names. He led cap-
tivitv captive ; or, as we should say, he mastered slavery.
Writing to poor wretches in Western Asia, whose least tor-
ture was the lash ; writing to congregations of worshippers
in which were slaves whose masters could put them on the
rack, if they chose, for their amusement, — Paul says calmly,
of one who was himself nailed to the cross within their mem-
ory, that he has put an end to captivity, he has abolished
slavery. Years, generations, centuries, pass, and make it
more certain and more that Paul is right. First, the master
cannot strike the slave to whom this morning he passed the
cup of communion. Surely, no slave can cheat the master
who only last night watched by his dying father's bed. Such
crude forms of service die away : serfdom dies away, and
vassalage dies away. All men become equal before the law.
Servant and master learn that they are needed, each by each :
each bears his brother's burden. At the very last, since you
and I can remember, the great nations of the world, bidden,
by that Nazarene peasant who hung upon a cross, crowd the
ocean with their navies to suppress the slave-trade. They
command ; and, when th^y command, they are obeyed. They
command the princes of Africa that they shall not trade in
men. They command the sultan at Stamboul that he shall
not trade in women. So that it is in our day that we see
that victory now. Yes. And, when at last God's clock
strikes, your brothers and your sons march even to battle
at the same command, to free slaves who were born to
slavery. They march and they die, obedient to Him of
whom they know also that he led captivity captive, as his
first gift to men.

I do not mean — and I must not say — that Paul confined
himself to speaking of this single form of captivity. That
Christ breaks every bond, — that is always at the bottom of
Paul's thanksgivings ; and the gifts Christ gives to men in-
volve men's freedom from all restraint of whatever suffering.
When Tesus himself cured the woman who had been bent

and crippled by her infirmity, he said, " Should not this
woman be 'loosed' on the Sabbath day, whom Satan hath
'bound,' lo, these eighteen years?" The promise is that,
step by step, the Saviour shall loose us from disease. Life
shall be better worth living till the end, when there shall
be no more sickness and no pain. Here is another of his
gifts to mankind.

I talked last Monday with the distinguished medical mis-
sionary* who opened the missionary hospital in Canton in
China. He showed to me the terrible pictures of a few of
the disfigured wretches whose sufferings it was his privilege
to relieve. Monsters they seemed, — you can say nothing
less, — -with the shocking distortions which this and that ab-
normal growth, unchecked by science, had produced. I
asked at once the question, "Are there more of these dis-
eases in China than in the rest of the world?" .And he an-
swered at once, that this is what you would see in any street
in New York and Washington and Boston, but for your
Warrens and Jacksons and Motts, your Mays and Lind-
says and Sewalls. Our freedom from such horrors is clue to
the work of Christian science in a Christian land. China
calls herself the centre of civilization. China had done the
best she could without this new life which Jesus Christ
brought us. Of that life, we have no finer concrete repre-
sentation than is given by medical science in its unselfish
vigor. "An outside barbarian," my friend landed in "the
Provincial City" of Canton, as a servant of Jesus Christ.
He established his hospital as a servant of Jesus Christ.
He was permitted to work among the abject beggars, who
might have died, and no man would have cared. Well, he
gave sight to the blind. He cut away these burdens of rot-
ten flesh, beneath which men had staggered since they were
children. Men saw in their own streets such marvels as we
read of in the Testament. The woman who had been bound
down by Satan for eighteen years stood up and walked be-
fore their eyes. Then the princes of the land came to beg
his aid for their children. And, after twenty years of such
service, he left the duty to younger hands, honored and
blessed of the highest officials in the land. But he is most
blessed in the remembrance that in those years fifty-three
thousand men, women, and children came to him for relief,
and that so often God permitted him to do his best for suf-

* Dr. Peter Parker.

fering man. Since he left that work, the hospital he estab-
lished has received — and has ministered to — seven hun-
dred thousand more of those who sat in that outer darkness.
Such light have they seen. That is the gift of Jesus Christ
to them, say in a quarter of a century. Now, I tell that story
in that detail, because there is some chance that so we can
take some notion of what one follower of Jesus Christ does,
in his spirit and in his name, while it is hopeless to tell
what all his followers do. I tell it as I once told here on
Christmas morning the story of what Jean Waldo did for one
dying girl in Lyons. But you shall not say this is romance,
or that it happened centuries ago. This has happened since
I was a man, and most of you. This is happening in this
town to-day. "Greater things than these shall ye do," the
Master savs ; and greater things do follow where he leads
the way. There is not one of the prophetical images but is
literally fulfilled. The blind see, the lepers are cleansed,
the lame walk, and the deaf hear. And. these are so many
Christmas gifts which, from the cup of his suffering, he scat-
ters over the world.

I remember, proudly and gratefully,— even in the very
case I describe, — that these are not the victories of men of
science only. 1 remember that this Missionary Hospital in
Canton is endowed and maintained chiefly at the charge of
the English and American merchants of that city. I am
speaking to men who bore their share in such beneficence,
and have perhaps forgotten it. This is a necessary part of
my statement. What is modern commerce but a gift of
Jesus Christ to mankind? It is the development inaction
— as man helps man — of the Golden Rule. No exchange
or bank or insurance company could carve a better motto
upon its walls than these words of Paul's, in which he
says he defines the whole law of Christ: —

" bear ye one another's burdens."

That is what trade is. That is what merchants do. Of
modern trade, as distinguished from that of antiquity, the
peculiarity is that it rests on honor. You cannot pass laws
so intricate as to solve its problems or enforce its requisi-
tions. It is impossible, unless your Rothschild, your Hope,
your Baring, be a man whose word is as good as his bond.
And this honor between men who only know each other's
names — nor always know that — is the gift to us of Chris-
tian life. I do not say that you cannot now find it in the

other religions. But I do say that you never found it be-
fore Christ lived and died. And I must say more. Let me
hold to my illustration. In a land not Christian, among
people who scorn them as outside barbarians, this colony
of Christian merchants build up, in this one case, a hospital
to relieve the beggars and the princes cf that land where
they are scorned. Do you find that Phoenician merchants
did that for barbarous Britons ? Did Jewish merchants do
that, when they went down for gold and ivory to Sheba ? Is
there any hint of that eager and active benevolence, till the
central word was spoken by Him who died on the cross,
when he said, "One is your Father; and all ye are brethren ? "

I cite such instances merely because they are small enough
for us to study, and distinct enough for us to remember.
Trace out any one of them in its results, and you have a
Christmas present of Jesus Christ to mankind, — so magnifi-
cent that you cannot imagine what the world would have
been without it. This prosperous America, for instance, —
happy home this day of who shall say how many million of
his brothers and sisters, — where it was, but for him and his,
the cold lair of a few thousand starving savages. There is a
Christmas present worth talking of and thinking of ! For
there is not a crisis in its history but bears Jesus Christ's
trade mark. The discovery by Columbus gave meaning to
his name of the Christ-bearer. Every settlement on these
shores which gave impulse to true civilization was a settle-
ment made by men eager to carry forward his gospel. The
Declaration of Independence and the Constitutions of the
United States were born in the Christ-blessed cabin of the
"Mayflower." And, as General Sherman said on Tuesday
evening, the old battle between civilization and barbarism is
still going on. Where light and victory perch upon the ban-
ners of the right, it is, as he said, where such men as Miles
Standish and such women as Rose Standish lead the way to-
day. It is in the mines above Georgetown, it is in the canons
of the Arkansas, that are the true celebrations of the land-
ing of the Pilgrims, amid snow-drifts which are deeper than
theirs, in a December which is colder, — both endured by
the eternal strength which comes to those who follow their
Leader, as he brings light to those who sit in darkness.

For Jesus Christ has given law to the world in the place of
anarchy. He has given freedom in the place of tyranny.
He has taught men that they are their brothers' keepers.

And he spoke the text word of Democracy, when he said,
he who is greatest among you shall be your brethren. I
like to say, in passing, that the whole Civil Code on which
all the institutions of Continental Europe are based, the gift
and the only gift to mankind of the Roman Empire, is a Chris-
tian gift, a Christian present. It was a Christian Emperor
who devised the Code ; and it is inspired all the way through
by the Christianity of his Court and of his time. Of that sys-
tem of jurisprudence, our English ancestors were not fond.
From their own customs and traditions, they built up our
system of the common law. Through and through, this is
interpenetrated by the gospel spirit, and in its axioms you
can trace New Testament direction. So that, of the moral
and legal science of the world, you may say what you say of
the medical science, — that the new life, which the world
needed, for the want of which it was dying, was the Life
which was made manifest when Jesus Christ lived, and died,
and was alive again. .

The greatest gift of all is the gift to man of a loving God
and a present heaven. In my little fable of the children of
the wood, he led back the graceless boy and girl to their
father's castle, beautified and restored. Cut the true Prince
of Life, after he found you and me, has brought us to
his Father's palace to tell us that this is our home. We
may come and go as we will in it. We may read the books
in the library; we may enjoy the pictures in the gallery; we
may play with the children in the nursery j we may sing our
songs in the music-room ; we may amuse ourselves with the
games in the play-rooms ; we may revel in the flowers in
the gardens ; we may pluck any fruit we see in the orchard.
Our Father's home is our home, and never is he so pleased
as when we enjoy the wonders of his hand. It is no longer a
judge who judges us. It is no longer a king who orders us.
It is no longer a distant lord who sends to us. God makes
his tent with men. They are his sons, and he is their father.
From the tyrannies of old worships, — fringes, bells, tithes,
and blood, — from the formalities of old creeds, — a string of
beads, a string of words, a paper covenant, and a paper
prayer, — we are set free.

"Son, thou art ever with me; and all that L have is thine."
So magnificent is the Saviour's gift to us on Christmas
morning.

CHRIST THE FRIEND,

"And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God
and man." — Luke ii., 52.

This is the statement of the very beginning, and with
unconscious simplicity all the Gospels carry it out to the very
end. The people hear him gladly. They cannot resist the
grace with which he speaks. They throng together to hear
him, and jealous priests are forced to confess that they can
do nothing to resist this personal" popularity. It is like
what we call the magnetism of a man. None of the writers
attempt any explanation. Not that it is beyond explanation,
but it is enough for them to state the result. Matthew him-
self "thinks it enough to say that Jesus saw Matthew sitting
in his office, and said to him, " Follow me " ; and he followed
him. He does not pretend to say more. John gives the
same account — neither less nor more — of what happened
when he called Philip, Peter, Andrew, James, and John him-
self. Hardly more passed when he called Nathanael. Were
this all we knew, we must be content with saying that this
Saviour of men had an extraordinary personal command,
such as we have no other illustration of, — that he com-
manded, and these men obeyed, could not help obeying.
This, of course, would be all that we could say.

The world has perhaps been too willing to satisfy itself
with this answer, — too willing; for, though the Gospels are
but fragments, they are fragments all alive and quick with
nature ; and, in the midst of a hundred illustrations, we have
many suggestions which explain the methods of his power.

I. Here is his complete self abnegation, self-surrender,
forgetfulness of self. " He made himself of no reputation."

At the verv beginning of his active life, when it was borne
in upon him that the time had come at. last which they had

all been waiting for, that he must go down and be baptized
by John, he saw heaven open. The story we have of his
baptism comes to us in two forms, — from his own lips, very
likely, to one of these writers, from John Baptist's perhaps
to another. It is not very clear to us, but it was certainly
very clear to him. What were his musings or determinations
before this we can only guess, but we have no question as
to what they were from this moment until he died. " I went
down into the river," he said to Matthew or to Mark, who
have written down for us this story : " I was determined to
fulfil all righteousness ; and so I told John, who would have
held back ; but I compelled him, and went with him into the
water. And then and there I heard a voice from heaven,
in which God himself said to me, ' Thou art my beloved
son.' And then I knew that the Spirit of God came down
upon me like a clove, hovering on its outspread wings."
From that moment to the end, he never wavered nor faltered.
It was no longer Jesus, the carpenter, the son of Mary: it
was Jesus, the well-beloved, the Son of God. It was no
longer Jesus of Nazareth, called to this home service or
that : it was Jesus, the Saviour of the world, proclaiming
the kingdom of God. This temptation or that or another
came to him, as they come to you and me. But it was all
one, whatever they were. Should he turn stones into bread,
as you and I will be tempted to to-morrow? Should he
make himself of reputation by some brilliant success, as
you and I will be tempted to ? Should he assume the
lead of this troop or that troop, this nation or that nation?
Not he ! Not he ! All that is settled and clone with, in his
life, once and forever. " Get thee behind me, Satan ! Thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou
serve."

We are to name this utter and complete forgetfulness of
self as the first element discernible among the causes of his
power. " He made himself of no reputation."

II. And, you see, this springs from the sense of God's
presence and God's power, absolute and never flagging. " I
saw the heavens open, Matthew. I saw the Spirit come and
rest upon me." " So you shall see heaven open, Nathanael.
You shall see the angels of God coming down on the Son of
Man, and going back." " I am not alone ; for my Father is
faith me." " Father, I know that thou hearest me always."
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sent i) -

about tmc, bu: :o not

W
f

I I

s spoken the
mess |

When S

md
have to : hem. Bu: Si

gc; ;nd those. It is not with him a flas

and goes t is the ca his life,—

here and God n:

ha- g up his life to make all men and women :o the

: od here and t
hand." vorld shall kn It shall be"

It shall s-. NTol Herods and Pilates and

lases
phiras. ts Sin Magus

believe it. or to proclaim it N er for

certain, and he will make the s 1 rid

shall k and feel and see tl and God

now. ^: preach tha ter and Andre ch

that. James and John. Go preach that, Philip and Natha

nore of them come for work to do.
Then no ot) rk to do, nor anvot.

God, now is God. "Go preach that, all c

— that Got' g : hand. The world

shall know it one day ; ar orld k.

the world will be a part of : _dom of hi-

III. I do not believe that we take enough to heart the

-
:

- -

,-/:-. , y —

/ed. But ail the

give •-.-':

► Christian corn m i j n i tie

: : brethr

lightly. To this hour, ind< »u may fairly test the sim-

plicity of a man's creed and the reality of his profession by
the cheerfu oi I d the steadfast serenity of his

life.

IV. And this implies, perhaps it says, that the Saviour's
>l method were I and nol separate, lie did

not trust, no, not to his own amazing power. Just so soon
as he is well at work les, now

to be with hin rl as his messen-

gers and ambassadors. Ih ets from them. He

tells them everything, and i i them t< hat he doe

ppointed, indeed, thai they do not do all that he does.
"Heal H i ays to them, " tit devils: freely

ye havi So he is gl i be in the

midst, of companies ol people, small or great, unless tho
compai mi to i him from th< -■-■'' ing

him king. Then he way to be

alone. Wedding fe ly dinner, of children,

fish< 111. n b) the In e, travellers in the highway, formal com-
,n the hillside, one gathering or another suits his pur-
po e, ■ o the) are onlj - thai life may qi life

in the glad sympathy of brotl isters,

heirs ol th rnity, and children of the same God. t

What follows is that we ti I find the

ills ol it. ir memory and study in the every-

day careers, in happy h< in the conducl of active af-

fairs. It i of the mi that of

th i . rch that it. looks for its saini those

who : ■ themi i in mankind, and points out a life

di from human sympathy as the life mo tian.

Of which, you see, j : hing and I noth-

ing. You see the true' example of what he I in what,

in fact, he 1 d. You see it in such a life as that

which has jusl closed in our little circle hi ion for

us, — the I I, from whose- hand of you

have taken the crumb of bread which is the memorial of
a S Such a man -aught from his

Master thai simple mystery, by which he carries into every-
day affairs the ,weetness and the majesty ol the higher life.
To him, m ligion mi ans cheerfulness, tenderness, justice, and
honor, and means not the talking about these qualities, hut
the embodying them in familiar life. So it is thai he makes
home i erful, business so interesting, and makes every

man glad to meet him, if he only catch a word from him in

the street. I do not believe I ever met this dear friend of
ours but that I made him stop to speak to me, from a feel-
ing that there was a sort of benediction in one of his cheer-
ful or brave words. And, if this were the place, 1 could not
more intently interest you than by repeating to you, what
] once made him tell me, of his personal dealings with t
who had never seen him personally before, when he found
the widow in her solitude, the Orphan in his destitution, and
found them in his errands of tenderness and relief. 'That
sort of life is the applied Christianity which I was speaking
of yesterday. Such I of life are caught from the Mas-

ter, who did his works of kindness " as he passed by '" in the
Streets ; never had to be arranging occasions, but found them
everywhere, because he found men and woman everywhere ;
and who came not to make men dissatisfied with the world
they live in, but to make that world for them the home of
life eternal.

1 hope th( i Son of Man have not lost their essential

meaning. Thej are words chosen by Jesus himself from
the old pn because he meant to show

I lie identified himself with the hopes and even the
fears, the necessities and the triumphs of these people round
him. He wanted to show thai the Son oi God can be and
is Son of Man. thai the Sou of Man can be and is Soif of
God. Like all the words which we reverence, this phrase is
losing its original value. But we oughl not to surrender
thai without a struggle. To a limited extent, our phrase
"child of the | spresses what he meant, when he

called himself " Son of Man." Expand that phrase, mi
sure that you see the confidence he expressed in human
nature, his certainly that nun could do what they would do,
Cod helping them, and you will see that the phrase "Son of
Man" meant everything, when he assumed it as his motto.
Often and often, lalse prophets come to you, and try to per
suade you that the country or the church or mankind are
going to gain by trusting their destinies to the son of the
grandson of the great-grandson of a hero, or to a class of
rulers chosen by the accident' of war or the accident of
wealth, oi any other accident of time. That is to say, such
false prophets try to persuade you that you shall gain by an
appeal from the manl i the many to the ingenuity of

the few. When you hear this chattel, remember that the
Saviour of men, who knew he was Son of Cod. was willing
to throw his whole cause on the divine longings and strug

of the whole human family, and asked for himself no better
name than "The Son of Man."

V. You will trace all these elements of power in the deeds
of mercy, where spirit rules over matter, which we call the
miracles of the Saviour. Of course, such works called atten-
tion, were talked of from mouth to mouth, and made him
known everywhere, even where people had not themselves
seen and heard. With the same command with which he
spoke to Matthew, so that Matthew obeyed, — had to obey,
without " if " or " but," without excuse or loitering, — he spoke
to the laggard spirit which had been caged in a paralyzed
body, bade it use again this rusted machinery, and the
spirit obeyed, had to obey. Nay, with that same certainty
of gentle love, he spoke to the disembodied spirit of the
widow's son, bade him return to his mother, to the body he
had left behind ; and the boy did as he was bidden. Take
the miracles, on his own showing of them, as the acts of
supreme tenderness of one who was supreme love, and they
lose that miserable aspect of signs and wonders, which dis-
gusted him as completely as it has always disgusted the
thoughtful world.

Take with you, as you read any passage in the gospel, that
quiet statement of the writer to the Hebrews, that the Sav-
iour experienced all our infirmities, and was tried just as
we are tried. Make real, in a fashion at least, some of these
elements of his power, and the scene which passes, when he
enters a village or talks to a group of the people, ceases to be
magical and becomes utterly natural and real. As the after-
noon comes on, in the course of one of those expeditions to
Cesarea Philippi or to Syro-Phcenicia, journeys all made with
a special motive which have left each its own result, — as
afternoon closed in, the word ran through some village, where
they knew him, that he had come again, — he, and a part of.
his company. Of course, the people pressed upon him. Easy
to imagine how this publican makes hasty arrangement for
a feast. Do you think the man forgets how cordial' he was
when he was here before, how he listened to every question,
stepped over every prejudice, and gave him motive for his
life ? Here are the school-children rushing down the street
to see if he will remember them. Here is a cousin of James,
and a nephew of Andrew, proud to claim relationship with
the suite. Here are women bringing their babies for a touch
or a word. Here are beggars who know they shall get com-
fort, if they do not get alms. The feast goes on in that

easy Syrian habit, the wayfarers peeping in under the folds
of the awning, as the dogs might run in to pick up a crumb
or a bone. And here is a woman, who is a sinner, anoint-
ing his feet from the box of her precious ointment. Ah, it
is not to her only, it is to a group of those behind her and
around her, — is it not to thousands upon thousands of those
around them and behind them, to you and me in our
sins and our repentances, that his words of comfort, of
forgiveness, and of blessing, fall ? Not words addressed
from some stately pulpit to some abject throng, but the
words of love and of life, which he can speak who is tried
as we are tried, and who knows that we have God's own
help, if we will struggle and be strong.

It is precisely because this is not a system of theology, pre-
cisely because here is one who is greater than a prophet,
that the common people hear him gladly, that everybody
presses upon him to hear the word of God, that the police-
men of the temple say no man ever spoke like this man, and
the centurion exclaims, " Surely this is a righteous man."
Because he is one of us, who knows that God is with him,
and who cares for us and cares for God, and for himself does
not care, — for this is it that Matthew follows him, that John
and James follow him, Peter and Andrew, all Galilee,
and all Samaria, that the world follows him, — because the
Son of God, who knows he is Son of God, shows frankly
and simply that he is Son of Man, tried as we are tried, and
suffering as we suffer. So much does the presence of the
speaker, his character, his method, his life, enliven the word
which the speaker has to bring. When we see him, then best
we hear him, and then best we understand.

His life is our life. The bread he eats is the bread we eat.
The table we sit at, morning, noon, and night, gathers
together those we love, just as he was most glad to meet
with his. Marriage feast, village welcome, Martha's supper,
or this thanksgiving, how often he was known of them as
they broke bread together ! The common altar of daily affec-
tion is the place of the central sacrament of the Son of
Man's religion. Each meal of daily life is made more glad
and holv because at this table we break this bread ; and the
food which gives us strength for daily duty becomes divine
now that he is willing to say of it, " Here is my body, which
is broken for you." For a generation now, it has been our
custom in this church to consecrate and make cheerful our

hopes for the New Year by meeting on New Year's eve at
this Supper of Commemoration. Of course, we bring the
memories, sad or glad, of the old year. We bring as well
the certainties and inspired hopes of the new. Memories
and hopes, we lay them at our Father's feet, and ask his
blessing on them. We shall meet in this service on Friday
evening here. My young friends, who have waited for a fit
season for their first communion, will find no time crowded
more full with memories and hopes. Let me ask you, as the
week goes by, to invite to the same gathering any of our old
fellow-worshippers, not with us now, to join once more with
us that evening in our communion.

ALL THINGS NEW,

"All things are become new." — II. Cor. v., 17.

We are accused by the cynics of discounting the future.
By this, they mean that we borrow imprudently on the credit
of its probabilities, and enjoy in advance the good which
it has in store. I believe, on the other hand, that we do
not study the future enough, nor look forward with that
steady hopefulness to which we are entitled, or with that
clear plan which is necessary for victory. There is, I sup-
pose, a certain danger in living too much in the present, —
a danger which the proverbs describe when they speak of
a man as stuck in the mud, or fixed in a rut of convention.
I suppose that a wise forecast, whether under the impulse
of a prophet's frenzy or under the mathematical calcula-
tions of the statistics, is a very important element in the
conduct of life. It is certainly the privilege, perhaps it is
the duty, of the New Year.

In the face of all the ridicule of what is called " Hi-
falutin " and the "flap of the eagle's wings," it is to be ob-
served that no prophet in our own country, who has com-
manded any respect in his own time, has ever aimed nearly
high enough in his prophecies. In three or four years after
the Revolution, George Washington devoted much time and
money to the opening up of communication with the valley
of the Ohio. If anybody was a prophet, Washington was.
If anybody was an enthusiastic believer in the future of
America, he was. But his prognostications, of which his
letters are full, are simply absurd, when in their smallness
they are compared with the reality of to-day. Where he
hoped that a few canahboats might deliver a little wheat
and tobacco, there are two of six or eight great routes by
which our Western empire feeds and warms the world. I
should be safe in saying that in one day these two lines
' liver at tide-water more freight than Washington expected

in a year upon his system of navigation. And, of that
produce, more than half, I suppose, comes from distant re-
gions, of which he knew neither the geography nor the
savage names. *

I do not mean to dwell upon such instances ; but there is
a single detail in the history of near eighty years ago which
is worth dragging from oblivion. We negotiated with France
for the territory west of the Mississippi, by Robert Living-
ston, one of the ablest statesmen, clear headed and far-see-
ing, whom this country has ever employed. He agreed that
the United States should pay $15,000,000 for the mouth of the
Mississippi and all territory west of that river to the Rocky
Mountains. The great object was the possession of New
Orleans and the mouth of the river; and for this alone
Livingston offered $3,000,000. Napoleon wanted money,
and wanted to give England a rival ; and he would not deal
with us on these terms. He said he would sell the whole
or nothing, so that Livingston was compelled against his
will, without instructions, to agree to pay $15,000,000. The
price was about ten cents a square mile for a region which
proves itself to-day of matchless worth in agriculture ; say
one cent for sixty-four acres, or one-sixth of a mill for an
acre. It is of this purchase that Livingston wrote home,
" I know the price is enormous." But he said he had al-
ready agreed with a European power which would never in-
terfere with us to take it off our hands for what we gave,
and leave to us the mouth of the river and New Orleans,
which was all he thought we wanted. "I have assured
them," he writes, "that we shall not send an emigrant west
of the Mississippi for one hundred years." Here was the
halting forecast of one of the wisest men of his time, — the
man to whose daring in acting and consenting to this enor-
mous price, wholly without instructions, we owe our Western
Empire of to-day.

Coming down to our own time, I remember myself the
speech of my own father in Faneuil Hall, when he was urging
the value of a railway west to Springfield. He was the fa-
natic of his day in that business, generally regarded in this
community as insane on that subject. And he took for his
starting-point the probability that there would be nine persons
every clay who wished to go from Boston to Springfield and
Northampton, and nine persons who wished to come from
those towns to Boston.

Now, I should not refer back to these halting and in-
sufficient prophecies, nor to the real advance and success,
if I supposed the advance and success depended on what
people called physical laws. I do not suppose that they do.
The same physical laws ruled the Mississippi Valley for ten
centuries before 1803 as have ruled it for seventy-seven years
since ; and no change nor progress came of them. No. As
we look forward on our New Year's Sunday, let us see how
certainly all these improvements in our physical condition
come from the new moral order which these texts announce.
It is when you begin to see that man is God's child, it is when
man is treated as God's child, that all things become new,
and such miracles in society come in. In that particular
case of the western half of the Valley of the Mississippi, it
was that moral ingredient, which then began to handle phys-
ical laws, which has made that desert blossom with the rose.
This moral element, the effect wrought by the courage and
conduct of children of God, has wrought the miracle
which wise men and prophets could only vaguely foresee.
It is because man does work with the infinite power of a
child of God, when he works with God, that these victories
wait on his enterprise. And this power, because it is infi-
nite, is wholly beyond the mathematical computation of men.

The truth is that neither Washington nor Livingston nor
Jefferson himself had any adequate idea of the unmeasured
power which they let loose upon society, when, in the Amer-
ican Revolution and the Constitutions which followed it,
they gave to every man the right to do all he could do, as
he chose to do it. Up to their time, and afterwards, every
community had its leaders who did the thinking for it. I
have lately looked over some diaries kept in a little town in
Western Massachusetts at that time. The vote at the annual
election was always unanimous on one side. The truth is
that that town was almost a pocket-borough. One news-
paper, or at most two, every week, sufficed for its reading,
and the people all voted as the minister and the doctor bade
them. Lawyers there were none. Now, you have only to
contrast such a town, say of five hundred persons, with any
village of the same size to-day, in which every man reads his
own newspapers, chooses his own church, keeps up his own
correspondence, and, in a word, forms his own opinion, to
contrast a system of civilization where a thousand hands are
worked by two pair of brains against one where a thousand
hands are worked by five hundred pair of brains. The

amount of ingenuity, of device, of new suggestion, of ambi-
tion and effort, is, in the latter case, a hundred times greater
than in the former.

And the success is in the same proportion, with all the
marvels of compound interest added to it as time goes by. It
is to such steady emancipation of the American of the North
from what was left of the aristocratic customs of feudal
times, — a success due to the steady unfolding of the demo-
cratic principles which had been boldly enough stated in the
"glittering generalities" of the Declaration of Independ-
ence,— it is to this development that the country owes what
we call its preternatural advance. To this development, it
owes the mechanical inventions which have aided that
advance. To the same development, it owes the system of
education and the system of simple jurisprudence, without
which that advance would be wholly impossible.

In the year 1848, I met in Charleston, S.C., with the lead-
ing club of that city. Their subject for discussion was
the question, "How shall we make Charleston a great city
in face of the disadvantages of slavery and of the climate?"
I observed that in their speculations they were studying the
analogies of Lowell and Manchester and other cities, which
had been built up by the influx of large capital. When it
came my turn to speak, I said I thought they were following
false analogies. I thought their real example was in such a
town as Worcester, where I then lived. We had not there a
single incorporated manufacturing company. But for every
pair of hands we had a head to direct them. "You are try-
ing," I said, "to find out how one head shall direct a hun-
dred pair of hands, and I do not believe you can make a
great city on that plan." They did not take my advice,
which was perhaps not wonderful. But I observe, by the
census returns published yesterday, that in thirty-two years,
which have passed since, the population of Charleston has
remained almost unchanged. Such increase as it has made
has all been made since the civil war. The town of Worces-
ter, in the same time, has increased from fifteen thousand
to fifty thousand people, an increase of three hundred and
thirty percent. It is still true, I think, that there is no manu-
facturing corporation in that city. Almost every head of a
family owns his own house and garden. For every pair of
hands there is a set of brains to run them.* And what we

* It is pleasant to cite one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches : —

" I say that, whereas God Almighty has given every man one mouth to be fed, and

call physical prosperity is clue wholly to this absolute recog-
nition of the rights of men. and the fact that every man has
a chance to do the best he knows.

We dwell with natural pride and interest on the amazing
inventions of our time. They emancipate for us latent
power. They make the water, the electricity of the air, and the
heat of the sun do our bidding. Nay, they even set to work
for us the sunshine of old prehistoric days, which God has
stored up for us in the coal mines of the world. These work
for us while we sit easy and luxurious. These inventions are
indeed amazing. But we owe all these, in the first instance,
to a moral change, — a change due to the steady power of
this gospel. You say of your own countrymen, and say
truly, that there is, particularly in New England, a remark-
able inventive genius. Where did this genius come from ?
All of it came from that same moral triumph, the triumph of
the Christian religion when it made for America the demo-
cratic statement of the rights of every man. Up till 1776
there is hardly a trace of this inventive genius. So long as
men lived in the aristocratic systems of provincial life, it had
little chance to show itself. For all that appears, the cannon
that were served at Bunker Hill were of the same pattern and
structure as those imported by Winthrop when the settle-
ment began. The identical musket of Queen Anne's reign
was actually levelled over the breastworks at the soldiers of
King George. The buff leather clothing of the minute-men
was cut on the same patterns and sewed with the same
stitches as the clothing of the Pilgrims. Their linen shirts
were woven on looms and spun on spinning-wheels which
had no essential improvements upon those which came over
in the "Mayflower." And their newspapers were printed with
worse ink, worse paper, and worse type than the broadsides
which Winthrop and Dudley read in England before their
emigration. The marvellous inventive genius of America
has appeared since then. You owe its development to the
opening to every man the stimulus for invention. In other
countries where there is such advance, you owe it to a like
liberality. And you do not have any such inventions in

one pair of hands adapted to furnish food for that mouth, if anything can be proved to
be the will of Heaven, it is proved by this fact, that that mouth is to be fed by those
hands without being interfered with by any other man who has also his mouth to feed
and his hands to labor with. I hold, if the Almighty had ever made a set of men that
should do all of the eating and none of the work, he would have made them with
mouths only, and no hands; and, if he had ever made another class that he had intended
should do all the work and none of the eating, he would have made them without mouths,
and with all hands."

such countries as Spain and Turkey and the old States of
Rome, so long as men are kept in leading-strings. The
truth is that the government there really orders them not to
be inventors. They once forbade an Italian nobleman to
place the Latin word Spes, the motto of his house, on the
gate of his castle, because it meant hope ; and no subject of
the Emperor of Austria ought to be dissatisfied with to-day.
You have poor chance for invention in any country so
handicapped.

But, if you leave every man free to do his best, if you then
educate him to the best you know, and, which is equally im-
portant, if vou encourage him to combine with others, you
set loose, far more largely than you dreamed, a set of wholly
new phvsical possibilities. Inventions help each other. An
English writer of the first authority says truly that, in an
American machine-shop, every person employed, from the
head of the works down to the boy who sweeps up the iron-
filings, is interested when the model of a new invention comes
in, and wants to have it succeed. And he says that every
workman in an English shop hates a new invention. Now,
in the sjeat watchword " Together," vou find another secret
of the successes of to-day. Each new invention smooths the
ways for projects which have been faltering : and, from each
single step up the mountain, we gain a better view and an
enlargement of the whole horizon.

In the time we have. I must not attempt to illustrate such
advances. They are all due to the infinite range of man's
faculties ; to the truth that man is really child of God, and,
when he goes to work rightly, is a partaker of his powers.
This is my reason for speaking of these things here. In
what is called physical success there are other pulpits
and platforms which will tell the story. Our business
to day is to see that all such success has hinged, and must
hinge, on moral powers : and, if I can, I want to state, for
the thousand thousandth time, why these prophets here,
why Jesus Christ himself, proclaimed, so certainly and abso-
lutely as they did, the complete newness of the life before
us, and the unending enlargement of prosperity and blessed-
ness in the future. It is not simply man's inventive faculties
which are enlarged when you give all men their fair place.
But that is a convenient example. One man alone, rightly
fed, can lift, say. a hundred pounds from the ground. But
twenty men, who are taught how, combine; and they build

a steam-engine which can lift a million pounds from the
ground. One of the twenty men attends the engine. The
other nineteen look on till their turn to attend it comes.
And, while they look on, they do with the engine, united,
five hundred times what they could do alone. This addi-
tional power to the world is gained as soon as the moral
powers have sway, which induce and permit them to work
together. There 'is, I say, a handy example. Now, what
Jesus Christ and all the prophets mean, when they talk of
new life and of the blessed future, is that such moral powers,
the infinite powers of a child of God, shall have such
scope and sway that not in steam-engines merely, but in
every wish of man's heart and in every fancy of his spirit.
He shall mount thus into a higher life, and work those mira-
cles which only yesterday you said were impossible. Jesus
Christ means, first, that everybody shall want to work the
miracles. Thus, every living man shall want to see Ireland
established in comfort. Every living man shall want to see
every such nest of wretchedness destroyed. Every living
man shall want to see purity where there is lust, temperance
where there is vice, happiness where there is misery. And
then, as every man and every woman has this wish, they
shall certainly, and without hindrance, so come " together "
that from the wish may be born the germ, and from the
germ the stem shall grow, and from the stem the buds
shall bourgeon, and from the buds shall spring the flowers,
from which shall ripen the perfect fruit of the blessedness
and victory of mankind.

Now, to discredit this declaration, because thus far this
thing has not happened, is to say a steam-engine will not
work because the wooden model in the patent-office stands
still. When has the world taken Jesus Christ at his word?
Here is his model and plan. When has the world tried
squarely to build upon it, and to set it in action ? Who has
ever struck the match, which was to light the kindlings,
which should fire the coal, which should boil the water,
which should dilate into steam to drive the piston to turn
the shaft, which should compel the machinery of the world
to move in his divine order ? " The greatest among you
shall be your servants." Here is one of his directions.
When has this been recognized as a truth in politics till
within fifty years? "One is your Master, and all ye are
brethren." What trial did you give to this statement in this
country, so long as you had four million slaves beneath the

lash of one hundred thousand masters ? " Bear ye one an-
other's burdens." What has been the practical answer of
the Christian world to this direction, so long as taxes were
intentionally thrown on the laborer for the benefit of the
landlord, or on the layman for the benefit of the Church ?
Nay: in matters which you called specially religious, you did
no better. He sent his disciples to preach glad tidings.
But, till this century came, by far the greater part of Chris-
tian preaching was pitilessly bad tidings, — the tidings of
damnation and despair. "Ye are all kings and all priests."
What sort of an echo has been made to that statement in a
world where, from Constantine's day to the third Napoleon's,
a close corporation of priests, meaning to keep themselves in
office, has been trying to keep Christendom under the sway
of a handful of kings? "God's temple is holy, which temple
ye are." How far has a world expressed its practical belief
that each man is the temple of God, — every beggar's brat,
every harlot, and every slave, — which has parcelled out its
education for the rich, and has left the rest to "get their
living in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call
them"? "They that take the sword shall perish with the
sword." How far do Christian lands show their belief in
that moral axiom, when, as Mr. Evarts said the other day,
" every peasant working on the farm has to carry a soldier
on his back " ? Such are only seven instances of central
assertions of Jesus Christ, and of the contempt with which,
in the eighteen centuries, they have been regarded.

Now, I do not say that in this country, or in our time, by
one great leap, we have crossed the faithless gulf before
which the world has shivered in eighteen centuries. But I
do say that, with the sincere wish to carry out the Christian
plan, this nation has professed, in form, its allegiance to
these injunctions of Jesus Christ. I grant terrible exceptions.
That corporation of priests is trying to persuade this country
to go backwards, and trust to its control again. The great
unincorporated body of manufacturers and dealers in liquor
would be glad to have us believe that man's body is not
holy, and need not be kept pure. So there are cliques and
knots of men, who would be glad to arrest universal edu-
cation. But the general drift is the othei way. The laws
and the constitutions acknowledge what no laws and no con-
stitutions squarely acknowledged before 1776; that "the
greatest among you shall be the servant of the others " ; that
" we are all brethren," that therefore we must " bear one

another's burdens" ; that we are all " kings and priests," that
every man is child of God, and must have the best possible
in education ; and that international peace is not only desira-
ble, but profitable. Side by side with this political change is
the change in theology, in which the gospel becomes " glad
tidings " to every child of man, and is no longer a tale of pre-
destined horror and despair.

I say, therefore, that we have chance and right to look
for the fulfilment of prophecy, such as our fathers never had.
And the improvement of the future will come directly and
visibly in the lines which Jesus suggests. It will be in happy
homes, it will be in life not bent by hateful toil, it will be as
pure love binds heart to heart, it will be as aspiring man
listens to God's voice, and in glad society, in easy inter-
course, in music and other fine art, in letters and other
mutual advance, man enjoys God's matchless gifts. It will be
as a happy world grows happier and happier, as a free world
tastes the real blessings of freedom. So will men begin to
know what they say, — what they now scarcely conceive, —
when Jesus bids us pray to God, " May thy kingdom come. "

THE ABOLITION OF PAUPERISM.

"The poor have glad tidings proclaimed to them." — Matt, xi , 5.

At the annual meeting of the " Associated Charities " in
November last, the Vicar-General of the Roman Catholic
Church made a careful plea for the preservation of poverty,
as an essential element in society. Indeed, he seemed to
take it for granted, and I think did take it for granted, that
his audience at heart agreed that poverty was a necessity,
and that, in all our devisings, we must leave it as one of
the foundation-stones of our whole social edifice. The
argument limped. So far as there was any argument, it
amounted to this : Many of the orders of the Roman
Church are sworn to poverty in their vows. So far, then,
you must have poverty, or you cannot have these orders of
beggars. But I do not think he meant to rest on this argu-
ment. I think he meant to appeal to an undefined feeling
in his hearers' minds that, of course, there must be poverty
in the world, as there must be midnight or pestilence or
tempest. He certainly said that there were such great ad-
vantages connected with the institution that we must take
care never to be rid of it.

Now, in fact, this sort of talk belongs to just the class of
protest with which, in 172 1, the older physicians in Boston
pleaded for the preservation of the small-pox, in face of the
eager clergy of the town, who wanted to introduce inocula-
tion. These doctors then said that small-pox was ordained
of God, and that men must not fly in his face. They said
there always had been smallpox, and therefore there always
must be. They had some success in enlisting on their side
the most ignorant people in the town and those who would
profit most by the proposed improvement. All the same,
they were in the wrong, as the conservative eulogists of
poverty are in the wrong ; and they had to give way to God's
purposes in making an old world new.

I am quite sure, however, that Dr. Byrne, in his speech,

appealed to a latent feeling which is widely spread, though
probably ill-defined everywhere. You see it trickling out
in commonplace stories for children on the last pages of
religious newspapers, in which the impression is given that
the poor children are little saints, and the rich children or
grown people are badly tainted with sin. Of course, if it
is true that poverty is the best school of righteousness, we
ought to encourage poverty. Then there are the words of
Moses, "You will always have the poor with you," — words
which Jesus cited once, which people remember as dully as
they remember most Scripture texts, which they write as a
phylactery or talisman, and then idolatrously worship.

Nothing is more certain than what Jesus Christ did mean
when he said this. Of that, I will speak before I have done.
He did not mean at that time, or at any time, to fix the seal
of poverty on the social system of the New World which he
was founding. On the other hand, he meant that it should
be a New World. As he abolished slavery, as he abolished
tyranny, and meant to abolish disease of the body, he meant
to abolish that poverty which makes slaves of those who
suffer under it. Wherever his principles have had their way,
his intention has been carried out. There are towns in all
parts of the Christian world where such pauperism as curses
unchristian society is wholly unknown. And, as the social
order improves, such pauperism becomes less and less, till it
ceases to be.

The abolition of pauperism now is, therefore, an object
just as definite as was once the abolition of the small-pox or
of slavery. If we will relieve ourselves from the false senti-
ment of the goodyish stories of which I have spoken, and the
false logic of that Catholic Church which has always wanted
to keep nine-tenths of the world under the spiritual dominion
of the other tenth, we shall devote ourselves with courage
and hope to this abolition enterprise. And as the Board of
Health three years ago abolished small-pox for the time in
this community, as the steady growth of a conviction in two
generations of men abolished slavery, in a long endeavor of
near fifty years, so is it in the power of any Christian com-
munity, which carries out in fact the central and eternal
Christian principles, to abolish pauperism. That is to say,
it can abolish it with those of whom it has the permanent
care. You would not say that the Health Commissioners
had failed, because, after the city was free from small-pox, a

ship-load of people sick of it arrived at the pier. That is no
fault of theirs. You do not say that Mr. Garrison and his
friends have failed, because slavery still exists in Brazil.
That is out of their range. It is in the power of a Christian
community to extinguish pauperism within its own sphere.
Let unchristian communities, or let the Pope of Rome, speak
for themselves, or speak for Rome. I say to extinguish pau-
perism. The distinction is to be carefully drawn between
pauperism and poverty, as we shall see. But I do not mean
to press this distinction to a fine point. I mean that it is in
the power of a Christian Church and a Christian State, work-
ing in harmony and with energy, to give to every man,
woman, and child, who is not disabled by disease, a life of
reasonable comfort and happiness, not meanly dependent on
the alms of others. So far we abolish pauperism, and, in the
ordinary sense of words, we abolish poverty.

It is not so much my business to-day to show in detail how
this is to be done. If that were necessary in this place, it
would only be because I had wholly failed in the preaching
of five-and-twenty years here ; and it would now be quite too
late for me to repair such damages. I will state very briefly
the requisitions made on State and Church in this matter, if
we mean to have the kingdom of God come ; and then I will
pass on to look at the fallacy of which I have spoken.

I. A Christian State does for all what it does for one. And
in no case is it satisfied with that supervision which may be
merely accidental, which a father or other guardian gives to
the children under his care. Thus, in matters of education,
every child shall learn to read and write, and shall have a
reasonable knowledge of arithmetic. This shall be done,
whether the father knows these things or not, whether he
cares for them or not. So boys and girls shall be taught to
swim, and trained in other physical exercises which look to
health of body and health of mind, — shall be, whether the
parents are or are not careless about these things. And
their education in both these directions, mental and physical,
shall be carried so far that each child, on coming to manhood,
shall be able to make a fit beginning in one or other of the
industries of that community. A sea-faring community shall
fit its boys to be seamen ; a manufacturing community, to
be machinists and manufacturers. And in every community
those who are born to be Mozarts or to be Raphaels shall

have their chances as well. And all this is vain, unless the
training of every boy and girl rests from the beginning on the
Three Eternities, on Faith and Hope and Love. The old
phrase of Queen Elizabeth's time was not a bad one. In
those times, they did not teach the children to spell. Even
Shakespeare and Sidney spelled very much as they chose.
They taught them no geography till they learned it from
the mast-head ; and, as for their arithmetic, it may be that
Raleigh and Lord Bacon could not have worked out a modern
sum in vulgar fractions. Still, their theory of education was
rightly centred. They said every boy must learn, even while
he was a boy, " to speak the truth, to serve the Queen, and to
fight the Spaniard." In this concrete form, they stated the
eternal necessities more distinctly, perhaps, than if they had
veiled them in more abstract expressions. To be true enough
to speak the truth is at the bottom of all practical education.
In this matter which engages us to-day, all pauperism, if you
carry back its genealogy far enough, descends from a liar
somewhere ; and it is one of the crowd of evils which vanish
in proportion as men and women and children are all true.

II. A Christian State re-enforces its system of education
by the whole drift of its legislation. For it is merely a trick
of sixpenny sophists to speak of education as if it were
only an affair of books or of the schools. In a Christian
State, all the legislation is guided by the same certainty, —
that, if one member suffer, all the members suffer, — and by
the same determination, — that no single member shall suffer.
The whole theory is that the whole ship may be lost, if there
is one rotten tree-nail. That is the interpretation in politics
of the Christian instruction, "Honor all men." So the State
provides that industries shall be varied. If Robert Stephen-
son be born to be a great inventor, he shall not be predes-
tined by any accursed Calvinism to spend his life in fishing
for codfish or in harvesting grain. Again, a Christian State
provides for the purity of its boys and girls. Even suppos-
ing that grown men and women have a right to risk or throw
away their lives, a Christian State screens its boys and girls
from the seductions of the liquor-shop. Till they are men
and women, they shall not be led into temptation. Once
more, a Christian State is absolutely just to the weakest
classes in its taxation. Of course, States must use money
but there are those writers — and I think they are right —
who say that it is wise for a State so to adjust its taxation

that, until a man have somewhat advanced from the naked-
ness to which he is born, till he have made some accumula-
tion of visible property, he should not be compelled to make
a contribution to the State. Of course, if he wish to vote,
he must pay properly for that privilege. Of course, too,
wherever the burden were fixed, he would indirectly bear his
share. But the theory supposes that it is well for the State
to bend over, beyond the line of strict justice, in its effort
to encourage beginners ; so to speak, to tempt every one to
take a share in the commonwealth. That we have not failed
in this business here appears in the Governor's statement
on Thursday that, of the population of Massachusetts, men,
women, and children, including even new-comers from for-
eign lands and little babies, who cannot tell their right
hands from their left, nearly one-half now have deposits in
the savings banks. All legislation which looks in this direc-
tion is genuine. It proceeds on the true hypothesis of a
Christian State, that pauperism is only an accident, and
never a permanent element in its affairs.

III. When you apply the immense latent forces of repub-
lican government to carry out these principles, you find that
comfort is indeed the rule, and pauperism, or what people
call poverty, is the exception. This is a great point gained
over that sentimental theory of the Kingdom of Heaven,
fostered by the Saint Dominies and Saint Francises and other
apostles of beggary, in which poverty is the rule for the
great mass of men. and comfort the exception for the rulers,
whether in State or Church. Let no man say that I am talk-
ing of a mere ideal. I had occasion, eleven years ago, to
studv the social condition of Vineland. a town then seven
vears old, in New Jersey. The population of this town was
ten thousand. Its pauper expenses in the year 1S69 were
four dollars, and its police expenses fifty, the salary of one
constable. The town had been founded with certain pecu-
liarities of organization, chief among which was the certainty
that there should be no. retail liquor traffic. A letter from
Vineland informs me that now. after eleven years, all the
expenses for the poor are seven hundred dollars a year. As
for crime and its repression, the charge, for a year, is one
hundred and four dollars.* Nor do the expenses of crime,

* V. .vered this sermon, I had misunderstood the letter I cited from Vice

and accidentally confused the expenses for pauperism and for crime. They are correctly
stated in the printed text above.

such as they are, seem to belong to the population proper.
It is only on Saturday night, when ei lin railroad trains
expose them to a sort of invasion, that they keep a constable
on duty to care for criminals and beggars. His wages — of two
dollars a week — make the charge for the care of criminals.
That is the sort of standard we are to aim at. And, as you
all know, this is by no means a single case. We all remem-
ber county jails, where the keepers take summer boarders
because they have no other inmates, and town poor-houses
which are vacant through the whole year. If there were any
necessity, I would furnish a thousand cases in this country
as satisfactory as this of Vineland.* I certainly do -not say
that in a city like Boston, which has not been permitted to
train its own people, you can expect such results in an hour
or a year. We have a population, half of whom were trained
under the sky of the most miserable country in Europe.
They are under the dominion of a Church which has never
squarely tried to prevent poverty, but has always apologized
for it and retained it, as a part of its ecclesiastical policy.
We are, so far, in just the same position that the Board of
Health would be, in my illustration, if a thousand vessels,
with small-pox on board, came up together to the wharves.
But this unfortunate and temporary accident does not change
our duty, nor does it affect the certainty of our ultimate vic-
tory. In the long run, it is Comfort which triumphs, and
Poverty which comes to an end. It is Health which in the
end triumphs, and Disease which gives way.

IV. The promise of the Sermon on the Mount is that, if
we will seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,
such clothing and food as we need shall be ours. It is the
fashion, even among Christian critics, to explain the Sermon
on the Mount away, as a compound of "Orientalisms," or
"glittering generalities." That has been the interpretation
of a Church which is a close corporation, which believes in
poverty, and for its purposes wants to maintain the class of
beeecars. It is more fair to the Saviour of men to take his
words as if he meant what he said. Compare them with
what he said all along, and you will come out on the cer-
tainty that he gave this promise: If a man will care for the
good of mankind, — which Jesus calls the kingdom of God, —

* Thus, in Alfred; N.Y., as a letter from a well-informed correspondent tells me, there
has been no pauper for twenty years. Greeley, Colorado, reports no expenses for police
and nothing for the poor.

if he will live a righteous life, pure, temperate, honorable,
and industrious, he shall not want either for clothing or for
bread. Try that experiment fairly, and see if it does not
come true. Let your man start, not handicapped by igno-
rance, by the burdens of low caste, by outrageous taxes, or
by drunkenness. Start him on a free world, with a freeman's
energy, and with the purity and courage of a son of God, and
he does have garments sufficient and food sufficient added
to his endeavor. In the one case in a thousand, where he is
disabled by a bullet from his country's enemy, or by a ship-
wreck in some tempest which he did not brew, it is not in
vain fof him that the Christian commonwealth has been
founded. Garments and bread surely come to him ; and you
feel that these are not alms, but are his due. As the disabled
soldier is honored and not disgraced by the traces of the
wound he carries, the man or the woman who, in the dis-
charge of duty, has become incapacitated for farther effort,
is honorably entitled to the help of the community he has
fairly served. That exception is clearly an exception. Pov-
erty is no longer the groundwork of your State. Poverty is
the unintentional accident, and comfort is the rule.

Note carefully the central and real statement of Jesus
Christ, far beneath all that superficial drivel in which men
justify the poverty which is really only an inheritance from
barbarism. "Together" is his great watchword. His " King-
dom of God " is a " Commonwealth." " Ye are all brethren,"
that is his encouragement and his direction. Born from the
womb of the same mother, we all partake the nature of the
same Father, God. So we are all bound to each other in a
tie we cannot shake off. It is a fellowship as real, if as mys-
terious, as the attraction which binds the atoms of matter to
each other. It is true, then, that each from each other needs
something. No man can live alone. In a convict's cell or
on a desert island, he slowly dies. You need the tender-
ness, the counsel, the sympathy of the brothers and sisters
whom you meet in daily life. And they need yours. This
life is all a broken wreck, indeed, unless you can rely on
their intelligence and skill. You cannot make sails, unless
he makes masts. Nay, both of you are useless, unless those
yonder will freight your ships. . I cannot read, unless some
one will write the books. And they write in vain, unless
others will print them and bind them. Every man is his
brother's keeper, as Cain found out to his sorrow, and as
the followers of Cain, in the selfish schools of to-day, will

find out to theirs. In this sense of mutual dependence, and
in this only, is it true that the poor are always with us. It
is mutual dependence. But it is not one-sided dependence,
which makes abject dependence. It is the dependence of
brother upon brother. It is not the dependence of vassal
upon chief, of subject upon king, of penitent upon priest.
All that abject dependence is done away in the new life of
the kingdom of God.

And you and I, trusting ourselves to that goodness of God
which feeds and clothes those who try to obey him in this
common life, have the other duty of trampling out what are
left of the sparks of the old fires. We are to put -an end,
where we can, to the contagion of the old disease. These
are our marching orders. We are to open the eyes of those
it blinded and the ears of those it deafened. We are to set
its lame to walking and its mourners to rejoicing. In our
intelligent philanthropy, we are to proclaim glad tidings to
those whom the worldliness of the world and, the corruptions
of the Church would have left forever poor.

THINGS ABOVE.

" Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth." —
Col. iii., i.

I lately met with the following passage in the Life of one
of the leaders of our time, as written by himself: —

" I suffered in my early life great anxieties about religious
experiences and about doctrinal truth. These I conquered
by a habit of prayer, which I formed with great difficulty and
obstinate persistence, — led to it by reading the biographies
of the saints, Brainerd among others, and by gradually
acquiring a sense of God, which set aside the childish
images of a form and put me into the possession of my
spiritual senses. I can recall the day and hour when I first
felt a reliance upon the witness of the Spirit with my spirit.
It is like my memory of the first time I trusted to the buoy-
ancy of the water, and, after two years of being in it without
faith, suddenly found it, and so could swim."

This illustration from the experience of a young swimmer
is perfect, and states perfectly the case of what I always
call "the great experiment"; the experiment, namely, of
prayer. I am afraid that the statement from the biography
may seem to some young people unintelligible, because out-
side of their experience in that form. But there are others,
as young as they, to whom such communion with God is so
entirely a thing of course that to them the unintelligible
thing is that anybody should make this confession in his
biography. To older people, the experience will recall ex-
periences of their own. The older they are, the more
certain is it that they will sympathize with the writer.
There is no way in which we demonstrate the being of
God to another. I might just as well demonstrate to a
frightened child on the beach that salt water will certainly
float him. Nobody proves God's being. But, all of a sud-
den, one finds God is here. One speaks, and God answers.
And thereafter all is sure. Afterward, you wonder that you

did not see it before. You cannot help seeing it now. It is
like one of those hidden forms in the amusing puzzle-pictures.
Before you see it, nobody can help you to make it out. Of a
sudden, the shape flashes upon you ; and then you cannot
understand why you did not find it before.

This has always been as true as it is now ; and it is the
great central truth which found expression so long ago, — as
long ago as Moses' farewell to Israel, — in words which
are to me among the dearest words of what I sometimes call
our "South Congregational Liturgy," —

" If ye seek me, surely ye shall find me, if ye seek for me
with all your hearts."

If, in life, we try to draw with any precision the line be-
tween people who succeed and those who fail, we shall find
that those who succeed are those who "fix their affections
on things above, and not on things on the earth." The
words stare out from the Epistle, as some of these epigrams
of Paul's do ; and one feels for the moment that there need
be nothing else in the whole Bible, that this is the whole,
story. Everything follows, Paul would have said, where one
thus begins. This writer, whom I have cited, started with
this fixing his affection on something higher than himself.
He had not heard God with the ear, — no. He had not seen
him with the eye, — no. But he thanked him. He honored
him. So far, he loved him. He fixed his affection on him.
And so the time came when he did see God, as the pure in
heart see him ; heard him as one hears him who needs his
consolations ; and trusted him, as a loving swimmer trusts
the loyal waves. On the other hand, how clearly you see
what follows, where the affection has been placed, as Paul
says, "on things on the earth." This poor tramp, who comes
in to you to beg, bringing the very atmosphere and smell of
dirt and disease with him, is clearly enough a man who has
put his affection on things below. He cannot look you
square in the face as he makes, his appeal. He wants first
a quarter-dollar. If you will not give that, he wants
a coat ; if that fails, a pair of shoes. You turn the con-
versation to the chance of finding work, and he is not
interested. You try to rouse his sympathies by asking
about wife or child, and he has neither. No, for the man
is what he is, because very early in life he put his affection
on some very earthly things. It was liquor, or it was cards,
or it was something to eat. What higher tastes he had, he
blunted. What lowest tastes he had, he encouraged. There

is element of beast in us all. He made the most of this
element. There is element of angel in us all. He made
nothing of that element. It is a pity that the vulgar phrase
has become vulgar ; for it expresses, under the old symbolic
language of the dark ages, the precise truth. Vulgar people
say of such a man, in their coarse phrase, that he has " gone
to the devil." That is, in symbolic language, just what he
has clone. He has not turned his affection on God, nor on
heaven, nor on anything beautiful ; not on anything above
him, not on anything large or grand; not on any master whom
he obeyed, not on any woman whom he loved, not on any
friend whom he respected. On the other hand, he has
placed his affection on the taste of food or of drink. He has
tried to have a soft bed or an easy day. He has tried not
to work. He has tried to live as a hog lives. He has
placed his affection on things below. He has tested that
statement, which I quoted the other day, which Lord Byron
puts into the mouth of Satan, where Satan says. —

" He that bows not to God has bowed to me."

And the poor tramp finds, alas ! that the statement is true.

Now there are a great many people who would disown the
name of being " religious," who would say they could make
little of religious books, and that they were themselves quite
outside the religious line, who ought to take real comfort
in knowing that all any teacher asks of them is that they
will place their affections above, and not on things on the
earth. I remember a man came to me. once, and said he
could make nothing of religion because he did not believe
that the first chapter of the Book of Genesis was literally
true. I had to tell him that it was of very little consequence
in comparison what anybody believed about the first chapter
of Genesis ; but that the important thing is whether I am
setting my affection on . things above my present self, or
whether I am setting it on myself, or whether I am setting
it on things below myself. There are saints in heaven who
never heard of the Book of Genesis. But if I, by any
machination or magic spell, should elevate myself or any-
body else into any sphere which all angels of light might
agree in calling heaven, it would be no heaven for me or for
any one, while we had our affections fixed on things below, —
fixed on our pretty selves, or fixed upon the food we ate or
the drink we drank, or fixed upon the chirping of crickets or
the flattery of fools.

8 1

Here is the basis of the advice I am always giving to
young people, — to make the most of such chances as they
have to see aged people intimately, to coax them to talk of
life, and to take the impression life has given them. And
the other practical rule belongs with this, which directs us to
seek every day the society of some one whom we know to be
a superior. To start squarely on an accomplishment, or only
a hobby, which turns your affection to some thing or some
power higher than yourself, is another application of the same
principle. " The undevout astronomer is mad," Dr. Young
says. And, in truth, you will not long collect your flowers
and arrange them, or dry your ferns, your colored leaves,
and your other specimens, or work out the laws of creation
under which they are classified, and become familiar with
Nature in her secret haunts, — you will not long fix your af-
fection in this way on things quite above your logic or your
comprehension without growing yourself into a higher life.
A man of science once told me that one of the two great
religious crises of his life was in the moment when he first
put his eye to the eye-piece of a compound microscope.
The truth was he then saw with his own eye the process
of creation. It was as if he stood by when God set Orion
in order, and started him on his journey through our winter
sky. I have known another man of science who did all this,
and yet fancied he was not religious. But, for me, all I could
say to him was that he was profoundly religious, only he
would not take the comfort of his religion. And, in truth,
you will always find that, as men or women do fairly and
steadily place their affection on things above them, their own
lives enlarge, they tread under feet temptation, they know
more the joy of living, and real success waits upon their en-
deavors.

Carry the same principle to explain the suggestion of the
author with whom I began, as to reading biographies of the
men who are allied with God. He speaks of the Life of
Brainerd, a man, I am afraid, not now often cited or remem-
bered. Brainerd was a man who did not know what fear
was. He went among the Indians of the then savage valleys
of the Susquehanna and the Ohio, with the first lesson of
love and light that was ever carried to them. Such a life as
his, gaining its real strength from God, communicates that
strength, long after Brainerd is dead and forgotten, to other
lives. For, as you read, you cannot escape the conviction

that, unless this daring pioneer was a fool, he knew where
his power came from. Well, clearly he was no fool. I must
then trust him, when he says he sought almighty strength
and found it, asked for it and received it. So you read
Milton's Life, and you find that he believed that he had
strength higher than his own, and light outside his own, for
such work as the serving of his country or the composition of
Paradise Lost. You read Luther's Life, and you find the
same steadfast reliance on the Holy Spirit. You find St.
Bernard civilizing Western Europe by his reliance on Almighty
God as his daily helper. Now, you know these men are not
simpletons. You know that the world has pivoted upon
them, and they did not give way. It would not be the world
it is, had they not served it. You read their lives to look for
their Secret. And they all say that they could not do these
things themselves. They say that they put their affection on
things above. They sought help from the Infinite Power,
which moves the world, from which men are born, which
makes right conquer and makes wrong fail. They say they
sought him, and that they found him. You cannot help
placing some degree of credence in their assertion. When
you find it backed by the experience of the successful world,
you cannot but wish to try the same experiment. You set
your affection on things above ; and you ask for God's part-
nership in your endeavor, just as they have done.

For, if you set your affection on things above, you escape
from the smallness of the narrow horizon of your little sep-
arate life. One does not wonder if you sicken of that. It
is monotonous, and it is petty. It would be queer, if you
did like it always. Outside of this little life, so petty and
alone so tedious, there is the larger movement : it is the infi-
nite movement of the universe. It is the movement in which
Good conquers Evil, in which Truth sets foot on Falsehood.
Now, if you choose, you may gnaw out of the bands which
shut you dead in your close cocoon, you may mount on angel-
wings, may enter into the courses of this unending life, and
be a partner in the universe. You may confide with God,
and he may confide with you. Yes ! I understand that this
seems too great to believe, but certainly not too great to try,
certainly worth trying if one be tired of that imprisonment,
as a chrysalis in its bandages. The grub in the cocoon has
a perfect right to say that his imprisonment cannot end.
But the grub is not such a fool as to say that. He tries.
He gnaws out, and, lo ! he soars on purple wing. You, too,

might say it was your nature to be always hedged and cab-
ined and confined. But you, too, are no fool. You hear
the voice of your fathers, and your fathers' fathers, testifying
that those who try succeed, that those who ask are answered,
that those who pray receive an answer to their prayers.
Nay, so full is this answer, and so certain, that prophets have
written down the word which they have heard from God him-
self.

" If ye seek me, surely ye shall find me, if ye seek for me
with all your hearts."

To all which, I can hear my young friends replying that
these Lives of Milton and Cromwell, of Heber and Brainerd,
of Mrs. Tait and Mrs. Ware, may not prove entertaining, —
may prove dull or even slow, may prove hard reading, and
dry. I have not said otherwise. True, I will say that the
development of character, and that of noble and pure and
successful character, is the highest theme with which even
romance can deal, whose business it is to be entertaining.
And I will say that the noblest biographies stand well by
the side even of the noblest romances, merely in the matter
of interest. But that is not the thing which concerns us
here. I have not asked you to read these lives of true men
and women because they are entertaining. I urge it because
it is an important and well-nigh necessary part of training
for life. I dare say that when you first went to dancing-
school you did not want to go, and it was necessary to com-
pel you. Still, I do not see that you dislike the dancing
party to-day, because of that disagreeable beginning. And so
you did not like your French teacher, and " hated French,"
if I may use the spirited vocabulary of childhood. Still, I
see that now you like a good French novel, when one is
found for you. Set aside in a much larger matter this mis-
erable business of likes and dislikes, and choose the read-
ing, dry or entertaining, which shall bring you into report
with the men and women who have blessed and helped man-
kind.

Step by step, you find how it is that life is enlarged and
inspired, so that it is no longer petty and material. You
find what it is that lifts a man above this narrow thought
of what he likes and what he does not like, into that larger
current of the infinite motive of the universe. You have a
glimpse of the way in which other men have risen from the
poor little code of personal morals, — a code hardly larger

than the etiquette in which a man trims his nails or smooths
his hair, — and you have entered into the movement of the
religious life in which a man does what angels do, because
he is an angel ; nay, does what God wishes him to do, be-
cause he is a child of God. This is what the old books,
perhaps too mechanically, called the experiencing of relig-
ion. This is the enlargement of separate or atomic life, so
that one becomes a partner in God's concerns, and a partaker
of his nature. I do not wonder that he whose experience I
read you found his guides into this life in the biographies
of the saints, or men of success who had gone there before
him. They taught him, you see, their talisman. They made
him look outside himself and above himself. They com-
pelled him to fix his affection on things above. And so
he learned to pray.

In a fashion, and a very noble ' and elevating fashion, we
learn to pray at our mother's knees. And there is many and
many a noble man and saintly woman who has never needed
to learn more of prayer than was there taught them. To
say, "Our Father, who art in heaven"; to say, " Now I lay me
clown to sleep," with the confidence and eagerness with
which a child asks and receives, — may well open up the whole
habit of personal prayer, so that one shall "experience relig-
ion " in infancy, nor ever find the lesson in any sort new.
Only let child or man be sure that intercourse with this
Power who makes for righteousness, and who is always eager
to make for righteousness, shall be frequent, simple, per-
sonal, and never dependent on a form. Let child or man be
sure that in conscious thought, — in spoken words, if he
choose, but that is indifferent, — in conscious thought he
open to God all his wishes, all his hopes, and all his fears.
Child or man, let us come to God, not as if we were asking
the conundrum whether he is or what he is, but with the loyal
confidence of those who thank him for life, want to enter his
life, and want him to enter ours. It is not to ask him for
gold or silver, it is not to ask him that after death we may
enter a bower of roses and myrtle, it is not to ask him that
our ship may float, while in the tempest another ship goes
down. It is to tell him of to-day's success or of its fail-
ure ; it is to turn over with him the plan for to-morrow's
adventure or amusement ; it is to lay out in order this per-
plexity and that misfortune, and gain light from higher life as
to the solution of the puzzle or redemption from the failure.

For us who are hot-tempered, it is calmly to cool passion

in the infinite ether ; for those who are indolent, it is to feel
the thrill and glow of the great line of battle, as the knight
most lazy would surely put his lance in rest, and charge with
the others, if some Richard led the way. For him who is
downcast, because he is alone, prayer is to find that he is not
alone. No ! Here are all men and women, all angels and arch-
angels, all cherubim, seraphim, and the host of heaven are on
our side : nay, God himself, the present power of present love,
is here, strength and companionship. Prayer quits the hum-
drum of my own separate life, and introduces me thus into
the society of the universe. It lifts me above the dust and
malaria of the things around me into the high, clear air,
where I see as I am seen.

It is to this contemplation that the apostle invites me,
when he asks me to fix my affection on things above. As
Jesus had done before him, when he asked me to place my
treasure where moth would not eat and rust would not gnaw.

" For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

NOT LESS, BUT MORE.

" What I do, thou knowest not now ; but thou shalt know here-
after." — John xiii., 7.

" I have many things to say unto you ; but ye cannot hear them
now." — John xvi., 1 2.

The managers of the Church have looked with suspicion
on such statements of Christ, and naturally enough like
to keep them in the background. The Roman Catholic
Church, for instance, really lives only by looking backward.
It rests on tradition. Luther and the Protestants inherited
its habits. And, so far from believing that time explains
Christ's work and makes it more clear, there is a supersti-
tion in Protestant Churches, and in the great Catholic and
Greek Churches, that, if you only knew more exactly what
Christian men did in Thessalonica and in Ephesus in the
times of Paul, you would be safer and better than you are, if
you would imitate them. This is, in truth, just as if we
should say that, if we could find out what sort of a mud
hovel Governor Winthrop lived in, the first year after he
landed here, we should all live in mud hovels like it, to show
our respect for his memory.

Now, this superstition not only runs counter to the whole
order of history in every other matter, but it contradicts every
statement of Jesus Christ himself, of Paul, and of the others.
They all knew that they had a very great thing in hand,
nothing less than the absolute reign of God in the hearts of
all men. To bring that about, they were injecting into the
veins of a dying world the quickening spirit of its new life.
Never was enginery so slight for a cause so great. If they
knew anything, if they felt and believed anything, it was that
the first new struggles and plunges of the dying man, into
whose veins this new spirit of life flowed, bore only a faint
resemblance to his energy and simplicity when he had re-
covered from disease, and the new life had full chance
with him. And just what they did not believe was that the

social life then, or the daily habits of handfuls of persecuted
outcasts, hiding in caves and dens of the earth, could exhibit
the true method of life of the perfect kingdom, or of the con-
quered world. Nay, they did not pretend to prophesy the
detail of its coming. Not even prophets can do that. Why,
in our time, Mr. Cobden could not tell in England, the day
free trade began, how free trade would affect England after
fifty years. Henry Clay could not tell in America, when the
American system began, the detail of the effect of protection
in America. Mr. Chase could not tell in 1861, when na-
tional banking began, how that system would affect the
United States. A new principle trickles into the world's life ;
and, literally, all things are begun new, on a scale which no
prophet can foretell. To bring into the outskirts of Thes-
salonica the gospel principle, in talk with a few women pray-
ing by the river on the Sabbath, is no test of what the
gospel principle will work, when codes of law acknowledge
it, when judges and kings are sworn to carry it out, when
marriage, servitude, commerce, and all social arrangements
are swayed by it, and all the world, in its heart and life,
espouses it. These men did not prophesy the detail, be-
cause, even in vision, it was beyond them.

Their language, therefore, was always on the key of this
text, "What I do thou knowest not now." Paul borrows
from an older writer * the great words, " Eye hath not seen,
nor ear heard, not hath it entered into the mind of man to
conceive the things God hath prepared." They had no
thought of keeping the new world looking backward and
therefore walking backward. They always referred it to
the present Spirit, and bade it trust to the infinite certainty
that the infinite life of this Spirit would work out infinite
victories.

In the opening of Paul's letter to the Romans, — a most
impressive and instructive study of the progress of religion,
— he shows with eager interest how from "faith to faith"
the absolute perfectness of God had been revealed ; how, in
this great joy of knowing God better and better,

" Nature always gives us more
Than all she ever takes away." t

* Now lost. The title of the book was The Revelation of Elias. For this state-
ment the authority is Origen and Jerome.

t From one of John Sterling's hymns, poems which have not so many readers as
they deserve.

And, in truth, as every sincere Christian must have ex-
pected, that has come to pass which these prophets foretold.
With every step, the world has stepped forward and upward
in its religion. Jesus Christ himself is better understood
and more widely honored than the day he was crucified: that
is always confessed. But not only is this so, he is known
better and honored more than he was when that century
went out, or the next or the next. So men know what you
mean by the inspiration of a holy spirit, as they did not know
then. And their knowledge of God, slight though it may
be and small, compared with what shall be or might be, were
the fetters of time and space broken, is still infinitely beyond
that poor knowledge of Pharisee or Sadducee, — though it
were the best of that time, — who thought of God as sitting
somewhere on his sapphire throne, or going to this place, or
resting in that upon a journey.

You have only to open any book of history at two places,
say six hundred years apart, and you can see this in the
concrete, without attempting any abstract discussion of the
causes of the intervening change. Thus, Richard, the Lion-
hearted, would have been called one of the most religious
monarchs of his day by any Christian writer of his day.
Well, he showed his religion by taking his life in his hands,
risking it fearlessly in miasma and in battle, by causing the
death of hundreds of thousands of Saracens, and taking the
responsibility of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
Christians. Turn the page six hundred years, and read the
life of such a ruler as Mr. Lincoln or of Mr. Gladstone. See
what has come upon the world in a larger interpretation of
religion. See how a Christian ruler — in the midst of battle,
if you please, struggling for the right, praying for it, nay,
dying for it — has as his distinct object to make other men
happier, freer, and better, to bring mankind nearer God. So.
far has the world's ideal enlarged and improved.

But it is not my business to-day to make historical con-
trasts or to compare principles in the abstract. I want to
relieve one anxiety of faith, which shivers in the fear that,
with the changes in civilization which are admitted to be
necessary, with the advent of more light and more truth, this
world may be left, alas ! to less religion. Wretched, indeed,
if it were so. As if the traveller at the north, midway in
that midnight which is measured by months of winter, should
see the northern aurora blazing up more brightly and with

§9

richer color in its rosy arches, but should find at the same
moment that the mine of coal on which he is depending
for his life is only worthless slate, and that in the new glory
all around him he must freeze and die. But the truth is that
every step mankind has taken has been spirit-led. Every
new discovery has been God's revelation of himself. With
every new blaze of light, man comes closer to the central
Power of the world. What follows is that God seems nearer
to him. The child knows his Father, and therefore the
Father knows his child.

With a catholic desire to join with all reverent people in
their worship, whatever may be its form, I always repeat the
Apostles' Creed whenever I find myself in an Episcopal
church. I repeat it, I need not say, sincerely and earnestly.
And, in fact, I suppose that the more thoughtful of the men
who used it when it came into common use, about four hun-
dred years after the apostles died, used the words with the
same significance which I give to them. I mean, that to sym-
bolical phrases, in what was virtually a hymn, they gave a
broad or poetical interpretation, and did not tie themselves
down, as so many people do now, in the hard fetters of the
letter. But it is impossible for any person, however reverent
or free, who has been trained as we have in the religion of the
nineteenth century, to use this ancient symbol without exulta-
tion that we see so much more, know so much more, and be-
lieve so much more than did the men who composed it. That,
in good faith, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is brother of our
brotherhood, strength of our lives, and that we may come to
God, just as he came, for a Father's help and sympathy,
nowhere appears in this creed. That God himself is here
now, the Companion and Inspirer of my life, to help me
when I am weak, to lead me when I wander, to rejoice with
me when I am glad, nowhere appears in it. That with
every day this world is to grow brighter and better, that the
sparks shall run through the tinder till the whole is in a
blaze, that this world shall become in truth the blessed king-
dom of a loving God, — this nowhere appears in it. That
man with man must live as brother should live with brother,
in life common and not isolated ; that man must bear his
brother's burdens, — this is hardlv hinted at. Worst of all,
that man may come to God in prayer, may ask him every-
thing and receive everything, is nowhere suggested in it.
For all that the Apostles' Creed says, the heavens are still, as
they were to the Jews, a firmament of brass over our heads;

9°

and, except for an occasional messenger coming and return-
ing, there is no sort of intercourse between God and man.
And so I might go on. But I name these points, because I
think these are the points which we should first think of, say
in the training of our own children ; or if, for instance, an
intelligent Japanese asked us, in brief, what are the essen-
tials of Christianity. I think we should say that they are
these : that God reveals himself to man in a being of perfect
manhood, — that all men are really God's children and God
really their Father, — that their life is a common life in which
each must help each, — that it is an everlasting life, and
that for this life we have the constant help and blessing of
prayer. Of these essentials, — of these five points, shall I
say, — the Apostles' Creed only mentions everlasting life.
The other four it does not even suggest in any language that
would be understood even by an intelligent reader. One or
two of them can be forced upon it perhaps by a person re-
solved to find them there. But others, as I said, cannot, by
any ingenuity, be tortured out of its symbols. Yet here is a
statement which wrought itself well into use thirteen hundred
years ago, as a brief statement, in symbolic or poetic form,
of the Christianity of the time.

Let no one say that I am speaking thus with the natural
prejudice of one who was born into "the Unitarian Church.
The truth is that I have been led to this train of remark by
a series of confidences which I have received, most of them
within a few months, from persons who have had to fight
their way out from the jumble of the creeds into the clearer
atmosphere of freedom. Their testimony is of one accord,
that now first do they know what religion means, so much
larger is it than what they had been taught. I met such a
man in travelling lately, who had been an eager preacher in
the Methodist Church. He said to me : " The Evangelical
Church talks of Saviour and Bible. Why, I never knew what
the worth of the Bible was till I read it in the new light of
our time. The Gospels were never so near my heart as now,
when I know I have a right to interpret them for myself and
to read them with all my heart and mind and soul and
strength." "And as for the Saviour," he said, with intense
feeling, " I never knew what the word ' Saviour ' meant till I
found Jesus Christ was really human, really lived as I live,
and died as I die." " Religion ! " .said another gentleman
to me, who had been a very eloquent and true preacher in
an Orthodox Church, — " religion ! I never knew what the

word ' religion ' meant, while I was expected to pick up in
a life-boat a few stragglers who were saved from this drown-
ing hulk of a world. I can give you no idea of the sense of
enlargement that comes to me now that I begin to preach to
all men with the certainty that no one is opposed to God,
and that all may work together to his glory." " Tell me,"
said another, " how my little girl may grow up so that she
shall not lose an hour of her childhood in the notion that
Jesus is her king or her judge, but that she may always know
him as her elder brother and her best friend." "You
know," said another preacher, " what was my theological
training in the Baptist schools. You know how long I
tried to cling to those standards. Well, I cannot undertake
to tell you how the range of my religious life has widened
since I read Renan's Life of Jesus, and the body of bio-
graphical literature which it has started into being. You
who were born to such freedom cannot conceive of the
enlargement of life for us to whom it is new." You will
remember similar statements in the recent declarations of
Stopford Brooke in London. If these men know anything of
themselves, if they can tell to us their own experience, they
are not less religious, but more. The step they have taken
is forward and upward. They leave thought of visible things
to float with the tide of the spirit which controls and orders
things. They rise from doctrine, which is at best but the
statement of the intellectual result of the studies of the past,
to try what they can add to the rush of life which is to sway
and bless the ages that are before.

I have been reading, with entire sympathy and respect, the
story of the recent imprisonment of the ritualistic clergymen
in England. They seem to me to be martyrs for conscience'
sake, as truly as was Stephen. But what is the cause for
which they make the sacrifice .' It is for their oath's sake.
In their ordination vows, they promised to obey the rubric in
the Prayer-Book. As they interpret that rubric, they think
it binds them to wear certain colored dresses, which were in
use in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Other men, equally
conscientious, think the same rubric binds them to wear the
simple black and white dresses which were in use in 1663,
after twenty years of Puritan administration. There can be
little doubt that this would be the view of unprejudiced
persons. Certainly, these martyrs for principle command
our respectful sympathy. But they do not regard the form
for which they suffer as in itself essential. They all say that.

if a convocation of their Church would relieve them, they .
would wear whatever garments it would prescribe. In the
most precise manner, they avow that they suffer for their
wish to obey exactly the literal direction of a verbal state-
ment, vaguely made in a fear of revolution. It is the loyal
service of the letter.

Such is a fair illustration of one of the martyrdoms of the
religion of the Middle Ages, — of the religion which looks
backward rather than forward. What might not such reso-
lution achieve, were it emancipated from this thraldom of
the letter; if, instead of counting the jots and tittles of a stat-
ute of Charles II., it might conscientiously spend every throb
of its energy on mending the sufferings of to clay and bringing
in the hopes of to-morrow ! Here is a private letter from a
martyr of the nineteenth century. She is a woman, not
learned, and never what the world calls prosperous. In a
happy moment, she was startled into the new life of a spirit-
ual religion. I mean, she found out, in some blessed inspi-
ration, that God is with her always, and that she is God's
child. She found out that rituals are nothing and dogmas
nothing, if one live and move and have one's being in one's
God. How shall she show her gratitude to God ? How
shall she use this priceless treasure of his indwelling spirit?
She will build up the lives of those who are not so happy.
She takes into her own home, at the very crisis of their
wretchedness, the poor girls who have been deserted by the
men who have ruined them. In her own humble house, with
the work of her own hands, and what she can earn by a
lecture here or a reading there, she will carry them through
sickness and restore them to the world which has cast them
off. But they shall not go, if she can help it, till they have
found out the love of a Saviour who was willing to die for
them, or of the God who has never forgotten them. Now,
the martyrdoms of this woman are not of the dungeon or the
stake. Hers are the sufferings of one who sees a baby with-
out its milk ; of one who sees a recovering patient without a
fire ; of one who has sent her parlor furniture to the pawn-
brokers ; of one, in short, always asking how she shall keep
the wolf from the door. It is not what you would call ro-
mance, though I think the romancers lead us to nothing more
pathetic. It is what comes to one who is willing to forget
herself, and make herself of no reputation, so only she can
lift up those who have fallen down and preach glad tidings to
the poor.

Now, mark me, I do not deprecate in the least the con-
scientious rigor of the English martyrs of this hour. I only
say that when it shall happen, in the steady progress of pure
religion, that such courage and faith as theirs work for the
real thing itself, and are not wasted for the forms which sur-
round the thing, it will be better for the preacher, and better
for those whom he would serve. It will be better for the
cause, and better for the martyr. And, to go back to that
anxiety of faith with which I began, I want to ask those
timid ones who feel it, to look behind the shell, and to find
the substance. The elegant processional at St. Alban's, or
at St. Vedast's, with boys chanting hymns and bearing
banners, the cloud of incense, and the awe-struck priest in
worship, do present religion to the sense, to the eye, and to
the ear. Perhaps there were times when men had to be sat-
isfied with such symbols of religion. But no man claims
that these are religion. True religion and undefiled is some-
thing else. What God requires of us is something more for
which the banners and the incense and the procession are
but a preparation. For the reality, there is not one of us but
would rather knock at the humble door of this working
woman and find her reading with the women whom she is try-
ing to save, or sewing with the little girls whom her kindness
has seduced from the wretched hovels which are their homes.
There is not one of us but would say that, in her emancipa-
tion from all anxiety about ritual or dogma, this martyr of
the nineteenth century, as I called her, had found not less
religion, but more.

" When the Spirit of Truth shall come, he shall lead you
into all truth."

" Many things I have to say to you, but ye cannot bear
them now."

" What I do thou knowest not now. But thou shalt know
hereafter."

CHRISTIAN REALISM.

"The Life was manifested, and we have seen it." — I. John i., 2.

Our puzzles with these transcendental chapters which be-
gin the Gospel and first Epistle of John come from the use
of language which we have wholly forgotten. Really, the
injunctions or directions apply to us quite as much as they
applied in their own time. For, in the first chapters, both
of the Gospel and of the Epistles, there are two more efforts
to do what religious teachers are always trying for; namely,
to bring the life of heaven into the life of earth. They afe
both efforts in the direct line of the Lord's Prayer that " thy
kingdom may come, and thy will be done on earth as in
heaven." Mr. Gibbon illustrates the difficulty in his cynical
and cold-blooded way. He says, " The preacher, who is
illustrating with the eloquence of a Bourdaloue the necessity
of a virtuous life, will dismiss his assembly, full of emotions,
which a variety of other objects, the coldness of our northern
constitutions, and no immediate opportunity of exerting their
good resolutions, will dissipate in a few moments." This is
to say that the temptations of earth in a few moments over-
come the resolutions of heaven. And Gibbon's remark only
covers behavior. The truth is that we find it much easier,
in whatever line of life, to obey our infinite longings, sepa-
rately or by themselves, or our earthly habits, separately or
by themselves, than we find it to mingle the two, and so to
set earthly powers to carry forward heavenly longings. Mr.
Gibbon talks of behavior, but the same is true of other
aspirations. I sit entranced by divine music, and am in
that stage of rapture which Paul so well describes, "whether
in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell " ; and I do
not want to. The concert ends. I am in Tremont Street,
waiting for my car ; and then I scold the conductor, or jostle
a competitor for a seat, in the same mood with which one
dog competes with another, as if no ray of the angelic ef-
fulgence had ever beamed upon me. Just so, these dreamy
philosophers of Egypt, for whom St. John writes, could sep-

arate themselves from forum, from market, from senate, and
from workshop, could write and read, and talk and sing,
about "The Life," "The Infinite," "The Glory," or "The
Light." But when there was a mob in the street, or when
the Nile failed to rise, or when the price of bread doubled
because a Roman speculator had made a corner in wheat,
the philosopher was just where the butcher or the' beggar
was. His philosophy was one thing, and his daily life was
another. And we — I do not think we are so far removed
from St. John and Alexandria but what we understand that
experience.

St. John meets this difficulty with a central Christian state-
ment. True, he uses words outside our common language ;
and to us they sound unreal. But, to those for whom he
wrote, the words were only too hard and brutal. "Talk of
' the Life,'" John says, "this ideal ' Life,' this 'infinite Life,'
the 'Life of the universe,' — why, I tell you 'the Life' was
made manifest. I have seen 'the Life.' All these people
round me saw it. I handled it. They handled it." All
Egyptian bubbles of vapory fantasy were pricked, and burst
by so square a statement of a fact. For once, he said,
God's will had been done on earth as in heaven. He had
seen with his eyes the person who did it, and handled him
with his hands. The statement seemed hard and brutal ;
but John had to make it in that form, because it was true.

What is called the realism of our time is trying to do
the same thing again for Jesus Christ, — and, really, for very
much the same purpose. The people who need the lesson
are not dreamy philosophers in Alexandria. Some of them
are Christians "in good and regular standing," who have so
long bowed their heads at the name of Jesus, and worshipped
him as the unseen maker of heaven and earth, that they
have lost all the reality, and all the sincerity, indeed, of the
gospel narrative.* Others are enthusiastic votaries of nine-
teenth century learning, — who are so sure that they are
themselves inspired, and are so delighted with the revela-
tions made to-day, as to be quite indifferent as to anything
which happened or transpired eighteen hundred years ago.
It is for the real benefit of both classes that the hearty, affec-
tionate common-sense of the world has undertaken in the
last fifty years, to find out and to show what manner of life

♦As when as sensible a man as Dr. Thomson talks of Jesus as walking about
Nazareth, and enjoying the prospect from the hills he has himself made!

this was which Jesus of Nazareth led among his people, —
what he did and why he did it, how he lived and why he died.
To this, we owe the countless biographies which half a
century has produced, and other studies in the same line,
which have not taken the form of biography. To give any
color or sense to these efforts, the "isolation theory," as Mr.
Tiffany well calls it, had to be swept away. Palestine had
to become a part of this world again, and not a secret or sep-
arate world by itself. Men and women there must come and
go, like other men and women ; and the Saviour must make
plans and execute them, — nay, must take his chances of their
failure, if a conceited Nicodemus stood in his way, or a
crafty Caiaphas. In this study, which tries to make his life
a reality instead of an exquisite fancy, men have gone every
length. They make paintings of wayside flowers, that you
may be sure you know what lily was more gorgeous than
Solomon. And they troll and drag in Genesareth, that you
may know what fish rewarded the work of St. Peter. When
Bida published his magnificent New Testament in Paris a
few years ago, — the most costly book which has ever been
printed, — he knew that our time would not be satisfied,
unless the most competent artists had been sent to Palestine
that they might figure precisely mountain, rock, and river,
mustard and mint, cedar and olive trees, for the illustration
of the record which was to be so sumptuously clad.

From this resolute effort for a real study of Christ's life
has sprung a literature distinct from anything which existed
before. In this country, it was born with Dr. Furness's
Studies of the Four Gospels, printed in 1836 ; and, in Europe,
by Strauss's Life of Jesus, published the year before, — two
books conceived irrespectively of each other, and differing
widely in their view, but both leading to a study more gen-
uine than the fanciful habit of former years, in which the
truth of history was always made subservient to some moral
lesson which the tiuth was to convey. In the remarkable
series of books which have followed in this resolute effort,
the three most valuable have been Furness's Jesus ami his
Biographers, a fascinating book for every reader ; Renan's
wonderfully picturesque life, — so picturesque, however, that
it has been said to be the life of Jesus with Jesus omitted, —
and Professor Seeley's Ecce Homo. The last was written by
an Englishman for English feeling, and probably has had the
largest influence in England of any of the books of the kind.
I think that these two last books owe their great success in

attaining their object very largely to the fact that the
authors are not preachers. We preachers, for our office'
sake, must try to improve people. We must point a moral.
That is our duty. When, therefore, a clergyman writes a life
of Christ, he is forever showing the moral purpose of this
or that, or the valuable lesson to be drawn. It is very hard
for him to read or to write as an historian. He reads or
writes as an ethical narrator. St. John himself did this ;
and there are passages in his Gospel where you cannot tell
whether the words are his or are those of Jesus whom he
describes. Matthew does not do it ; and the business-like
character of his Gospel arrests the most careless attention.
M. Renan and Mr. Seeley have been able to approach the
work without making a text for a sermon out of every sen-
tence. One consequence is the vivid reality which attends
the celebrated biography of the one, and the treatise of the
other.

The determination to see with the eyes of those who
looked on has gone beyond the work of fine art and of
biography. It has been taken up by one and another au-
thor, who have attempted works of imagination, of which the
scene is laid in Palestine, in Christ's time; and the actors
see and report to us his work, as so many evangelists might
do, each from a new point of view. The effort is quite legit-
imate, and has many advantages which do not belong either
to a sermon or to a set biography. This very week, our
friend, Mr. Freeman Clarke, publishes such a smdy, which
we shall all welcome. Thomas, called Didymus, is the centre
of his story. The remarkable book Philochristus, published
two or three years ago here and in London, was one of the
most successful of such attempts. Governor Wallace has
just now published another called Ben-Hur, which has
some curious studies and vivid scenes. I have brought
here a poem where the life of Mary Magdalene is studied
so, and I am going to read some passages from it. The
merit of such a book, as you will see, is that precisely be-
cause Jesus is not the centre in this case, because Mary
Magdalene is the centre, you are able to imagine how his
power appeared in act and fact. You are not asking the
vain question where it came from or what it was. You are
only accepting the reality that it was. And all the more
are you able to ask, at least in imagination, what might he
do for me ?

This new poem is by our townswoman, Mrs. Greenough,
now living in Rome. It is in three parts. The first describes
Mary Magdalene in her splendid palace in Jerusalem, with
her troop of flatterers and admirers around her, as a nov-
elist might describe Aspasia in Athens. The second de-
scribes Christ's entry into Jerusalem at some visit, when
Mary Magdalene waits for him at the wayside, and sees him
for the first time. Afterwards she sees him again at the
feast, where she anoints his feet and wipes them with her
hair. The third part describes the crucifixion and the resur-
rection. But all this is not from an evangelist's point of
view, nor as if one were writing Jesus' life, but with her life
the centre. Here is, for instance, the first time she hears
of the Saviour : —

" Now, as she listless dreamed, her ear was caught
By sudden harshness in the tones of one
Who seldom spoke, a swarthy, gray-haired Jew : —

'A beggarly impostor, nothing more;
( )ne of the spawn of ignorance and craft
That swarms upon us in these latter days,
Leading the stupid multitude astray :
Soon to be smitten by the very hands
That now applaud.'"

In answer to this Jew : —

" A youthful Roman knight, a stranger there,
Who was in act of raising to his lips
A rubied nectarine from the broad vase
Of fretted gold that stood beside his arm,
Turned his calm look upon the hoary Jew,
And cpiiet answered : ' I have yet to learn
What crime may lurk in teachings such as those.
Last week, as I was travelling hither, near
The hostel where I tarried for the night,
This cunning villain, as thou call'st him, stood
And taught the wondering multitude his faith.
As in the hostel not a soul was left,
But all had crowded thither, I too went
To see what novel folly moved them thus.
I stood and listened. Cavil as thou wilt,
He spoke as never mortal spoke before.' "

They laugh at the young Roman, and ask him to tell them
more : —

" He slow replied, ' I doubt me if the words
This peasant spoke could find an entrance here.
He told of truth and purity and good.
He taught God is a spirit, and as such
Must worshipped be in spirit and in life

Of noble deeds, of love from man to man,
Counting no cost too great to win that pearl
Of price, the .spirit's holiness.' He paused,
And looked around upon the silent throng."

This description of Jesus of Nazareth is enough to awaken
Mary Magdalene's interest ; and she compels young Probus,
fairly against his will, to give up all talk either of compli-
ment or of passion, and to tell her more. She sends her
own slaves to bring her such tidings as can be had of the
peasant prophet ; and, when Jesus next enters Jerusalem,
she makes an opportunity to see him.

"At last, the Nubian, from the hillock where
He stood and watched, came hurrying to her side.
' Behold, he conies ' And, moving hastily,
She knelt upon her litter, raised above
The surging crowd, amid the tossing boughs
Of feathery palms. Her eager c

She bent upon the coming form Her hands she clasped
Above her bosom, seeking to hold down
Its quick, tumultuous throbbings. And he saw —
Jesus of Nazareth saw the Magdalene!
The eye that loved the beauty of the flowers
Rested upon that flower-like face His look,
Piercing and puissant, clove that pearly breast,
And saw the struggling human soul within,
That blindly yearned for purity and love.
He saw her past, he knew her as she was;
And a divine compassion stirred his heart.
A look of mournful pity gave response
To her imploring eyes. So passed he on ;
And the great multitude closed round his form,
And followed him toward the city gate.

'• She did not weep, she did not cowering hide
Her face within her hands, as she had feared
To do, remembering Probus' cruel words,
Beneath the Prophet's look of stern rebuke.
A strength undreamed of from the Saviour's gaze
Flowed in upon her heart. She felt a new
Transforming power move within her soul,
That drew her on, she knew not how, yet felt
That she mu>t follow the great Prophet's steps.
There was the answer to her questionings."

And this is the answer to her questionings.

" And ever from that day, where Jesus taught,
In the still coolness of the early dawn,
Standing within the crowded market-place
Amid the simple country-folk who brought
The bright-hued products of their narrow lands ;
The hardy fishermen who, from the shores

IOO

Of deep blue lakes, had borne their glistering spoils;
The shepherds who the younglings of the flock
Reluctantly had led from dewy meads ; —
While all, close gathered, reverently heard
Wise speech of gentle counsel from his lips; —
There, standing on the farthest verge, was seen
A youthful figure, wrapt in shrouding veil
And sweeping robes of dark and shadowy fold,
Still followed by a swarthy Nubian slave
Who in a silver leash a leopard led."

Of such occasions, as you know, only one is described in
the Gospels. Mrs. Greenough accepts the supposition that
it was Mary of Magdala who anointed the Saviour's feet at
the house of Simon the leper.

"Jesus sate
At meat within the high-born ruler's house.
And, as they stood and watched, a youthful form,
Shrouded and veiled, passed slow athwart the throng,
Bearing a vase of alabaster, carved
And set with stones of price. She neared the gate
And asked for entrance ; and the servants looked
Upon the precious vase, and passage made
For her who came with such resplendent gift.

"Awhile that shrouded form stood motionless
Within the portal of the long-roofed hall,
Trembling and silent. Then she forward moved
With faltering steps, until she reached the couch
Where Jesus lay reclined. Upon her knees
She sank beside his feet :.her veil fell back,
And all beheld the golden, waving hair,
The lovely face of Mary Magdalene.
She oped the vase : its costly perfume filled
The spacious room. She bent above those feet
Fevered with loving toil. Her lips she pressed
With timid touch upon them, and the while
She bathed them with her warm, fast flowing tears,
Then wiped them with the gold of her long hair.
Then from the open vase she ointment poured,
Of priceless worth, upon them, sobbing deep,
As one whose heart is breaking in its pain."

And then it is, after Jesus has extorted from the Pharisee
the unwilling and unwonted lesson of forgiveness, which you
heard me read from the Gospel, he continues : —

" Wherefore, do I say
' Her sins, and they are many, are forgiven,
For she has loved much.' He turned and looked
On her that was a sinner, as she knelt ;

. . . and in a voice

IOI

Of tender, yearning pity, Jesus said:

' Woman, thou art forgiven. Go in peace.' "

It is in the garden on Easter morning, after Mary Magda-
lene has seen him killed on Calvary, after she has helped to
bear him to burial, that Mary Magdalene is represented in
the statue by Mr. Greenough, which has suggested this
poem : —

"Deserted by all else, one mourner there
Beside that rifled couch of stone kept watch,
Weeping, while in her clasping hand she held
The crown of thorns, the all that now remained
To her of him. 'Twas Mary Magdalene.
Sobbing, she prest her shuddering lips to those
Keen points stained cruel crimson with his blood;
She held them to her quivering breast, nor thought
To heed the sharp pain of their pointed darts:
'Twas all she had of him, and he was dead."

"And, while she wept, upon her consciousness
A form dawned slowly, standing near to her.
Mist-veiled by tears, her blinded eyes she turned
Upon that form, nor knew whom she beheld ;
And the Lord spoke to her thus mourning soul.
' Woman, why weepest thou ? ' he gently said,
'Whom seekest thou?' And still her ears the while,
Throbbing in cadence with her sobs, knew not
The voice of him who spoke.

And Jesus looked upon
That loving, lovely face, and said to hef,
'Mary!'

Her soul sent up its worship in the cry,
' Master, my Master.' . . .

. . . ' Touch me not ; for I
Am not ascended to my Father's home :
Thee have I chosen for my messenger.
Thy lips shall be the first to tell mankind
That I, Christ Jesus crucified, still live.
Go thou from me unto my brethren : say
Unto them, I ascend unto my God,
And to my Father. To your Cod 1 rise,
And to your Father. Go and bear my words ! '

"And she fulfilled that sacred last behest:
His messenger, appointed to proclaim
His resurrection to the waiting world.
She bore unto the sad, remorseful band
Of those who had forsaken him, their Lord,
His greeting of forgiving love sublime,
Ere he ascended to his Cod and theirs;
And then we know no more. We know but this :
When Jesus Christ was risen from the dead,
He first appeared to Mary Magdalene."

102

I read those passages, and I would gladly read more, that
I may ask if it is not better thus to consider what Christ did
for the people who knew him than to ask what his nature
was, or what we shall call it, or how he did what he did. It
is clear enough that somehow he moved the world. He set
the apostles to their work, their followers to theirs. They
overturned thrones, they remade all social order. Now,
when you go back to the history, you find that they were
under the power of this person who sent them. His name
was Jesus, and ihey called him Christ. The world is in the
habit of disputing his nature, how he came here and what he
was. But the world is of one accord, that he was ; and, as
to what he did, is it not better for a man to ask what he
would have done himself, if Jesus Christ had appealed to
him ?

Occasionally, some young preacher sends me a sermon in
which he pleases himself by proving that it is all a mistake
to apply the Hebrew word "Messiah" to him, that that was a
bad piece of nomenclature. What if it was? Or another
sends me a sermon in which he says Jesus was not infallible,
— he did not know about the calculus, or the law of eclipses:
he shared the error of the Jews about devils and possessions.
Granting he did, — though there is no evidence of it, — this is
the real question : If you or I had been at Simon's feast or
at Martha's table, if Jesus had told us what God wanted us
to be and to do, if lie had addressed to us the parable or
the appeal, should we have obeyed or resisted ? Well ! if
you had had the fortune to be there, you would never have
discussed details. You would never have asked him to
define his terms. You would never say, " I do not acknowl-
edge that you are an infallible teacher." You would have
known that that great heart was beating for you, that great
mind planning for you, that great life controlling you ; and,
with the same enthusiasm which swept them away, you would
have obeyed. "Follow me." " Yes, Master." You would
follow.

Can it be a matter of much import what name we give to
this person ? People try to make me think so ; but I do not
think so. One set of people tell me it is his divinity. I
assent at once, and I say : " I also am divine, then. I also
am child of God." Then another eager set says that is all
wrong : it is his exceeding and perfect humanity. Have it
your own way. Call it what you will. I like to think it is
his humanity; for I know I also am a man. Surely, the

103

power of his personality makes clearer what he meant, when
he said we are not creatures of God, but his children. It
shows what he means, when he says God's spirit shall inspire
us. And we, if we will look at him more and repine about
him less, if we will obey him more and question less, if we
will follow, — that is, his word, — we shall be more sure to
find the worth of the lead and the certainty of the power
of him who goes before.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

It is not yet a year since we were all trying to review the
effect on the religious life of half a century which had been
wrought by one man, — William Ellery Channing, — in a life
not long. The death of Thomas Carlyle, in England, sets
one again on a like review, because atone period he so swayed
the education of thoughtful persons, as to advance largely
that revolution in religion which has made the last fifty years
to be almost another Reformation in the progress of Chris-
tianity. This sway has not extended, perhaps, beyond Eng-
land and America. But for those nations it has been very
powerful, and that means fcr a hundred million people, the
leaders still of the civilized world ; a sway to be remarked,
indeed, when exercised by a man without place in government,
not attached to any university or other organism of power. It
is the most remarkable exhibition in our time of what he would
have called The Hero as Scholar.

Mr. Carlyle is now, perhaps, most often spoken of as a
political writer. I am afraid that in this country he is most
often remembered as a writer who has said unkind things of
America. It is, indeed, true that he is a monarchist : he
believes in power, in holding a firm hand over people, — in
telling them what is right, and compelling them to do it.
Such a man of course traverses the opinions and the feelings
of Republicans, who know the good of maintaining the least
government possible, in leaving promotion open to every
person, and in letting those lead who can lead, wherever they
may be. But, because of this utter divergence between our
political principles and his, we should not neglect to see that
in his younger life he was the most efficient moral teacher
whom England has known in this century. His moral teach-
ings crossed the ocean. They were welcomed here before
they were welcomed at home. They became the staple of
the new thought and the new resolve of the young people

who came upon the stage here forty and fifty years ago. In
this way, he has moved the religious action and the education
of both England and America. Just at the moment when
the Oxford movement, what is now called the Ritualistic
movement, began to impel many of the members of the
Church of England toward a renewal of forms of worship
which had been long abandoned, there started up this Pres-
byterian school-master, this hearty admirer of Cromwell and
the Puritans, who proclaimed that all forms were rags,
whether in politics, in society, or in religion. With the
" Old-Clothes Philosophy," in which by a satirical irony he
pretended to justify the world's worship of its dress, he set
the world of England and America laughing at all its cus-
toms, and probing them to the bottom. Do not understand
me that the Old Clothes Philosophy was suggested by the
Oxford movement in particular. Sartor Resartus was in ad-
vance of it in time of composition, though not ot publication.
Nor was this work specially aimed at that set of formalities.
It hit every conventional custom, — thrones, crowns, and
scep'res, the judge on his bench, the soldier in his uniform,
Parliament and its rules, aesthetic teas, and professors' hum-
drum,— -all the white lies of society were ridiculed. It struck
all these as squarely as it hit any ecclesiastical formalities.
And where Carlyle hit he left a mark. I shall best describe
the moral influence of Carlyle in those years when I quote
what the poet Arthur Clough said of him in 1849. He said,
" Carlyle has led us all out from the Egypt of shams into the
desert." By " us," Arthur Clough meant the educated young
men of England, the thinking men, conscientious and seri-
ous. He had led them out from a comfortable Egypt, where,
if they did serve taskmasters, they still had lentils and meat
to eat. He had led them into the desert, where, instead of
vassalage, they had open air and fresh adventure. But they
had to rely for their food on the flocks of quails or on the
collection of desert manna. And Arthur Clough added
sadly, " He has taken us into the desert, and he has left us
there."

This remark of the young poet, whose early promise was
dashed by his early death, was repeated to me by an Amer-
ican traveller to whom Clough spoke. Thirty years have
passed since then ; and they have proved, even painfully, that
Arthur Clough was exactly right in his estimate of the posi-
tion. In fifteen years, — between 1832 and 1847, — Mr. Car-

io6

lyle's power as a moralist had been very great in compelling
men and women, by argument, by ridicule, by vivid illustra-
tion in present fact, by the pitiless verdict of history, to strip
off this form and that, to disregard this or that convention,
to go out into the cold, as we say. Those were the days of
" Come-outers," and for this John the Baptist life in deserts
no man was so much responsible as Mr. Carlyle. But, when
they had made their protests, when, on the whole, most
thinking men said " Amen " to their protests, and asked what
was to come next, this Moses, who had brought them into
the desert, could not lead them into the Promised Land. So
far, there was a precise parallel with the old Moses ; but this
Moses could point to no Joshua. He could not lead them
himself, and he could not tell them who should lead them.
Worse than this, he did not seem to care for those he had
led. He retained a certain interest in his old work, but it
was no longer the craving interest of his life. He was much
more interested in finding fault with this effort or that in the
world of politics than in organizing or leading the hordes or
tribes of those who had followed him. They were all in the
desert, and they found sadly that he left them to shift for
themselves.*

It is hardly possible to read in Sartor Rcsartus his sensitive
biography of his double, Herr Teufelsdrockh, without being
sure that he tells his own story between these lines. He
thus represents himself as in babyhood : " A still infant that
kept his mind much to himself; above all, that seldom or
never cried. He already felt that time was precious, that
he had other work cut out for him than whimpering."
In his childhood, in the old Scotch farm-house, it would
seem that " everywhere the strait bond of Obedience held me
down. Thus already Free-will came in painful collision with
Necessity." And describing the church-going of his parents :
" The highest whom I knew on Earth here bowed down with
awe unspeakable before a Higher in Heaven. Such things,
especially in fancy, reach inward to the very core of your
being. Mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into
visibility in the mysterious deeps."

He goes to the high school and college, and learns noth-
ing from his teachers ; but at the university he does pass

* I had forgotten, till after I wrote these words, that Carlyle himself compares his
double, Herr Teufelsdrockh, to John the Baptist : " In our wild seer, shaggy, unkempt,
like a Bapist living on locusts and wild honey, there is an untutored energy, a silent, as
it were unconscious strength, which, except in the higher walks of literature, must be

loy

through fever paroxysms of doubt, and he tells how he cast
himself before the All-seeing, and with audible prayers cries
vehemently for light, for deliverance from death and the
grave.

Then, when he leaves the university, there come the inevi-
table experiences of "getting under way," of young love and
sorrow, and the questions which since that time have been
always called the questions of the "Everlasting No." It is
in Hell Street in Paris that the answer comes to him, — in the
Rue St. Thomas de V Enfer : —

"All at once a thought arose in me. I asked myself, —

"What art thou afraid of? What is the sum total of the
worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death ; and say
the pangs of Tophet, too, and all that the Devil and man
may, will, or can do against thee. Hast thou not a heart?
Canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be, and as a Child of
Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy
feet while it consumes thee ? Let it come then ! I will meet
it and defy it. And, as I thought, there rushed like a stream
of fire over my whole soul, and I shook base fear away from
me forever. . . .

"The Everlasting No had said, 'Behold thou art Father-
less, outcast; and the universe is mine, — the Devil's,' — to
which my whole Me now made answer, ' I am not thine, but
Free, and forever hate thee.' "

It is when from the Everlasting No he makes his hero pass
into the Everlasting Yes that Carlyle establishes himself as
the moral teacher of the Englishman of his time. That the
spirit of man is superior to things. — ■ sways them, if it will, —
this is the gospel. Twenty or thirty pages in that part of
the book contain that gospel. Of those pages there are
fragments which young men and women could repeat in
those days as oracles, which have indeed passed as proverbs
into the language. Goethe's assertion, that "you should do
the duty that comes next you," then first appealed to English-
men as a solution of a religious problem. That "there is no
act of legislature that you should be happy," that "blessedness
is better than happiness," were lessons, strange to sav, that
even " the Religious World" needed. The depths to which
even thoughtful people had then sunk in their sentimen-
talisms can now be scarcely sounded. It was in such depths
that this John Baptist startled them by the cry, " Lay down
your Byron, and take up your Goethe." "The Fraction of
Life," he said, " can be increased in value not so much by in-

io8

creasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator."
That is, if a man will not so much try to enlarge his esti-
mate of his own deserts as to diminish the amount of his
claims or expectations, it will be well for him.

" Fancy thou deservest to be hanged, as is most likely,
thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot. Fancy that thou
deservest to be hanged in a hair halter, it will be a luxury to
die in hemp."

" Make thy claim of wages Zero, and thou hast the world
under thy feet."

Side by side with these oracles were his words on the dig-
nity of labor, — words which quickened the manhood of every
workman, whether he used hand or brain, or both : —

"Two men I honor, and no third. First, the toil-worn
Craftsman, that with earth-made Implement laboriously con-
quers the Earth, and makes her man's. Venerable to me is
the hard Hand, crooked, coarse, wherein notwithstanding
lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of
this Planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face, all weather-
tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence ; for it is the face
of a Man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for thy
rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee !
Hardly-entreated Brother ! For us was thy back so bent,
for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed : thou
wert our Conscript, on whom the lot fell, and, fighting our
battles, wert so marred. For in thee, too, lay a god-created
form, but it was not to be unfolded. Encrusted must it
stand, with the thick adhesions and defacements of Labor ;
and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet
toil on, toil on. Thou art in thy duty, be out of it who may.
Thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for daily bread.

"A second man I honor, and still more highly, — him who
is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable ; not daily
bread, but the bread of Life. ]s he not, too, in his duty,
endeavoring toward inward Harmony, revealing this, by act
or by word, through all his outward endeavors, be they high
or low? Highest of all, when his outward and his inward en-
deavor are one : when we can name him Artist ; not earthly
Craftsman only, but inspired Thinker, who, with his heaven-
made Implement, conquers Heaven for us. If the poor and
humble toil that we have Food, must not the high and glori-
ous toil for him in return, that he have Light, have Guid-
ance, Freedom, Immortality? These two, in all their de-
grees, I honor : all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind
blow whither it listeth.

109

" Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both
dignities united ; and he that must toil outwardly for the
lowest of man's wants is also toiling inwardly for the high-
est. Sublimer in this world know I nothing than a Peasant
Saint, could such now anywhere be met with. Such a one
will take thee back to Nazareth itself: thou wilt see the
splendor of Heaven spring forth from the humblest depths
of Earth, like a light shining in great darkness."

It is to the last degree pathetic to see the stolid way in
which such oracles were received by the established critics
of the time, even when they were accomplished men. There
seems to be a fatality brooding over the post of the estab-
lished literary critic.

There was then, and there is now. But, for all the short-
sightedness of the critics, and the grotesqueness of the dress
it wore, Carlyle's rugged gospel made its way directly to the
hearts of thoughtful men and women. We have reason to be
proud here that the value of Sartor Resartns was at once
comprehended here, so that the first collected edition of these
papers is a Boston edition. Carlyle himself afterward cited
the book, as a '"New England book," because this edi-
tion preceded by two years the London edition. Such pride
of ours is due to the happiness that we had here our own
prophet, Mr. Emerson, who saw from the first the depth and
the worth of these papers, and, with the author's permission,
collected and published them. Carlyle himself says that
two Americans joined in this work. I do not know who the
second was, for there are and well may be many claimants
for that honor. That New England should have appreciated
it is almost a matter of course. Its religious doctrine is
stern Puritanism. The Puritan here learned, long before
Goethe whispered it, that renunciation is the highest victory
of man. In the Puritan Bible, he read of "blessedness " at
the same texts where Bible-readers in France were chattering
about "happiness." While Carlyle was pronouncing this
eulogy on the craftsman, Channing, who was the fine flower
of Puritanism, was bidding us "honor all men," with an itera-
tion which fools thought wearisome. And the centre of the
whole proclamation of the Sartor Resartus, the statement of
the Everlasting Yea, — the statement, namely, that man, be-
cause he is man, may reign supreme over all things and
circumstances, may tread the Devil under foot, and rise
superior, even to the pangs of hell, — was but the statement

I IO

in another form of Emmons's statement, that he was willing
to be damned for the glory of God, or of Channing's fun-
damental of the Divinity and Infinity of the nature of man.
A like welcome for like reasons attended this John Bap-
tist gospel among the best thinkers of England. This, too,
was of course ; for the heart of England is Puritan. That
is, it believes in purity, and at bottom it wishes to push prin-
ciples to their ultimate consequences. It has been so since
the days of Pelagius, and before ; since Roman emperors
said sadly, what Roman pontiffs have said ever since, that
England was a "nation of rebels." Whether the regular
critics of England saw, or did not see, that here was a new
proclamation of some essential features of the everlasting
gospel, the young men and women of England saw it. New
schools of criticism, of history, of art, — nay, of manufacture
and of decoration, — and, of course, new schools of philos-
ophy and religion, sprung into being. Carlyle taught them
to tear down all shams, precisely as two hundred years before
Pym and Prynne had taught them to pull down the wooden
images of saints that never existed. And young England took
him at his word. When Mr. Ruskin attacked conventionality
in art, — nay, when Stanley and Arnold built up a realistic
school in history, — when the Crystal Palace and Kensington
made men study a real morning-glory before they even mod-
elled the handle to a poker, when Drury Lane would not
mount " Hamlet " without a correct painting of the Castle at
Elsinore, these were so many recognitions of that hatred of
shams, of that holy quest for the real blood of the thing,
which had been exacted in the desert cry of this Jordan
prophet, in his girdle of hair-cloth. And these are but visi-
ble illustrations. Who shall say how profoundly this hatred
of shams has descended, or what miracles this spirit has
wrought in building barriers to Imperial arrogance, in resist-
ing the babbling of infallible popes, and on our side the
ocean in abolishing the slavery of man by man ?

What now were the limitations to this extraordinary power ?
Why is it that Carlyle left without a leader those whom he had
led into the desert ? He had a Promised Land. He was on
his feet, and sure. Why could he not be the Joshua as well
as the Moses? I know it seems presumption for me to
answer. It is like Gulliver measuring the giant with his
angles and foot-rule. But every religious teacher ought to
have his answer to this question, or to abandon the duty for

1 1 1

which he is not fitted. Whether presumptuous or not, I
ought not to stand here, if I had not my suggestion.

It would seem, if we looked at method alone, as if Mr.
Carlyle neglected — from accident perhaps, or perhaps a cer-
tain wilfulness — some duties necessary to a great religious
leader. Thus, he never lost for himself the habits or convic-
tions of his childhood in the Scotch village : he always had
the child's sense of God's present power and his present love.
He came to God in his own weakness, and for God's strength
in duty he sought God's alliance; Now, he seems to have
taken it for granted that other people would do the same.
He seems to think that it is idle to teach other men to do
so. It is like telling a voyager on Lake Erie that, if he
wants water, he must throw a bucket into the lake by his
side, and draw it. But that sort of teaching is necessary.
There are all degrees of dulness. When, in 1812, the Eng-
lish Navy-board sent out to Canada the fittings for their fleet,
they sent out, with the rest, the water-casks which the sailors
on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario were
to fill before they started on a cruise. Just like that igno-
rance is the ignorance of many a man to-day, who thirsts
and grows faint for want of the infinite supply and help
which would come from his real abandonment to the present
God. The weakness and grief of the young England of
to-day come from just that ignorance. Yet Mr. Carlyle
could not condescend, it would seem, to meet it. Evidently
a religious man himself, through and through, he takes it
for granted that the strength and cheer of prayer and a
religious life will come to others, — as a thing of course, —
because it came to him, from all the careful training of his
boyhood's years.

But this is simply a matter of method. Far deeper down,
and fatal to Mr. Carlyle's power in the long run as a leader,
is a defect in the whole basis of his religious philosophy. He
is eager to show each man his own power, — that he can smite
down the devil, and hold him clown. True. But, all the
same, man is not alone. With man, man must live ; and
with man he must work and conquer. Mr. Carlyle does not
recognize this " together," which is the centre of successful
life. His recruits, therefore, do not make an army. They
are all so many come-outers, fighting each man " on his own
hook." Now, because we are men, because we are grega-
rious animals, as much as horses in their herds, as birds in
their flight, as the fishes of the sea in their wanderings, the

I 12

teacher who is to lead us must lead us together. The great
Leader of leaders would have had every excuse, had he kept
himself apart from men. His apostles must have galled him
on every side, duller than hounds in taking his meaning.
But all the same he chose them, kept them by him, explained
to them, bore with them, loved them. He sent them forth,
and sent them two by two, that courage might quicken terror,
and sense get the better of dulness. Every successful
teacher of his Word, every Paul or Luther or Ignatius or
Wesley has thus bound his hearers and followers together,
has inspired them with a common enthusiasm for a common
victory. It is as an army that they march, and not as so
many separate travellers. They move to conquer, and to
conquer they combine. It seems to me that Mr. Carlyle
failed, on the very brink of Jordan, to achieve the greatest
victory of this century, because he did not feel or recognize
this necessity. He repelled all those who came to him. He
sought and of course found the points of opposition with
them. He resented their admiration. Because he could stand
alone, he made them stand alone. So he never knew for him-
self the joys, nor gave to those he led from Egypt the victory
of that common cause in which each man bears his brother's
burdens.

All the same have the England and America of to-day
their debt of gratitude to the man who for one generation
tore off the disguises of the world's follies and disclosed
them, tore away the screens from its true nobility, and dis-
closed that as well. We must not ask too much from our
heroes. If Moses leads us out from Egypt, we will find
some Saviour who will lead us into our Promised Land. The
men of my time — the men who have been for a generation
in public life — are what we are, say what we say, and do
what we do, because fifty years ago the last of the prophets
summoned us into the wilderness. We should be graceless,
indeed, if we did not always remember that call, and at his
grave express our gratitude.

GOD IS A SPIRIT.

" God is a spirit." — John iv., 24.

In this statement to the woman of what she herself felt
and tried to understand, Jesus met, and for the time over-
threw, all her anxiety about temple or place. Whether the
temple shall be on one hill or another is an absurd thing to
discuss, if God is a spirit. This is not a hard thing for the
woman to receive for the time. Even to untaught minds or
simple, it is not inconceivable. Even the American Indian,
whose range of language is very narrow, and whose meta-
physical practice is inconsiderable, always spoke of God as
a spirit. We have no better name for God than the "Good
Spirit." And the American savage came so far toward meet-
ing us that he called him the " Great Spirit." The theory
does not hold which supposes that simple worshippers are
merely fetich worshippers, or idolaters. The Ashantee negro
may go to a temple to leave his offering before an idol ; but,
as he travels home in the darkness, — miles away from the
shrine. — he fears or he hopes that his god sees him there.
That is, he fears or he hopes that this power outside himself,
with which he would connect himself in prayer or by sacri-
fice, is close to him in that darkness. This is to fear or to
hope that this power is a spiritual power, is a spirit outside
of place and outside of time.

As the world, growing older and wiser, grows more relig-
ious and more, one evident reason for this improvement is
the greater readiness with which men take this idea of spirit
as they come to see more and more of its ways. Language
has now a thousand images by which to illustrate the spir-
itual reign of God, which it had not in the clays of David
and of Homer. So much the easier is it for us to avoid
errors of thinking of God in this place or in that, which
made the hazard for Jeroboam and Jezebel. It is indeed

ii4

pathetic to see how simple people and ignorant then, seized
on the very best they had to illustrate the range and extent
of the power of their gods. Thus, a flash of lightning, be-
cause it was instant and everywhere, because it came from
no one knew where and acted no man knew how, was the
natural image for the sceptre of Jupiter or of Jehovah, —
whether a Greek poet or a Hebrew poet wrote the hymn.
Jesus himself is glad to seize the image to illustrate the
universality and instantaneous power of God's empire. As
the whole land, he says. — from the sea to the desert, from
Dan to Beersheba, — is in a blaze at one instant when the
lightning flashes, so shall the Son of man come, not in this
place, not in that place, but everywhere and in a moment.
That illustration was the best they had : it stood almost alone
in their faltering science. And eagerly they accepted it. But
every step of advancing wisdom teaches us more, and so
gives us other and new parables. Newton weighs the worlds,
and he finds a power unseen, invisible, unheard, inaudible,
untasted, not to be tasted, not to be handled, not to be fet-
tered, but all the same it binds the different worlds in one
system. Its work is stated by the same simple formula; which
Newton calls the laws of attraction, whether it work when a
bit of paper flutters in its fall, or whether it direct the move-
ments of planets round the sun, or of the sun round his cen-
tre. So that, from Newton's time to this time, it has been
easier than it was before for men to conceive of power act-
ing without form, without time, and unfettered by space.
The world gained a new illustration of God's power in that
discovery.

If one believed, what even intelligent Greeks in the
early days of Greece really believed, regarding their own
land and the seas around it, it would not be hard to believe
as those Greeks did about their gods. If the whole world,
or all that was of any account, were the islands and penin-
sulas of Greece, while no ships came from a distance, and
no traveller ever went to other lands, it was not hard to
suppose that high on Olympus or other mountain ranges lived
gods large enough and strong enough to order the winds and
the lightnings, the plagues and famines, the fortunes and
misfortunes of a world so small. The ancient religions
began with such tokens of local worship and limited power.
When commerce began and travel began, when the world
grew larger, of necessity all this localizing of religion fell
away. But Greece and Rome did not lose in religious sen-

timent. They gained infinitely, just as soon as their gc ds
ceased to be so many local princes, and when men began 10
worship, not an unseen neighbor a little stronger than them-
selves, but the Lord of the whole world.

A similar step, but infinitely greater, was made when
Copernicus made his great discovery of the true solar sys-
tem. Next to the revelations made by Jesus Christ in his
life and work, men have had no such help for their true con-
ception of their God and Father as they gained in this
unmeasured enlargement of their knowledge of his works.
Up till that time, the solid earth, as men chose to call it, was
the centre, indeed it was the foundation of all things. To
begin with, it was the largest of all created things. Here
it was, the central, solid foundation. Around it moved every
day the sun, for the purpose of warming it and lighting it.
One of the Greek philosophers incurred the ridicule of gen-
erations, supposing the sun to be enormously large. He
said it was as large as the province of Attica, say fifty miles
across. Whoever looked at the little thing saw it was no
bigger than a wagon-wheel, and felt sure that the astronomer
was a fool. When the sun went down at night, certain lesser
lights, the moon and the stars, gave such help as they could
to relieve the darkness. Although learned men knew better,
such was the opinion of the common world when Shakspere
wrote his plays, when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.
Now, for such a world as this, the theology of the Dark Ages
might be made to answer. Thus, you could just fancy the
God of such a world as that taking the form of a man for a
while, walking by Lake Gennesareth, and permitting men to
kill him upon Calvary. You could imagine a hell beneath
your feet, and on the other side the mountain of Paradise,
as Dante described it. But so soon as Copernicus showed
what Galileo proved, so soon as men of thought knew that
of one system the sun was the centre, all this was changed.
It was not philosophy, so called : it was the common-sense
below all philosophies, which saw and knew now that God
was infinitely greater in power and in wisdom than the
Church had ever called him. If Jesus Christ had not long
before told them the truth, in words they had never under-
stood, if he had not said God was a spirit and was every-
where, if the statement of the Roman Church had been the
only statement, the new revelation as to the truth of the
solar system would have been the end of the religion pro-
mulgated by the Church at Rome. As it was, the Pope

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wisdom teach us more of the agency of the spirit we call
God, man who is learning of that spirit is learning more
of himself. Chief of all, he learns that he is a spirit also.
He is in a physical body, and he uses it for his tool. So God
uses sunbeams and rain-drops. But man is lord of that
body, and uses it for infinite purposes. The astronomer
finds the law of God in the farthest corner of the universe.
He says that the nebula there is not so far away but that
God forms it, "nor so far away but I see the work of its
formation." "In the beginning," he says, "God created
the heavens and the earth, and I — I can forget time be-
tween, and I go back in my imagination to that work of crea-
tion." Nay, man penetrates to some untrodden section of
this globe. He mounts some peak where no man ever stood
before. He looks over valley and range, range and valley,
which no eye ever looked upon. He did not make it. No !
But he finds the prospect exquisite in beauty, it satisfies every
yearning of his curiosity. It was set in order by power out-
side himself, by infinite power; but this is power with which
he can sympathize, whose work he enjoys and can begin to
comprehend. God is a spirit, and man can give to him a
spirit's reverence, homage, and praise. It is not the terrified
obedience of a beast, nor his dumb fawning. It is what
Jesus called it, the love and reverence of a child. God is a
spirit, and he is the father of our spirits, too. So is it that,
as the world's knowledge of other worlds and of the unend-
ing work of God increases, man's knowledge of himself and
of the possible greatness of his own life increases also. On
both sides, the divine side and the human, his religion is not
less, but more.

As man traces the history of his own race in his own world,
he finds there also is law. Certain courses have insured per-
manence and success, have fitted in with other courses in
harmony: certain other courses have jarred and grated in
discord with other courses, and in the end have come to
nothing. Man finds that the Infinite Power outside himself,
of which Jesus Christ says man is child and not creature,
is a Power which makes for righteousness. People who do
right, work with others who do right, and what they do in the
end succeeds. People who do wrong jar against all other
workers, and in the end their work fails. So Herod the
Great is a sovereign of immense power ; but what he does is
wrong, and after 1800 years no trace of Herod the Great is

ii9

left upon the world. Jesus Christ, you said, is a peasant
without one faithful follower. But what he says is true, and
what he does is right ; and, at the end of 1800 years, he rules
the world. Such moral victories prove to be as certain as
that, in a country like Egypt rocked with earthquakes, a
pyramid will stand five thousand years ; but a column will
not stand, it will fall. So certainly, indeed, does right prove
itself to be might, so certainly do nations succeed, and men,
in proportion as they do right and eschew wrong, that specu-
lators are now beginning to say that this is where our idea of
right is born. They say that men could now afford to sweep
away all gospels but statistics, and live and move and have
their being, not to please any God, but to satisfy the pro-
visions which social economy makes for them. It is not so
that, in fact, men have begun. They have believed God
spoke to them : they have believed God spoke to others
holier than they. What he said they have tried to do ; and,
as they tried loyally and in faith, he has given them the
victory.

"If ye seek him, surely ye shall find him, if ye seek for
him with all your hearts." This was the promise of the
Good Spirit, as one of his eager children made it, now well
nigh four thousand years ago. Year by year, since he wrote
it clown, the men of his race, nay, the men of every race,
have sought and sought, have sought with all their hearts
indeed, to know more of God, to make all screens transpar-
ent that they might see, to break clown all barriers that they
might hear, — yes, to quicken their own minds and language
that they might understand their God. And the answer has
been returned, which that seer promised.

It is true that no man, as he muses now before his fire
at midnight, fancies that, by any blessed chance, the door
may open and the God of Heaven enter in human form, as
Jupiter was supposed to enter the cabin of Deucalion, or as
Buddha was supposed to ask for help in some Indian shed.
It is true that no man supposes that God is hiding behind a
cloud, and that the arrows of his wrath may strike the irrev-
erent, as they thought the arrows of Apollo smote Niobe
and her children. It is true that no man supposes that one
prayer more or less recalls God's distracted or forgetful
attention, now to a battle-field by Nazareth, or now to a ship-
wreck by Cyprus, as men supposed in the days of the crusad-
ers. Nor should any man now suppose that God loved Heze-

120

kiah and Josiah with other love than that with which he loved
Themistocles and Miltiades. Yet John Winthrop supposed
this, and other good men among our fathers. It is true that
no man supposes that at any moment God stands in need of
the perfume of a cloud of incense, or longs for the perfume
of a wreath of flowers. Yet there were times when men
brought him such offerings, — as if he did not have them al-
ready ! — as my boy might bring me a bunch of violets when
I had none. So far, it is true that with the world's advanc-
ing knowledge, as men's eyes see further, and their minds
understand more, the old language of worship, of reverence,
of love and wonder, has fallen away or is changed, as men
know, more and more, that God is a spirit, and that they,
his children, who are spirits too, must worship him in spirit.
This they might have known eighteen hundred years ago.
They know it now better than they knew it then. That they
are of his nature, and in his likeness, this they know as they
never knew before. That, in this world, he relies on them
to carry out his purposes, this they see, cannot help seeing,
as they read their history. That they work with him, when
they seek the right, this is every day more sure and more.
So all veils are rent. Every man becomes his own high
priest, and stands face to face with God in the Holy of
Holies, — Spirit with spirit, Life with life, child with Father.
So much nearer is the child to the answer to the question of
questions : " Will my Father hear me, if I call to him ? I
know his power, as no age till this has known it. T know
its infinite sweep, as men never suspected it before. I
know its harmony and unity. I know its beauty. I know
its wisdom, and I suspect its love. He must hear me, the
child, as I whisper, or, without whispering, grope for him.
Will he, the Father, answer ? "

Dear child, for the answer, you must do what Moses did,
and David and Isaiah ; nay, what Jesus did, and bade you
do. If you would find, you must seek. If he is to answer,
you must ask. They sought, and they found. Because they
found, they trusted. When they needed strength, they asked
for strength, and, lo ! the strength came. When they needed
light, they asked for light, and, lo ! the light came, — came
because there is identity of essence in all spiritual being and
all spiritual life ; came because God is Father, and they
are children ; came because he is a spirit, and they wor-
shipped him in spirit and in truth.

121

Such worship is easier to-day than it ever was, because tem-
ples are worth less, because altars are less needed, because
creeds are crumbling and forms are dying away, because
men know as they never knew what that word " spirit "
means, and seek God neither at Jerusalem nor at Gerizim nor
at Rome. All the more simply and easily does the child seek
the Father, all the more closely does the Father bless the
child.

SEND ME.

" Here am I : send me." — Isaiah vi., 8.

A thoughtful man, ten years my senior, was so kind as
to give me his early experience as to the power of preaching.
" I followed," he said, " with many of my young friends
who were at the bar and in business, with a thoughtful com-
pany who listened to the most promising preacher of our
time. With passionate oratory, he asked us if we were satis-
fied with the mechanical and conventional lives we led. We
were all eager to say that we were not satisfied. ' Did we
not see, ' he asked, ' that society might be set on a higher
plane, and God's law be more universally honored?' We
all hoped for it and longed for it. ' Why would we not join
shoulder to shoulder to bring in this higher life ? ' he cried.
Well, in substance we said we would join shoulder to
shoulder, if he would show us how. But, when we met Sun-
day after Sunday to learn how, — what we were to do, where
and how we were to cross Jordan, and when and how we were
to storm Jericho, — we always heard merely the same appeal
again : ' Dear friends, will you not leave this outside life that
you are leading, and mount higher to something that is more
true ? ' I am now sixty-five," said my friend. " I was then
twenty-five. I am not so hopeful as to my own ability as I
was then. But my eloquent preacher has never come be-
yond that stage of exhortation. In these forty years when I
would have gladly followed, he has never shown me the par-
ticular thing he wanted me to do at that particular hour."

If I were lecturing to a company of young clergymen, I
could not have a better text than this story. I should im-
prove it, to show what is, I am afraid, the special danger of
prophecy or of the pulpit, — the danger, namely, of dealing
with abstract propositions, and the failure in specific state-
ment of immediate and definite duty. But such is not my
purpose now. I am not speaking to many persons who pro-
pose to become preachers ; and I want to try to state a
larger lesson, and warn against a danger of far wider range
than any pulpit difficulty.

123

You have anticipated me in the advice which we should
have given to this clergyman. We should say to him, " Take
one step forward on the earth in the midst of all your proph-
ecy about soaring on wings like angels." "Teach your
hearers," we should say, " to walk, or at least to creep, while
they are getting ready to fly." Even a caterpillar crawls
before he becomes a butterfly. And, in the special instance,
this eloquent prophet would really have met the requisition,
had he done this, — had he said to these young aides who ral-
lied round him, " We do not know exactly how the kingdom
of God shall come in, but we can at least teach jig-sawing to
three or four of these street-boys " ; or, " We can take an
orphan out of the almshouse, and place him in a cheerful
home on a western prairie " ; or, " We can go into our vil-
lage canvass, and rip up the ring that nominates the county
supervisors, and so take one step toward clearing out the
mad-house in the county town"; or, "We can start the
neighborhood on a system of sewerage which shall relieve us
from the risk of fever and ague." And if my prophet of a
heavenly kingdom had in any such way ballasted the flight
of his winged words even by lumps of lead, no matter how
petty the thing, not one of his pupils would charge upon him
to-day the burden of their failure, as, perhaps, they do.

This is all I say about preaching. My business to-day is
not with preachers, but with other conscientious men, and
with women as well, whatever be their calling. Are we not
all tempted as this prophet was tempted? The danger is
that in reading the Bible, in making our religious resolu-
tions, in looking into the infinite range of life, in trying for
as great a reality as communion with an infinite God, we
shall set on one side, as if it belonged to a different effort
and a special resolution, the immediate business to which
somebody must attend to-day, — as if indeed that were petty,
worldly, common, or unclean.

The mathematicians do not calculate the flight of a comei
simply by observing its place at one end of that flight and
at the other. This they can seldom do, if ever. They cal-
culate it by the study of the "infinitely small difference
between the two successive states or places of the comet.''
Here is a good practical suggestion for our achievements in
heavenly or religious life. We want to see God and know
him. We want to make heaven real, that we may not fear
death. We want to live as immortals live. Yes. And this
is a great effort. Because we want to know this and to do

e must begin as these astronomers begin, with a very
little part of this infinite orbit: we must study well and
manage righdy the infinitely small difference between one
minute of life and the next minute. We must attend per-
fectly to some one detail to-day. if we would rightly project
the orbit or the life which is to run through eterr.

So falsely has religion been taught, however, that this
lesson is neglected, and is unpopular. X a am an wanted to
be cured of his leprosy, and he was told to wash himself.
He did not like the injunction. People seldom like such
lessons, which imply that the infinitely small teaches the
to the infinitely great. Here is Lent coming upon us now.
It is the season when, in our northern zones, man's body is
more or less reduced by the absence of the sun in winter.
The Catholic Church, with its accustomed wisdom, has seized
the occasion for a season of religious reflection and commun-
ion ; and we all follow the suggestion in one way or another.
I can imagine that you see the reason for giving up the the-
atre for a while ; for dancing less for six weeks to come ; for
reading more, and more thoughtfully ; for serious and devout

dance on some special course of religious instruction.
You wish you were nearer God, and thought of him more
You knock at the doors of the Madame Guyon and
the Thomas a. Kempis, the Bernard and the Bonaventura,
who have sung with most rapture and have prayed with
most certa: only I could clearly as

see, or hear such ravishing accents as they he^ Thi

your cry, and it is a very noble n truth, if Ma-

dame Guyon or St. Bernard come to your help, if, wher
knock, either one of them opens the door and looks out far
enough to answer, it is to give the perfectly commonplace
direction. It is to say: " If you mean to travel to the Holy

of God, you must begir zeping off your own front

d«K>r-step. And, when you hav u must keep it

in." People hate to hear this ans ProP

h.ue to make the But it must be made. Jesus

g it all the tim_ T»y do ye call me Lord,

Lord, when you will not do the meanest thing I tell you to
do? How will you enter the kingdom of God, unless
repent of this or that petty habit which debases you, and
unless you keep it under ? It is idle to talk of • and

heaven, un : can attend to the things of earth and of

tin.

[25

Now, when people shrink from this injunction, the diffi-
culty is not the simple difficulty which the pupil feels who
is told to do a little thing instead of a great one. Thu>. a
boy comes to me to learn how to paint historical pictures,
and I tell him to begin by copying a mug. He does not like
that ; but he sees some reason in it, for the drawing the mug
and the painting the picture seem to be in the same line.
The religious difficultv is far deeper, for the religious aspi-
rant does not believe that the little thing demanded is in the
same line with the great thing he seeks. He seeks to be-
gin to be "an archangel, and he does not choose to begin
with being a street-sweeper; for, at bottom, he does not be-
lieve that archangels sweep streets or that street-sweepers
develop into archangels. He wants to know God, to see
him and hear him, to pray to him and receive from him :
and he does not believe that he gains this knowledge or this
insight by knowing man, or by converse or intimacy with
the things of man. He wants to enter eternal life; to "ac-
cept the Universe,'* as Margaret Fuller savs ; to live in infi-
nite relations, as the philosophers say. He does not believe
that any intimacy or relationship with time can train to that
eternal affair. Such disbelief sends men into hermitages or
puts them on the top of pillars for their devotions. Such
disbelie: point to all the stories of hypocrites, as they

are called, who offer loud prayers at the corners of the street,
while at home they abuse their families and cheat their cus-
tomers. The familiar Southern story tells of a prayer-meet-
ing of negroes, where a man proposed that the worshippers
should pledge themselves not to rob hen-roosts, and was told
he disturbed the harmony of the meeting. We laugh at that
absurdity. But it really reveals, in its droll way, this doubt,
which lingers low down in people's minds, whether their de-
meanor here or their conduct here, in what they please to
call the little things of time and of the earth, is an essential
and integral affair in their aspirations and ^les toward

the life with God or the life in heaven.

It is therefore, as I have said, to this precise point that
our Saviour addresses himself: and so- do all his successful
apostles. He undertakes to show us. when he deals with
the beggar in the gutter, with the outcast leper, who shrieks
to him far away, that he is dealing with a child of God, who
really, and not in metaphor, partakes of the divine nature.
So. when he welcomes the little children, who cannot even

126

speak perhaps, but who have, all the same, their own ways
of expressing faith, hope, and love, — which are the only
eternal attributes we know of, whether in babies or in arch-
angels,— Christ's whole injunction is : " If you would come
nearer to God, come nearer to the children of God. If you
would understand God better, see that you understand his
children better; and, if you would gain keener sense of his
constant and present help, gain it by extending that help
yourself, in your own ways, to those in need from you." It
is, all through, spark from his fire. If you would learn what
spiritual power is, try the effect of spiritual power. If you
would know that love rules the universe, find out by experi-
ment how far love will go in the management of your own
household. Such is the key to Jesus' somewhat blunt re-
fusal, made more than once, to discuss what I may call the
transcendentalisms of a religious life. He will not do it.
He turns attention to something quite commonplace in their
immediate surroundings. Wash this leper, and you draw
closer to God. Stop this baby's crying, and make the little
darling laugh again, and you have worked one of the infinite
miracles ; for you have shown the power of a loving spirit
over the things of time. This is the explanation of the
steady "Follow me!" to those who wanted to enter the in-
conceivable kingdom of an infinite heaven. It is in dusty
travel in the by-ways of Galilee that they are to begin to
walk with cherubim and seraphim in a world without meas-
ure and without time.

Duty — square, solid duty — is one essential step to the
noblest or highest communion with the Infinite. Let a man
remember that. Nor let him be confused by the fallacies
of "small" and "great." "I am so small," a man says,
" my work for God or with him is so petty, that God cannot
stop to think of me or of it." All this belongs to the old
heathen notions of God, as if he were a giant-man, larger
than we are. And all this vanishes when a man learns that
spirit and the power of spirit cannot be weighed on scales,
counted by figures, or measured by tape. For myself, as I
have already said, I received one of the greatest lessons in
the science of Eternal Life, when., in the study of mathe-
matics, I came upon that law which I have cited, by which
the infinite hyperbola of a comet's flight is calculated from
the differential, infinitely small, which marks its motion in
an infinitely brief period of time. Since then, I have needed

127

no other parable to show me that, with God, nothing is small
and nothing great. I have heard men who use the micro-
scope say that they had learned the same lesson, when they
found the perfect organization of a tuft of mould which the
naked eye cannot see, but which shows symmetry, beauty,
and law, as perfectly as nebulae in the void or the perfect
constellation. Always man, though he be a pigmy with
giants, finds he is a giant with pigmies, as Gulliver, who
thought himself a mite in Brobdignag, found he was a mon-
ster in Liliput. And this law may be traced out in all
forms of service. The boy who shod the field-marshal's
horse was necessary to the field-marshal. The blear-eyed
beldame who taught Milton his letters was necessary to
Milton. The mouse who gnawed the net was necessary to
the lion. When once we know that it is not as separate
creatures that we are working, for separate purposes, but as
those who work in one great organism with God and for God,
why, it will be with us as it was in the conservatory with
Mendelssohn, — you will strike the infrequent drum-beat, or
play on the disagreeable trombone, with pride and eager
ness as if you led the violins, if only the Great Master asks
you, and you carry out the harmony of his great design.

I am not now addressing myself to men and women to
whom the Higher Life seems a delusion and folly, who are
satisfied with this earth and what it can do for them. The
statement I make, and such argument or illustration as 1
have tried, is nothing to them. I speak now to men and
women who really wish the}- felt God's presence more real,
and were sure of it more often. 1 suppose them eager to
feel heaven more a reality, and those whom thev love there
still loving them. I suppose them willing to work with God,
if only the certainty could come to them that he cares for
them.

You have come to-day to church, to join in prayer and
hymn, seeking this higher life. You will seek for books of
devotion, written by those who have bathed in this ocean ;
and you hope they will teach you to swim in it. You curi-
ously inquire if this or that ritual, nay, if fasting, self-denial,
or penance, will bring you and God any closer to each
other. For which experiment and inquiry, 1 offer my tender-
est hopes and sympathies. But do not rest on them alone.
With them and a part of them, a step toward quicker faith
and deeper insight, is this square and simple discharge of

128

some bit of present duty. There is your service for Lent.
There is the first step, which must come before you take a
second. Let no man resolve that he will enter on the eter-
nal life and measure himself with angels and archangels,
unless he determine on the specific task which shall begin
that course to-day. Thus, he will read an hour to a blind
man. or he will walk to the jail and counsel a prisoner.
He will find his way into the hospital, and lighten the long
Sunday of a sick child. He will give strength to the failing
resolution of a drunkard. He will encourage the aspiration
of his own child by coming down to his level. He will speak
to the beggar-boy who is wondering at the treasures of a
shop-window, will walk home with the little fellow, and
become his friend. He will read in the newspaper, and
will heed the imploring appeal of the Associated Charities.
He will courteously welcome his busy neighbor, and will
assent when he calls to urge him to attend a hearing at the
City Hall or at the State House. In one of these ways, or
in some way, he will find how he can enter into the common
life and do his share in the common work. This is to act as
a child of God, and to act with other children of God. And
this, in the success of one distinct experiment, is to find that
spirit rules flesh, that the eternal law is stronger than
time, — a discovery which, when once made, is never dis-
proved or forgotten.

It is only the first step which costs. And it does cost. It
costs resolve and determination. I renounce my separate
will, and I accept the will of God. And, on the other hand,
who can take the first step can take all steps. He can mount
on wings as eagles. He can walk, and not faint. He can
run, and not be weary. That man enters into the infinite life,
who seeks and finds a place where he can work with God.
The train of the angels of the Eternal filled the heaven.
The gigantic seraphim, the archangels, and all the host were
in presence. The earth was filled with the glory of the Lord,
and at his voice the pillars of the temple trembled. Least of
all, you would say, in the unnumbered assemblage was this
fearful man, so weak and faint, who describes it all. But,
when the moment of crisis comes, when the Lord of Hosts
needs a messenger, when he asks, " Whom shall we send ? "
then this trembling listener becomes peer of the noblest in
that great hierarchy of God's children, simply because in that
service he volunteers.

"Then said I, Here am I : send me."

THE RELIGION OF AMERICA.

" When he had come near to Jerusalem he beheld the city, and
said, 'Oh, if thou hadst known, m this thy day, the things which belong
to thy peace! But now are they hid from thine eyes.'' — Luke xix., 42.

We can look back and see what the leaders of Israel could
not see. Jesus Christ himself had appealed to them. With
his marvellous command of men, he had tried Annas and
Caiaphas and Nicodemus and Alexander and the rest, and
to all visible purposes he had failed. He had been forced
to take other measures, which have in nineteen centuries
largely succeeded.

What was possible, so far as we can see, was this.

Here was the whole Roman Empire at the very acme of
its power. And all through Roman Europe was an eager
craving for the mystery, the secret of the East. Men were
looking eastward, in their crude Western power and wealth,
for Asiatic art, Asiatic learning, Asiatic culture, Asiatic re-
ligion. It was just as to-day a bonanza king of Nevada
or California sends his son eastward to Harvard College,
his daughter to Paris, buys his pictures in Rome, and in
his own steamboat sails up the Nile. At that moment, the
Lord of Life comes to Jerusalem. To the rulers of Jeru-
salem, he offers the keys of a new kingdom. He urges them
to throw overboard the local formulas of a local religion. He
asks them to announce to the world a God not peculiar to
Zion or to Judah. He shows them, in terse epigram and in
picturesque parable, that all the world is God's family, and
that this is not true merely of one handful of Abrahamites.
And they will not hear him. They stone him. They ex-
communicate him. Once more, he goes to make a last ap-
peal ; and then it is that he says so sadly: "If thou hadst
known in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy
peace. But now they are hid from thine eyes."

They refuse him again. Nay, they seize him and kill him.

130

And, before that generation passes, the Pharisee pride is
forever broken, which would keep Judah separate from the
world. The Roman legions close about Jerusalem. The
mounds and battering-rams of Titus rise against it. The
mad soldiery storms at last the wretched city, torn by quar-
rel and faint with famine. A torch is thrown into the midst
of the gorgeous temple carvings. The flame runs from cur-
tain to gallery, from gallery to roof ; and our lovely Zion,
the glory of the world, becomes a ruin and a desolation.

There is a double lesson : first, of the vanity of local pride ;
second, of the supremacy of spiritual forces over material
forces, the lesson of the eternal empire of truth and right.
It is to this last that jesus himself appeals. That nation
prospers which understands the spiritual law of its own pros-
perity. That nation fails which does not accept the principle
of its greatness, but is resting on some incident external, and
therefore transitory. If Annas or Caiaphas or the rest of
the Jew rulers could have been made to see that the power
of Israel was all in her recognition of God as a spirit, the
unseen God, well for Israel. Victory over the world for
Israel, victory going forth from this very Jerusalem ! But if
Annas or Caiaphas or the rest try to keep up that gorgeous
temple, those particular rites, this tribute to the high priest,
and that etiquette by which the circumcised are higher than
the uncircumcised, woe to them all ! The besom will sweep,
the threshing-mill will winnow, and such chaff will all be
burned with unquenchable fire.

It is impossible, when we transfer this critical appeal to
our own country, in this day of her glory and success, — it is
impossible not to see that the same temptations seduce her,
under which poor Israel stumbled, fell, and was trampled to
death. For there are on every side to-day, as there were on
one side then, those who conscientiously substitute ecclesi-
astical method for the intensity of religion in the nation's
life, and in the forecast of her history. Annas and Caiaphas,
then, believed in an unseen God. Yes : in their fashion, they
prayed to him. But, all the same, they had this professional
notion, — that he must be worshipped with this incense and
that sacrifice, this procession and that liturgy, this feast clay
and that fast day. And when the great Reformer would
have swept all this away, would have made the world to be
the temple, and all honest speech a liturgy, they nailed him
to the cross. Well, what is the aspect of the religious life of

i3i

America today ? A hundred years ago, the country uncon-
sciously settled the basis of its religion. In its political con-
stitutions, it virtually declared that each man is child of God,
and one man as much child of God as another. For it
staked everything on a suffrage which at once became uni-
versal. It trusted its destiny to the weakest and meanest, as
much as to the highest and strongest. Since that time, in
the civil war and in the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments,
the country has ratified that determination ; nay, has sealed
it with its best blood. It proclaims the " honor all men " as
the central principle of its existence. Though those men be
black or red, it honors them. It admits that they are all
children of God. And this childlike relation of all to God, —
God's fatherly care of each and all, and their consequent
mutual dependence as brothers in one God-born family, —
this is the basis of the country's religion. Now, it is to such
a country as this that an Italian prince, crowned with three
crowns and sitting on seven hills, comes with the most
amiable and affectionate accent, and says: "The Virgin
Mary gave you all to me. God speaks to my heart as he
will never speak to yours. Give up this phantom of an
unseen Father, and obey the directions of a present father,
whom you can see and handle, who lives only four or five
thousand miles away, and who thinks of you as often as once
a week, when his attention happens to be directed across the
ocean."

And this Latin-speaking imitator of the dark ages is only
a little larger and a little more absurd than twenty other
popes, who, in their way, are cooing or sighing, scolding or
cajoling, as they would seduce this free-born people from
its enthusiasm for freedom. For, whenever any ecclesiastical
machinery pushes forward any ecclesiastical puppet to make
his dumb, wooden gestures in some little play-house, before
this free-born people, in the hope of persuading it to substi-
tute the judgment of others for the personal conscience, or
to pray by proxy or by machinery where God seeks personal
communion, the managers of those ecclesiastical puppet-
shows are only so many lesser popes, trying to beckon us
back to the lethargy of the past. One sometimes sees, in
our time, one of the miracles. You can see one, in the start
of glad surprise with which a man, trained for half his life to
believe that machinery and organization and doctrine are
religion, wakes all of a sudden to find that religion is life. I
have seen such a man, who for twenty years had painfully

132

assisted in carrying on the mechanism of the Presbyterian
Church. He had contributed for this mission and that col-
lege, he had voted for this and that delegate, and had com-
missioned this and that elder. He had fasted in this fast,
and given thanks in that thanksgiving ; nay, had bound his
conscience as he was directed, by this or that article of this
or that creed. I say I have seen such a person, when the
great miracle of God was worked upon him, — when he saw,
almost of a sudden, that all this was not itself religion, but
only a sort of hemp and matting by which timid men had
protected religion from sun and air. The Saviour speaks
to such a man, and says, " Awake, arise ! " And you see
his eyelids slowly open, you see the color flush his marble
cheek, you see his lips gasp for fresh air, and then the smile
of heaven itself lightens up the man as he knows and first
feels that this is pure religion,— for man to seek God, and
for God to bless man.

Particular attention is called at this moment to the tyr-
anny of the Mormon ecclesiasticism in Utah. An admi-
rable instance this is, for it is visible and tangible, of the
tyranny which an organized priesthood can wield as against
even a large number of unorganized men and women. But
that tyranny in Utah is not a whit worse than the tyranny
with which the Jesuit fraternity rules the territory of New
Mexico, or the tyranny with which the Roman Catholic
Church wants to sway the education of the whole coun-
try, or with which in practice it often does govern the city
of New York. And there are a dozen other little ecclesias-
ticisms in the country, which gladly exercise the same sort
of power on some petty sphere, whenever, by bad luck, they
have the opportunity.

Thank God that all these efforts do seem to us puny.
For, among a thousand blessings which surrounded the birth
of this nation, one was that the infallible Church of Rome
was fortunately at that moment in one of its paroxysms of
inefficient lethargy, and for half a century could not mix
nor meddle in our affairs. Other ecclesiastical organiza-
tions were as weak ; and to this happiness we owe it that
the constitutions of the country, as 1 said, are based on
each man's separate right to come to God alone, without
the bolsterings or promptings of any priest or priesthood.
Such efforts of the sects, therefore, as I describe, whether of
the great sect of Rome or any of her petty imitators, are but

133

the puny attacks of outsiders who assail an establishment,
now well assured by the triumphs of one hundred years.
Well for the country that this is so. The conservatism of
this country is thus on the side of freedom. And, when
you appeal to the American to maintain the American
system of religion, you appeal to him to maintain the ab-
solute freedom in which child comes to Father, and Father
to child, with never man or rag or dusty form between.
This freedom in religion is the central truth on which rest
the glory of the country and its strength. And if Jesus
were to look upon this nation, in this day of its power, it
would be to pray and to hope that this central glory of its
glories might not be hid from its eyes.

For it is to be observed all along that the country is pro-
foundly religious. It believes in right, and it wants to have
right done. The Puritans did not cross the ocean for noth-
ing, nor the Huguenots. Such men as Asbury and Brainerd
did not preach for nothing. Such lessons as the Revolu-
tion taught, of great made from small, by the mere power of
faith, were not neglected. And that eternal experience, by
which people who live much in the open air, in hourly pres-
ence ot nature, become thoughtful and religious people, has
made a religious race from the pioneers and settlers of the
frontier. The leader of Americans, who may wish to lead
them forward in the line of the destiny which has triumphed
thus far, leads a religious race in the methods of personal
and spontaneous worship, with constant reference to the
eternal laws. He does not appeal to this man's selfishness
or to the greed of that community. He does not teach the
wretched doctrine of a bald economy, to induce them to
pile up gold or iron or brass. He appeals to the highest
motive men can grasp, and cites the noblest law he knows.
This law is a law outside themselves : it is the infinite law
of an infinite God. because this people is at its very heart
religious.

I have lately been asked to prepare a short memoir on the
Religion of America in 1SS0, for the reading of those who
may live in Boston in 1980. It is to be enclosed in a copper
box, with many other memoirs of the present condition of
the city, not to be opened till the centennial celebration a
hundred years from this time. I have never found any lit-
erary task so difficult. Whenever I approach it, I ask for
a little more time ; and the first word of it is as yet unwritten.
It seems well-nigh certain that no large ecclesiastical organ-

134

ization now existing will exist then without serious changes.
In those changes, it is very likely that the methods of men's
worship may largely change. It is difficult, therefore, to say
what features of the religion of to-day will have most interest
for a reader then. One dreads a reader of whom he knows
so little. So far the memoir is hard to write. But this is
easy : to say that, on the whole, the men of this time are
seeking to do the right thing, and eager to find what it is.
Some of them ask priests to tell of them, some of them ask
poets, some of them ask chemists, and some ask mediums
or seers, some try their own experiments, and make their
own study of history ; but, on the whole, people want to
have the right thing done. And, if they shall be misled,
they will be misled by those who pretend to lead them rightly.
This is to say that they are, on the whole and at heart, a
religious people.

If they know the thing that belongs to their peace, in
these the clays of their glory, they will hold to this simple
love of right and determination to win it, each man for him-
self, without submission to external authority. Dr. Furness
has said — and I think the remark is true — that outside a
republic no critics seem to understand what Jesus Christ
means, when he speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven. Out-
side a republic, even learned men cannot be trained to under-
stand how there can be a kingdom with no king but God.
Inside a republic, — praise God!— men can understand
this. Inside a republic, men understand how the least
man is essential to the greatest, and the greatest to the
least. They understand how he that would be first of all
shall be servant of all. They ought to understand the whole
law of Christ, which is that man shall " bear his brother's
burdens." And to understand that law is one step toward
fulfilling it. The man who leads this people will keep it true
to this great law of mutual service. The rich will help the
poor, and the poor the rich. The East will help the West,
and the West the East. The carpenter will help the gold-
smith, and the goldsmith the carpenter. No man will live
for himself. No man will talk much about his own things ;
for all men will be seeking the common-weal of the common-
wealth, and be eager for the prosperity of the trade, the
mining, the manufacture, the farming, the education, and the
worship of the whole.

One of the wisest and one of the most instructive of the
great men of our time has put on record his dread of this

135

common life and common interest in America. It is tha
pure man, that clear thinker, Stuart Mill, who points out the
clanger that, with equal rights to all, with the same training
in the same circumstance to all, we shall all grow to be like
each other. If we go to the same schools, study the same
books, have each a homestead farm of one hundred and
sixty acres, in a land without mountain horizon, or any
desert of clay or gravel, how can we fail to lose our individ-
uality ? he asks. Is there not danger that we shall become
as like as the pegs cut by the same machine ? Well, it is not
enough to say in reply that we do not yet see this. Mr.
Longfellow is not like Dr. Wayland, Dr. Waylahd is not like
Mr. Edison, Mr. Edison is not like Mr. Tilden, Mr. Tilden
is not like Bishop Simpson, Bishop Simpson is not like Jay
Cooke, Jay Cooke is not like Frederick Douglass, Mr. Doug-
lass is not like Mr. Garrison, and Mr. Garrison is not like
Mr. Longfellow. We must not say this in reply to Mr. Mill,
because it is conceded that these men were trained by the
past, and that there is not yet time for the destruction of
individuality by the life in common. What is the future to
show of individual power among men who have confessedly
been bearing each other's burdens ?

Well, let us say frankly that it is very clear that great individ-
uality has not been an unmixed blessing. The individuality
of Napoleon the Great was a curse to Europe for fifty years,
and hardly works any benefit up to this hour. The individ-
uality of Dominic in his conduct of the Albigensian crusade
set back the civilization of Europe for three centuries. If
we here have hit on any device by which the tyranny of one
man shall be held in check by the steady, united force of
fifty million, the loss of individuality is more than compen-
sated. Is there any danger that, if another Shakspere
should be born here, another Goethe, or another Stuart Mill.
we should lose the advantage which the individuality of
those men has given to the world ? I do not see it. Such
lives will assert themselves. And if, while we secure such
blessing, the whole theory and drift of our social order is to
make man stand by man and be his brother's keeper, there
is hope — shall I say for the first time? — that here the real
genius of mankind shall have perfect chance. Man is God's
child. Therefore, man is man's brother. Till the world
gives this chance for brother to work with brother, each
brother on each other depending, the world does not fully
know what man is, or what man is good for. If any man

136

believe that Jesus Christ knew what man is, that man must
see that man has no full chance for his full being, till he live
thus in mutual relationship with his fellow-man, and that on
an even plane. The prayer of Jesus Christ and his injunc-
tion are that none shall be our master, but that we shall be
all brethren. The plan of Jesus Christ and his prophecy
are for a commonwealth, where we shall all give thus, and all
share, — not in any stupid communism, not in the surrender
of one's own rights or one's own life, but in that noble love
in which the lord of the feast asks to the feast even the halt
and the lame, in that loyal benevolence in which the Good
Samaritan chooses his brother where he finds a traveller
stripped and bleeding by the highway. That man truly ad-
vances the American idea who governs his life by this Chris-
tian idea, in which a man learns,, not for his own amusement,
but that he may teach others. He educates the beggar's
child, not simply for the child's good, but for the good of the
community. He plants and reaps, not that he may feed him-
self, but that he may feed the rest. He spins and weaves,
not that he may wrap himself in his own cocoon, but that he
may do his share to clothe mankind. He lives, not for him-
self, but for the commonwealth of his brethren.

" I have given you an example that ye should do as I have
done unto you."

" A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one
another. By this shall all men know that ye are my dis-
ciples, if ye have love one to another."

" This bread is broken for each and all of you."

" This cup is the token of my blood, which is shed for each
and all of you."

PARABLE AND BIBLE.

" Without a parable spake he not unto them, as they were able to hear
it." — Mark iv., 33.

This is the severe condensation in Mark's Gospel of a
statement made more at length in all three of the Galilean
Gospels of Jesus' method. He justifies it or shows its prin-
ciple in two recorded conversations. The people who hear
are stupid, he says. They will not understand much. Per-
haps some of them will understand nothing. But they will
remember, if what is told is told in a picturesque or dramatic
way. Therefore, he uses the method of teaching by example
or illustration, that hearing they may hear, even if they do
not understand. That phrase has become a proverb. And
it may be observed that long before his time, and ever since,
this is the method adopted by all moral teachers who have
to do with the people generally, with what we call the rank
and file. It was the method of Jotham in Judah and x-Esop
in Phrygia hundreds of years before Christ, as it is to-day
the method of every stump-speaker addressing the populace
in a public meeting. " I will tell you a little story," he says,
if he thinks their attention flags. It is to be noticed that
in St. John's narratives of what passed in Jerusalem between
the Saviour and Nicodemus, or between him and the priests
and Pilate, there are no parables. This is one of the points
urged with great eagerness by those who would prove that
this Gospel was not written by one who was an eye-witness.
But it does not prove much. We should not argue that
Abraham Lincoln was not a story-teller because we found
no "little stories" in his public messages, or in some one
record of his conversations with Lord Lyons or with the
chiefs of his cabinet.

What Jesus Christ means by a parable is a presentation
to the eye or the imagination, or both, of some moral or
spiritual principle. The representation may be imaginary,
as in the parable of the wedding feast, or it may be some-
thing passing under their sight, like the growing of mustard-

138

seed or the spark running through tinder. And it has been
thought also that sometimes he took some incident well
known in his own time, as, that the story of the dishonest
steward was a real experience known to his hearers, or even
the story of the good Samaritan. This is certain, that when
he said, "What king, going to make war against another
king, sitteth not down first to consider whether he be able
with ten thousand to meet him that cometh against him with
twenty thousand ? " he used an historical parable taken from
King Herod's position just at that time. War was brewing
on the frontier between Herod, King of Galilee, and Aretas,
the King of Arabia. Herod eventually lost his throne in
the result ; and he had on his mind much this question, when
Christ spoke. Thus, a parable may be the description of a
natural process, of an event in history, or of an imagined
event. If it be a dramatic representation of the result of
some moral principle, it is a " parable," in the use these
writers make of that word.

The world's instinct for story-telling and story-hearing is
thus distinctly recognized and approved by the greatest of
teachers. The instinct which makes all people delight
in the drama is a part of it. Some of you heard Miss
La Flesche here on Friday, when she avouched the eager-
ness of our Indian tribes for such legends as those which Mr.
Longfellow has made familiar to us in " Hiawatha." And
the same eagerness appears almost everywhere. Oddly
enough, the only considerable permanent opposition to this
instinct has appeared among the professed theologians of
this very Christian Church, which was itself built on a
corner-stone of parable. The standard theologians, and the
preachers most in formal ecclesiastical repute of the Church,
have always presented the moral which they had in hand,
with a dry or dull, decorous omission of any parable to illus-
trate it. 'it is thus that the phrase "dull as a sermon" is a
proverb now. And another proverb might be made, which
should say that people forget the average sermon as they
forget nothing else in literature. I remember that I have
myself been condemned, by what is called " a leading
religious journal " of this country, for one of my own poor
efforts in parable or fiction with a moral purpose, as being
"a forger and counterfeiter."* This decorous habit resem-

* Since I preached this sermon, I have heard of a church, not three hundred miles
from Boston, where some advanced reformers bought a Sunday-school library from an
establishment which might have been thought safe, — the Baptist Sunday School Society.
When the books arrived, the trustees of the church sequestered them simply because the
stories in them were fictitious.

139

bles that of some dried-up old school-mistress, trying to
teach a child to repeat from .Esop's Fables the " moral " of
the story of the Fox and Grapes. The child knows the
story, but cannot repeat the moral. In face of this habit,
the in-formal prophets of the Church, the unecclesiastical
re-formers, delight in parable. Luther, Wesley, Whitefield,
were never afraid to preach as their Master preached. And,
in the Catholic Church, the same is true of Fe'nelon, of
St. Francis of Bernard, and of Savonarola.

At the present moment, this method of teaching is con-
demned in similar fashion by quite another set of moral
re-formers and advisers. They are men who are very tired
of churches and preachers and old-fashioned gospels. They
are indeed indisposed to worship, though, by a certain figure
of speech, they are disposed "to worship truth." It seems
to me very curious that all this school' — the extreme agnos-
tic, the more doubtful sceptic, and, in general, the utilitarian
moralist — seem to -propose to dispense with the parable in
the teaching of the world with exactly the same hatred with
which high and dry Orthodoxy hates it. Dr. Emmons or
Jonathan Edwards would have put into the fire a play of
Shakspere or Fe'nelon's Telemachus. The advanced mor-
alist of to-day seems to hate dramatic illustration as bitterly.
He proposes to us, if we assemble people for instruction,
to give up from the Bible its wealth of historical illustration,
and to satisfy ourselves with the Book of Proverbs and
Ecclesiastes. He asks us to introduce into the place of
Isaiah and the Book of Samuel select passages from the
Veda, from Zoroaster, and Confucius, driest of the dry.
Macaulay said of the Puritans that they disliked bear-
baiting, not because it hurt the bear, but because it amused
the people. It seems to me, as I read the modern ghastly
suggestions for improved worship, that the central purpose
is a like desire to strike out of religious training everything
that is imaginative or entertaining.

The forefathers of this school, in the French Revolution,
tried just the same experiment, — may I not say committed
the same folly.'' Thus, they made a calendar to take the
place of the Roman Catholic calendar. The madness of
that day was to instruct people in physics, or what they
called " natural philosophy " and " natural history." So
the new calendar assigned to each day a specific subject
for study and contemplation. Thus, where the Church had

140

called men's attention, say, to the faith and martyrdom of
St. Sebastian, the new calendar would ask them to give the
day, say, to learning the culture and qualities of pepper. Or,
where the Church set aside All Souls' Day or All Saints'
Day, for the memory of all unnamed souls and saints who
had set the King's work forward, the new calendar suggested
the chemical formula of the proportions of common salt as
the subject for that day's contemplation. In this particular
form, this absurdity belongs to the folly of that time, in which
people mistook the laboratory, which is one beautiful porch
of God's temple, for the Holy of Holies itself. The present
drift seems to be just as absurd. It supposes ethical science,
which is another porch of the temple, to be the Holy of
Holies. When any one asks me to give up reading from this
pulpit the story of Joseph, and to substitute for it the most
accurate and what seems to me the most true statement of
intuitive morals, even by the best writer of our time, he
seems to be committing this same absurdity. As matter of
history, the Buddhists, who are at this moment quite in
fashion among Christians, have tried this long ago. They
have temples in Japan, of which the walls are adorned with
ethical texts from their best writers. The worship consists
in the reading of these texts by such people as feel that they
need improvement in those lines. But the misfortune, alas !
is that the temples are empty ; for the people who would be
most improved by the texts are occupied elsewhere, and
those who do not need them stay at home to carry them
into execution.

Wholly unlike this didactic and abstract system is the
system by which Jesus Christ inculcated religion. He chose
to teach by example. And his system has been carried out
on the largest scale, a larger scale even than that of his own
earthly ministry, in the method by which the world has, in
fact, learned and maintained its religion. It is from those
great dramas, in which nations rise and fall in thousands of
years, that men learn the laws by which nations live. It is
in the faith or the brutality of other men and other women
that the people who come after them learn what it is to obey
God and what it is to forget him. Men want to put all this
into a code, to refer to the code by an index, and to teach
the code by a catechism. But God chooses to teach his law
by the Reported Cases. Those cases are the great dramas
of history. The world never tires of them, never learns the

141

lesson to the bottom, but never finds it can state it better.
From the record of such cases, it brings together its Bible,
and, in practice, learns and teaches its religion. What provi-
dence is, in the long run, the world learns, as it reads how
Abraham left the beastliness of materialism and nature-
worship behind him, and resolutely marched westward.
How good comes out of evil, the world learns when it sees
Jacob and his clans fed by the prudence and tenderness of
Joseph. How tyranny dies, — and the great lesson of free-
dom instead of slavery, are the lessons of Egypt and the
march through the desert. Law and the worth of law are
taught, as that mob of slaves becomes, in a generation, a
nation of freemen. And so you may go on through the
Bible. Now, you cannot teach those lessons in the abstract.
But, in the experience of thousands of years, you come to
know what empire they hold over men's affections and their
reason, when they are taught with all the picturesque scenery,
with all the personal passion, with all the living intensity of
the biographies of men and of women.

Of our Bible, one special element of value for our Western
life incalculably is that it is written by men who are not
afraid to speak of God as a Living Friend. They speak of
God as He, and not as It. They speak of his presence in
men's affairs. This is not natural to the Western races. In
the Iliad, the men and women take their turns one day, and
the gods and goddesses another. The Old Testament
writers saw and knew that God could speak by Moses' lips,
or rule in Joshua's leadership, or prompt Gideon's strategy ;
and they did not fear to say so. The eternal God comes in
as a present actor in human affairs. The Bible, therefore,
is not merely a book of dramatic interest, teaching men by
example ; but it is a book where the examples involve spirit-
ual power. From end to end, it supposes and it states that
the Idea creates the Fact, that Spirit rules Matter, that the
Word makes and controls the Thing. This statement of
what is the real substance, — namely, the soul or life, — with
the corresponding statement that things, bodily and visible,
are but transitory forms, gives dignity and character to what
would else be petty in these histories. True, you can find
the same lesson in all history. But you do not find it every-
where written in this Eastern naivete' or simplicity. This is
indeed the distinction of Eastern thought, habit, and expres-
sion. It is the peculiar glory of Eastern literature. Those

142

Eastern nations were never startled by the idea of spiritual
power, unseen, incalculable, but always present. So they
never made the attempt which Western nations are always
making, to simplify matters by supposing that such spiritual
power acts by starts, comes in of a sudden, and is then for
ages withdrawn, to wait and wait, and then to come in again.
Here is the key to the difference between the Eastern
sacred books and our cold-blooded criticisms and commen-
taries upon them. Take the Arabian 'Nights, which are
confessedly fictions. Those poets fill full their pages with
superhuman action. Fairies and giants, genii and spirits,
are woven wholly into the narrative. You cannot separate
them. The worlds of the invisible and the visible, the
worlds of spirit and of matter, are wrought in close together.
And, though the whole is written as a fiction, it shows the
habit and tone of thought of him who wrote it. But in any
Greek or Roman poem, though written in as simple times and
hardly less as a fiction, the author brings in now his gods
and now his men, but with such careful distinction that they
hardly appear on the same scene. The author is worried
and ill at ease when they do. There is the habit of mind of
Western nations, so far as spiritual conceptions go. The acts
of God are read separately from the acts of men. The laws
of God are one thing. and the laws of men are another, to
the careless eye. Religion is religion, and business is busi-
ness. Sunday and Monday may be separated as quite dif-
ferent in spirit. The church and the street, the hymn and
the song, sacred music and daily music, sacred history and
profane history, sacred reading and profane reading, have
been too long separated thus in general estimation. As if
beneath all life, all action, all duty, there were not one spirit,
one law. one God. All this is changed, when you read the
Bible. God and man, man and God, God with man, man
with God, — these are the actors — shall I say the heroes? —
of the story, one and inseparable all the way through.

I wish some imaginative author, who should have humor
enough to show the ridiculous side of what is absurd, would
draw for us the picture of a colony, taken into a new region
of the world, under the auspices of the Gradgrind school
in morals and religion. One would like to have a fair state-
ment of what the third or fourth generation would be in a
world educated without fairy tales or the Arabian Nights,
without Bibles or prophecies, on the hard-baked food of util-

itarian ethics, demonstrated by the greatest good of the
greatest number. This is, perhaps, not the place for such
a narrative, as I am not the person to attempt it. But the
lesson would be worth teaching and learning. Without
working out that picture, you need only take the average
Hymn-Book, and you have an illustration of what the world's
Bible would be, if the trained teachers of the world had the
arranging of it. The ghastly hymns, which they call "didac-
tic hymns," which indeed sound like a school primer set to
rhyme, are a prominent part of it. Why, in a collection of
five hundred hymns, you shall not be indulged with fifty
which have the rush of action, the ring of victory, nay, the
picturesqueness of a common ballad, far less, anywhere, the
energy and reality with which the Book of Exodus takes
the Israelites across the sea, or the Book of Revelations
overwhelms Rome in the ruin its sins deserve. The deco-
rous and quiet men who compile the average Hymn-Book
have no such knowledge of the world or what the world
needs, to give you more than what their own stately and
rather dreary language would call in the index: —

"Didactic Hymns on Fidelity to the Obligations of the
Christian Life in general " ; or,

" Demotion Sanctifying the Relations and Pleasures of the
Christian Life in particular."*

It is, indeed, only the large borrowing from the more pict-
uresque and dramatic Bible which saves the average Hymn-
Book from decay and corruption.

It is no such fastidious and critical consideration in the
abstract " of the obligations of the Christian life in general,"
which has saved the world, or taught it its religion, from gen-
eration to generation. Renan says with perfect respect to
St. Paul, for whom he had a great admiration, that, since Paul
died, his letters alone, which make half the canon of the New
Testament, have not made a hundred converts to Christian-
ity.! Lt is the story of the Master's life, it is his stories of
the Good Samaritan, of the Prodigal Son, and the rest, which
have taught men what life is, what divine life is, and have
made them seek to be sons of God. Paul's letters have
helped them, when they came to the detail of character. His
epigrams have been texts for action and memory.* But it is

* These titles are copied literally from the " Index of Subjects" of what was lately a
standard Hymn-Book.

t" Seules, les epitres de Saint Paul n'eussent pas acquis cent adeptes a Jesus." —
p.^ioo, Evangiles.

144

not a letter of Paul that sends John Augustus into the
prison : it is that he follows his Leader. It is no discussion
in the Epistle to the Romans which turns round yonder tear-
ful and repentant woman with the struggling hope of a new
life, to leave a house of shame : it is the story of Mary Mag-
dalen.* Or when some Indian, coming in from the hunt,
stops in your frontier church to find what lesson the white
man's teacher teaches, he is not attracted by any discussion
about conversion or sanctification. He is touched, if that
day the preacher tells, though for the thousandth time, the
story of " I must walk to-day, to-morrow, and the day follow-
ing." He believes in the love which was willing to die for
men unknown and far away.f I sat here on the platform
below, that evening in last November, when Miss Fletcher
was describing the Passion-Play as she saw it in the Ammer-
gau. As her narrative went forward, there was in it less and
less allusion to the peasants of the Tyrol, or to the adventures
of her own party. More and more, from the very nature of
her subject, was she thrown back to the unadorned language
of this simple narrative, as you would read it from any
Harmony of the Gospels. By a fortunate chance, as she ap-
proached the story of the crucifixion, the sun set without, the
church here grew darker and darker, and the only lights were
those which enabled her to read. She went on with the
simple narrative, just able to command her own voice as she
did so. And I, as I looked out from this light into the dark-
ness over the crowd, saw every face eagerly and unconsciously
bent on her, every eye wet with tears. I felt the keen atten-
tion which would not lose one word of the story they knew
by heart. I heard strong men sobbing ; and I knew, in the
hush of the great assembly, broken only by that sound, how
it was possessed by the story. Then I understood once
more what is the God-ordered power of a book like the
Bible for maintaining the religion of the world.

I sometimes hear of some young gentleman, who has com-
pleted his studies of theology, proposing that we should
make arrangements for a new Bible. It is to bring in all the
sacred instructions of all the inspired men. Truly a large
collection t I never hear this suggestion from the older
men, who have advanced so far that they know that their

*This is not rhetoric. It is the literal statement of the result wrought by Mrs.
Greenough's poem " Mary Magdalen."

t This story is told very simply by Miss La Flesche.

145

studies in theology are hardly begun. For Bibles make
themselves. They are not made by forethought or to order.
This book made itself. Gospels there were, which are lost,
alas! These four were so divine that men would not let
them die. Hundreds of letters Paul wrote, and James, the
secretary at head-quarters. These letters here, had in them
that which men must have. The law of selection worked,
and they kept these in being. Nay, you know yourselves
how some parts of the Bible are strange to you, because
they do you no good, while what you need is a household
word and a blessed memory. It is by such compulsion,
which no scholarship can overthrow or undermine, that a
book like the Bible makes its own way into the affections of
the world. And, whenever the world adds to its canon new
treasures of wisdom or of imagination, it will repeat its old
history. It will read, not the digest of a law-book, not the
abstractions of a philosopher, but the intense visions of a
poet, or the tale throbbing with pathos, which makes visible
the struggles of a life.

I have chosen to say this to-day, because, in a few weeks
now, the new version of the New Testament will be awaking
a new external interest in the shape of the Gospels and
Epistles, the Book of Acts and the Revelations. Happily, we
shall not handle the book as an idol. Happily, we shall
come to it for fruit, for medicine, as we need fruit or med-
icine ; and. where we find neither, we shall not force the
words for what they do not give. In the common-sense
notion of the Bible to which the youngest child in this church
is trained, it has a power far surpassing what it had in any
of the days of superstition. That power is the power which
narrative, dramatic or historical, — when it is the story of
God with man, man with God, man's life hid in God, — com-
mands of its very nature. Men must remember ; and, if they
remember, one day they will comply.

" Therefore speak I to them in parables, that hearing they
may hear, even if they do not yet understand ; and seeing
they may see, even if they do not yet perceive."

" Happy are your eyes, for they do see ; and your ears, for
they do hear "

" What kings and prophets waited for,
And died without the sight."

INDIFFERENCE.

" Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature."'
— Mark xvi., i^-

In the early days of Christianity, the intensity or eagerness
of the new converts roused the wonder and ridicule of lookers-
on. There is many a jest in the classical writers at their
habit of pushing things to extremes.

The truth was that, especially in the higher classes, eager
or vehement action was then out of fashion. There was a
fashion of indifference. In older times, a Roman gentleman
had fought in person. He served in the army, led his own
company to battle. But this was all over now. Any fighting
was done by provincial regiments, and the average Roman
gentleman stayed at home. Then, in old times, there had
been the excitements of the annual political canvass. Por-
cius or Manlius was a candidate, and Junius and Livius were
on his committee. Or, under the admirable civil service
system of Rome, the young men were preparing themselves
for higher duties by serving in the lower. If we lived under
Roman law, no man could be governor of this State who had
not been mayor of his city, nor mayor unless he had been
superintendent of streets, chief of police, and superintend-
ent of buildings. Thus they secured men of first-rate ability,
even in subordinate offices. All such life had kept Rome
alive in early days. But all this was over now. And now
the fashion set the other way, in Rome and in the provinces.
The fashion was to be indifferent, or to seem so. At Athens,
Luke says, " they spent their time in nothing else but to hear
and tell some new thing." In the capital at Rome, things
might be described in much the same way. It was all what
our modern world calls " loafing," and no other word ex-
presses it so well. Such people dawdling through the day,
wishing somebody would amuse them, and finding life very
much of a bore, looked with amazement and amusement on
such a man as Paul, pushing always from province to prov-

ince, — nay, from continent to continent, — possessed by an
idea. Scourged, imprisoned, stoned, shipwrecked, taken up
for dead, — all the same this driving fellow is carrying for-
ward his enterprise. The King's work must go on. And.
in good report or evil report, he would drive it on. Free-
man or prisoner, working in his shop or speaking from a
platform, tossed on the sea or pleading for his life, first, last,
and always, he would push forward the great idea, " Woe is
me if I preach not the gospel."

The new stimulus with which the Christian idea broke up all
such lassitude and indifference as then reigned is to this hour
its first best gift to the world. It tells the sick world, or the
world bored with ennui, to take up its bed and walk. To
men and women in the highest grades of life, or in the lowest,
it offers one great motive for life outside themselves. This
picture of a possible, perfect world, of a world which shall
obey God as perfectly as planets in the heavens obey him,
a world in which men and women are to be willing servants,
children, and princes of his, as loyal as the angels and arch-
angels of poetry, — this picture, or real vision, is put before
the eyes of the humblest and the greatest. Humblest and
greatest are taught that they may do their share to bring it
in. The languid young prince, who is tired of flattery, and
the toil-worn day-laborer, who is tired of hard work and
poor pay, see alike that here is an object great enough for
the noblest. Once possessed with a passion for it, prince or
bt-ggar has something to live for. And, once enlisted in
the service of him who leads the way to that perfect world,
all lesser amusements pale, and all lesser ambitions are
unsatisfying. The more they achieve, the more they seek to
achieve ; and passion grows with its own exercise and suc-
cess. Nor is languor or indifferentism possible longer, to
him who has seen the vision and enlisted in the cause, deter-
mined that God's kingdom shall come, and his will be done
on earth as it is clone in heaven.

The observation was early made that Christian men and
women, embarked in this great cause, work from passion,
work with the eagerness of their whole nature, and not simply
under the cool control of mere logic. The determination
of^ a Paul or a Francis or a Bernard, of John Knox or
Fenelon or Wesley, is a passion sweeping away the whole
man, and every power of his life. These are not states-
men who can argue for a constitution to-day, but to-morrow

148

amuse themselves in society, turn over the best arrange-
ments for their investments, or buy pictures for their gal-
leries and discuss the last novelties in art. If they, by acci-
dent, do any one of these little things, it all falls into the
sweep of the great determination that the Christian Com-
monwealth shall be established in the world. The critical
world has been quite right in pronouncing that they are
swept along by an all-controlling passion, and that they
differ in every throb and in every act from mere theorists
or men of prudence or doctrinaires.

It has happened occasionally that such a passion has
swept nations away, perhaps they hardly knew how. When
the cry reached Europe that the Pagans oppressed Christian
pilgrims in the very region of the cross, that the land where
the Son of God lived and died was desecrated by blasphemy,
the Crusades, as they swept whole nations away, and made
armies from peoples, showed in all their fervor, even with
all their absurdity, that the Christian passion still ruled in
the hearts of men. People, who could not be argued or
convinced to change their daily lives by a hair's-breadth,
could be summoned by the great invocations, " For the love
of God" and "In the name of Christ," to leave every habit
and surrender every comfort, to accept the worst hardships
of campaigns well-nigh hopeless, under that passion's sway.
It was infinitely stronger than any calculated appeals to
personal expediency, or other merely worldly wisdom. Once
and again, at its great epochs, the world learns the same
lesson. Our people here knew it, when our Revolution
began ; people caught a glimpse of it in France, when their
Revolution began, when one passionate appeal to the " Sons
of Freedom " started a nation of peasants, just emancipated,
on a career of conquest which defeated the armies of Europe
recruited, and fought in decorous and calculated system. A
finer instance than either was the great uprising of our own
people, now twenty years ago, when every man forgot his
own lesser duty to his family or to himself, in his passionate
determination to serve his country. Those first three months
of the war were worth everything to us who were happy
enough to live in so great a time. To see the weakest vying
with the strongest, the poorest with the richest, to show who
best could serve in the hour of the country's need ; to see
the rare ingenuity of sacrifice by which man, woman, and child
all found some way in which they could help in the great
necessity, — this was to know of our own knowledge what is

149 .

the abundant life which comes into play among sons of God,
where there is common enthusiasm in one great cause. Even
the courts of justice found that under this great emotion
pickpockets and burglars forgot to steal and to rob. The
meanest men were lifted above themselves ; for a man was
a man, and the worst man had a chance to show that he also
could serve the country, the mother of us all, and God,
who is our Father. " I have lost that which nothing can re-
pay me," said a patriot American poet to me, on his return
from France at that time, " because in my absence in Europe
1 lost the sight of this grand enthusiasm, — of this fanatic
sacrifice of a nation of men."

The young American of to-day, ripening into manhood, is
tempted to curse his star that he was not born into those
fortunate days. His father charged with Kilpatrick or with
Lowell, or sailed with Farragut or with Winslow, or struggled
up the glacis with Shaw, or waved his hat and cheered when
the rebel flag fluttered downward at Pulaski. And the son
broods over all this, as he sits smoking in his club-room, or,
lolling back with his feet on the window-sill, counts the
passers-by from Parker's ; and he asks why he was born to
these degenerate days, — clays of vulgar prosperity, where,
he says, there is no chance for men. Even Literature takes
on such ghastly purple hue of blood not oxygenated, and
asks if life be worth living ; sings her songs of gloom, and
feeds us with novels about women uncomprehended and men
without a purpose. For all which, our guardian angels must
grieve and wonder. Is there no purpose worthy of adven-
turous manhood or womanhood but the storming of the walls
of Jerusalem ? Cannot a young man or a young women be
roused to passionate life, unless a country be tottering to its
ruin ?

George Eliot was one day speaking to a lady about her
hope for the future of mankind, and she said eagerly : " What
I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall
be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp
something when I fall." " The eloquent gesture with which
she grasped the mantel-piece as she spoke remains in the
memory, as the expression of a sort of transmuted prayer."
Such are the words of her who was speaking with her.

The illustration is a perfect one of that eager readiness
with which a man like Paul flung himself into service, or

150

with which Saint Vincent de Paul took the place of the felon
who had been chained to the oar. This is the " love your
brother as yourself," which is the centre of the Christian
ethics ; and it suggests the great necessity that the effort and
act must be, not cold obedience to an enacted law nor the
deduction, as cold, from a logical investigation, but the pas-
sionate surrender of every power of the whole man to help
the person who suffers. The quick eye and the sure foot and
the strong hand and the ready wit and the sympathetic tear
and the good-natured word and the wise counsel and the
community of purpose which unites many in such help, —
these are all to be twined together in the effort to relieve.
It is not a fixed method, which men need to study or to
resolve upon : it is abundant life which they are to conse-
crate to such a cause. Crusade, indeed ! war for freedom,
indeed ! help of suffering, indeed ! With all the passion of
abounding life, the Christian theory supposes that each man
enlists in the common service in the help everywhere and
always of his brother-man.

And one need not go back to Paul for illustrations of the
outcome of such effort. There are a plenty of little, half-
way victories in this direction. The Washingtonian temper-
ance movement was the sudden determination, eager and
full of life, of a large number of persons, not themselves in
danger of drunkenness, that they would come to the help of
those that were. For the time, they would and did throw off
other duty and other care. To find the man who wanted
to reform, to be sure that he should not be alone, to sur-
round the ray of his flickering candle with every screen and
guard which should keep from it the wind, to strengthen by
society and the quick stimulus of society — and that the best
society — the trembling resolution just formed, and so easily
abandoned, — these were the hopes of the Washingtonian
reformers. They are hopes not planned out by wisdom or
on theory, not possible to a commissioned functionary. A
man flings himself into the gulf. A man ! That is to say, a
divine soul, using human wit and a human body. A man —
that is, a child of God — says to this poor drunkard, Take
my hand, and I will pull you through. And a woman — that
is, another child of God — says, Take mine, and I. too, will
pull. And another man offers his manhood, and another
woman the divine force of her womanhood. They surround
him, they refresh him, they inspire him, they encourage him,
they feed him with new food, they excite him with new

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motive, they renew him with a new life. All this is because
they do not work as functionaries, but because they are pas-
sionately determined. They give the omnipotence of life to
the effort ; and life conquers death, as it always does.

To the young man or the young woman, then, who finds
much learning to be weariness of the flesh, — who finds
fashion a sham, society a bore, politics a fraud, who is weary
of life and of self, and so sits by the wayside proclaiming
his or her dolefulness, — the fair question is: "Have you,
by chance, tried the experiment of the Christian Religion ?
Have you thrown yourself with hearty passion into a great
cause, — the great cause of making this world a part of
Heaven ? " It is no affirmative answer to this appeal to say
that one has fooled over social economy, has studied its sta-
tistics, or adjusted some of its machinery. It is no answer
to say that one has sometimes offered advice which was re-
jected, or instructions which failed. It is no answer to say
that you have offered a part of yourself, and kept the other
part for certain purposes of your own. Nobody has asked
for a part of you. God Almighty has asked for the whole.
Jesus Christ, his ambassador, has asked for the whole. The
demand is that you will squarely devote yourself, your life,
that God's Kingdom may come, and his" will be done on
earth as it is in Heaven.

And do you tell me that you have no field, that the
world does not need you? Surely there are ten thousand
people right around you, nearer to you than any other ten
thousand people in this world. Do you tell me that the
kingdom of heaven has come to them and theirs? Where
do they fall short ? Where is the loose screw ? Are there
so many rushing to tighten it that there is no room for you ?
When you sprung to their place of need, — as George Eliot
clutched that mantel that she need not fall, — were there so
many that you could do nothing ?

People talk of revivals of religion. It seems to me to be
irreligion which is faint and wants stimulus, and there is
nothing but religion which will revive it. Ennui, indiffer-
ence, lassitude, will be quickened and revived, not by a new
code here or a new method there, not by this system or that
function, but by more abundant life,— that is to say, life from
the fountain of life, — and this means more religion. The
sickly revival of the churches is an appeal at the end of
winter, when people's nerves and muscles are weakened by

152

cold and by the absence of sunlight, so that bodies are faint
and minds are morbid ; and it is an appeal to induce men
or women to take up some new habits of prayer, of confes-
sion, and so far of Life. But how narrow the appeal, and
how petty the object, compared with what it might be ! If
only some shot on some Sumter could revive, not ten men
nor a hundred, but a whole community, to sweep out its
iniquities, to put a stop to its debaucheries, to wipe out its
temptations, to end its jobs, to give society to the lonely, to
find homes for the homeless, to empty into the desert the
crowds, to abate disease, to ward off pestilence, — in a word,
for men to bear the burdens of their brothers, and live not
for to-day, but for the years that are to come. And such a
revival would not content itself with this little detail or that
in the processes of observance, but would try to sweep in with
a current of new life which should restore the whole.

I should think any life might be a bore, stupid and tedious,
of which the centre was self-indulgence, self-approval, or any
form of self-worship. To divide one's interest in the various
rites or services of such worship must be monotonous. To
share the sixteen waking hours between one's smoking, his
dancing, his card-playing, his eating, drinking, and complain-
ing, must be a stupid task • and he who is immersed in it,
certainly is entitled to the sympathy of men more fortunate.

But what Fate or what Devil condemns any man to this
slavery? He has only to rebel, and to leave it. He has
only to listen to his " marching orders," your marching
orders, my marching orders. These good-tidings are what
he needs, and the marching orders are that he shall make
them clear to every creature. That God is, and is here ;
that heaven is, and is here ; that these men and women round
him are so many members of God's household, whose cares
he is to soothe and whose pleasures he is to share, — this is
what he is to teach, till men feel it and know it. He is to
make his office-boy believe it. He is to make the waiter
behind his chair believe it. He is to make the billiard-
marker at the club believe it. He must make the girl he
dances with believe it. With whomsoever he has to do, he is
to carry life, — life more abundantly, the blessing God gave
him, — and gave on condition that he should give it to his
fellow-men. I should think life would be dull to the officer
who has passed through West Point and acquired its accom-
plishment, has joined a marching column, and then, when
the rest are pitching the tents, are seeking the water, are tell-

153

ing off the men, are dividing the rations, are writing the
despatches, found himself by some devilish fatality always
lounging round the camp, in the way of every worker and
despised by every soldier. Striking no blow and rendering
no service, varying the tediousness of his meals by his cigar
and the tediousness of his smoking by his meals, — I should
think this life would be dull. It was to save you and me
from such tedium that the Saviour of mankind gave us
life more abundantly. Machines move by processes. Men
live with a Divine Spirit. That Spirit, for us, he quickened
and made strong. To that life he assigned its duty : that
we lift up this world ; that we bring it to God ; that I do
not think of myself while we do it, nor you of yourself, so we
only can bring in the Commonwealth of Love.

And we, if we accept this commission, find that this life is
not bound in with the narrow range of this or that shop or
office or club-room. Why, it unites me with him and with
her who are on the other side of the world. It makes me'
partner with the nobility of all ages and all lands. Mysignal-
liashes are read from the heights, which repeat them to all
waiting eyes, just as I read theirs, that I may repeat them in
my turn. My labor is not the humdrum toil of a separate
machine : it is in the infinite life of a child of God, who lives
with God, nay, who enjoys with God, in the abundant life of
his united children. This is it to " go out to all the world,
and preach the gospel to every creature."

THE POSSIBLE BOSTON.

" He looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and
maker is God." — Hebrews xi., 10.

This striking text has given trie form to the ideal plans of
Christian Reformers. Augustine, the great African leader,
wrote a book called the City of God, which has held its place
in literature as still a living book, with suggestions not all
antiquated for civil society. Sir Thomas More's Outofiia,
which is his city of God, is not a mere play of fancy made
for amusement of writer or reader. It is a profound study
of social science, which, when presidents or governors or
heads of bureaux choose to read to-day, it is well for those
they serve.

Before such reformers there is a distinct vision of what
civil order will be when God's will is done on earth as it is
clone in heaven. Where such a vision or plan exists, that
man does not work wildly or from hand to mouth. It is true,
on the other hand, that he is in danger of doing nothing,
because he seeks for every thing. " The better," says Vol-
taire, " is the enemy of the good." It is a cynical statement,
and dangerous. But it points out the risk which awaits
Christian men and- women, and all idealists. We are all to
be careful, lest in our eagerness for the impossible best, we
fail of that better, which is possible.

Among the people who have squarely addressed them-
selves to the building up a visible city of God upon this
earth, the men who founded Massachusetts, and especially
who founded Boston, are the most distinguished in modern
times. They winnowed out from England about twenty
thousand people of the class who were nicknamed " Puri-
tans," because they meant to keep their bodies pure. They
did not believe in drunkenness nor adultery, as the dominant
party in England practically did. They did believe in a pos-
sible law of God on earth, and they meant to put it in prac-

155

tice in worldly legislation. For this purpose, they came to
the end of the world. As long as they could, as long as
they had power enough, they shut out from their jurisdiction
all persons who did not prepare to join in their plans. And
those plans, including all their legislation, went forward for
two generations, in this hope of establishing here the pattern
town or State.

When a year ago I was speaking here of Dr. Channing's
early ministry, I said, in passing, that he and the men round
him, fifty and sixty years ago, had this very hope for Bos-
ton, that they might make it a city without the faults,
vices, crimes, and dangers which literature and h, story con-
nect with city life. In the calmest and most resolute way,
these men, in a little town of thirty or forty thousand people,*
set about that business with the highest idea, — an idea noth-
ing short of perfection. " Possible perfection of human nat-
ure " was the Channing motto. " Possible perfection of
city nature," — of the social methods of a. large town, — that
was the idea of this set of men. I ask you to-day to follow
some of the more important of their theories and processes.

First, of course, was public education. They had, in the
common school law of the State, the whole theory granted.
But the practice was much below the theory. As early as
1813, Dr. Channing and the men around him went to work
on the public schools of Boston. There followed the eleva-
tion of the Latin School, to be at that time the best school
in America, the creation of the primary schools, the establish-
ment of the English High School, which is spoken of in the
pamphlets of the time as a new invention, the establishment
of a similar school for girls, and the large improvement of
all the grammar schools.! Of all this, we see the result
to-day, when, from our whole population of the school age
so called, from five to sixteen years namely, there are hardly
fifteen hundred children in Boston not " present or accounted
for " at the daily roll-call of the schools. This is a degree
of success without parallel, I believe, in any country at any
time since school education began.

That illustration of success shows what sort of perfect-
ness these men expected in other lines of endeavor, as in

*In 1810, the population of Boston was 33,250; in 1820.it was 43,298; in 1830, it
was 61,392.

t This school for girls, which began under the charge of Mr. Bailey, was afterward
given up on the plea of economy, to be re-established in 1^52.

i56

prison-work, in houses of reformation, in the arrest of pau-
perism, in the suppression of intemperance. [They thought
they could make a clean sweep. Boston was a small city
and a very rich city. It was a very prosperous city, when it
was prosperous. And it happened that the rich and powerful
men were in accord with this new theory of " honor all men."
It is the onlv instance known to me, where the real aristoc-
racy of a town held a religion which did not part them, either
in practice or in theory, from the lowest of the low. The
Channing theory of life is absolute democracy, and it hap-
pened to be held by the gentry of Boston. If anybody
knew what was the right thing to do, such men as Jonathan
Philips, Colonel Perkins, the Appletons, the Lawrences, and
the rest, were behind that man with money, good-will, and
power; and they meant to have that thing done.

Of course, the leaders of movement in such a town looked
curiously and eagerly on the questions of poverty, the rela-
tions of the poor and the rich.

In view of our arrangements of to-day, it is interesting to
see that they did not make the provisions we find necessary
for the supervision and regulation of alms-giving.

They meant to prevent pauperism as a social disease.

As a military man would say, they did not mean to have
the enemy advance beyond their outworks.

Dr. Channing, Dr. Ware, and the men around them, had
studied with curious care the work of the social writers on
the other side. They knew all about the plans of Fellen-
berg and Degerando and Robert Owen and, later down, of
Fourier and Saint-Simon. They knew what is the truth, — -
that pauperism is a disease as much as scarlet fever is ;
one of those diseases, too, which you can prevent, but can-
not cure.

They did not expect to prevent pauperism by feeding the
hungry or clothing the naked.

They did mean to have a community in which men and
women could feed themselves and clothe themselves.

There was not, therefore, any general arrangement before
the year 1851 for what we regard necessary, — the general
supervision of alms-giving.

The plans were all laid on the idea that alms-giving should
be only accidental and occasional.

What shows the idealism of these men is that the two
principal measures set on foot with this view relied on moral

157

agencies. It was by making men more manly that they
expected to rid their town of paupers.

These two measures took their form in a private club,
from which much that is good in those days sprung. It was
sometimes called the Wednesday Club, but it was not the
club so called which celebrated its centennial a few years
ago. It was a club of thoughtful men, all of them Unita-
rians, who met simply to discuss the desirable agencies for
the moral and social improvement of this city. Among other
things which sprung from its plans, this South Congrega-
tional Church of ours is one. The club voted that it was
desirable that there should be another Unitarian church in
this part of the town ; and from that vote this church grew.
This club discussed the social, moral, criminal, and religious
condition of the town and the best plans for its improvement,
always having in view this possible perfect city, a city with
foundations. Such men recognized the value of the estab-
lished churches in this .affair. They knew that people reg-
ularly trained in religious habits did not often become paupers
or criminals. But, noticing the risk in cities of the existence
of a class not so connected, the " Ministry-at-large " was
established, to take in hand the people who had no church.
It was not to feed them nor to clothe them : it was to minis-
ter to them morally. It was to give to them the self-reliance
and backbone which belong to children of God who know
they are his children. The original idea was that Dr. Tucker-
man, who had volunteered, at his own charges, for this min-
istry as early as 1826, in a town where there were not five
thousand people not on the visiting-list of some clergyman,
should watch over the education and moral welfare of those
"unchurched" people, with such aid as he could obtain from
laymen and lay women who were willing to work and visit
with him. He was not disappointed. When Dr. Henry Ware
first asked for such volunteers, Frederic T. Gray, George
Merrill, and Benjamin H. Greene presented themselves, and
while they lived did efficient service in the work proposed.
Such men as Robert C. Waterston, Charles F. Barnard, and
Charles Faulkner are among those who soon afterward
joined cordially in this lay ministry. Three of these gentle-
men were afterward ordained as clergymen. As you know,
the organization which sustains this Ministry-at-large exists
with increasing usefulness to this day. I am to speak of it
further in a moment.

Side by side with this, to work on more secular affairs, the

158

same group of men established in 1835 the " Society for the
Prevention of Pauperism." This society was not to relieve
hunger or cold or nakedness. It was to prevent them. I
know of no other city in the world which has started with so
clear-sighted an effort. The society was to see that intelli-
gence offices were regulated, and that men who needed em-
ployment had a chance. It was to regulate pawn-broking,
and see that the poor were not fleeced by usurers. It was
to transfer labor where there was a glut to places where there
was a need. It was to facilitate education for industry. In
any way it could find, it was to prevent pauperism. This
society also has now existed for near fifty years. I doubt if
it has ever expended $5,000 a year. But it has kept down
the ascending tide of pauperism. That is what it was for.

Both these plans were well in order when Boston was still
a town of some fifty thousand people, of homogeneous Eng-
lish blood. There was one small Catholic church in the
town. The men who established them were the same men
who controlled, in those days, the politics of Boston and of
Massachusetts. They had the confidence of the richest
merchants and capitalists of New England. If any branch
enterprise were needed to carry out such plans, it was at
once established. If you needed a blind asylum, you had
that. If you needed a deaf and dumb asylum, you had that.
They had really good right to flatter themselves, in the insig-
nificant population of their jails and their poor-houses, that
they were working out the problem ; and that here was to be
a city which, for freedom from crime and freedom from pau-
perism, might challenge comparison with the most favored
village or Arcadian valley in all the world.

But all such computations were doomed to disappoint-
ment, from an element wholly unexpected. In 1832, the
wave of Irish emigration to America began. Within two or
three years, Boston felt it. It was unexpected. It was dis-
liked. Some of the least wise of our gentlemen here actually
established an office on Long Wharf, and paid a secretary,
with the purpose of dissuading Ireland from emigration. I
knew this gentleman well. He sent out circulars, and wrote
articles for Irish papers, to explain to Patrick that he had
better stay at home. So Mrs. Partington swept back the
tide with her broom ! The wave increased. The famine of
1845 and 1846 made it a deluge. Of that deluge, Boston
has received the largest proportional share. At this mo-
ment, in proportion to our numbers, our population of Irish
blood is larger than that of any other city in America.

159

That is to say that, on your fine plans for curing pauper-
ism before it existed, you now had with every year ten thou-
sand people poured in, a fifth part of whom were paupers
ready-made. On your fine plans of meeting such evils in
advance by nobly educating the children, you now had
poured in on you every year ten thousand men and women,
who had been educated by penury, whose childhood was
over, and whose characters were formed. And, again, on
your fine plans for treating such evils by moral and religious
influence, carried in personal tenderness to each separate
home, you had ten thousand people in a year thrown in, who
would not listen to the first word you said on religion, on the
will of God, or the duty of man, without suspecting it, — nay,
believing it, — as they were taught to believe it, to be damna-
ble heresy. With this deluge of a population which Boston
did not train, and for which old Boston was in no sort re-
sponsible, came to an end, a generation ago, the immediate
hope that here should be a town in which alms-giving should
be virtually unknown, and in which vice, godlessness, and
crime should be at a minimum, steadily less and less, until
the perfect end.

So far did the original aversion to any organized alms-
giving give way, of necessity, that in 185 1 it became nec-
essary to organize the Provident Association. I am proud
to say that, when the necessity existed at last, it was in this
church and in the Warren Street Chapel, blood sister of this
church, that this organization began, under the wise direc-
tion first of Mr. Charles F. Barnard, assisted then by our
own minister, Mr. Huntington. The necessity was forced on
them, and wisely and practically they met it. This was six-
teen years after the Society for Preventing Pauperism was
formed. So long and so successfully had that society and
its sister, the Ministry-at-large, clone what they were meant
to do. In our own time, we find it necessary to make the
fuller organization of the Associated Charities, which secures
the intelligent co-operation of all these organizations, for the
prevention of pauperism in the wisest relief of the poor.

All through this deluge, as I called it, the joint work of
the Society for Preventing Pauperism and of the Ministry-at-
large has gone bravely on, never flinching. To speak to-day
of the last : it has now seven regular ministers, where it
began with one ; it has four regular chapels, and as many
Sunday-schools, besides Warren Street Chapel, our own Unity

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Chapel, and other kindred institutions. It has never pro-
posed, in a single word, in a single report, any lower standard
than the standard of the beginning. Nor has it used any
lower agencies than the agencies of the beginning. By the
word of God and by the help of God, men, women, and chil-
dren shall be made freemen in Christ. Not by feeding them,
not by clothing them, not by punishing them, no, nor by
frightening them, but by renewing them, so that they shall
come nearer the stature of a perfect man. Nor has this min-
istry failed in its hope of enlisting laymen and women to the
direct ministry of Christ, by the side of those professionally
ordained to that work. Such men and women are at work
in connection with each of these centres, with a determina-
tion nothing less than that which I have cited, — the building
a city of God on eternal foundations. Never was this work
more effective and promising than it is to-day.

1 have not, to-day, to say more than I have said on the
secular sister of this ministry, the Society for Preventing Pau-
perism. I shall take another method to speak of its present
position.

To-day is the anniversary of the Ministry-at-large. To-
night, the churches which sustain it meet for its yearly organ-
ization. I have gone thus at length into its history, be-
cause I think that with this decade, which begins with 1881,
we are to see the original work go forward on the original
plan, as we have not seen it for twenty years. This wave of
Irish emigration is well-nigh ended. From England, from
Germany, come many more strangers than from Ireland.
Boston is more and more an American city with every year.
Our Catholic friends are less powerful and less bigoted, and
their children are more truly naturalized. And, by the mere
currents of emigration, of birth, and of death, it is certain
that we have seen the end of an alien majority, either in our
votes or in our counsels. The time has come again when,
with courage, such as no year in the last forty could com-
mand, we may address ourselves to that larger ministry which
levels up the people of the town. We can continue what we
do. We could double it to advantage. We could meet the
religious needs of persons dissatisfied with Rome, by a
special ministry. We can take firmer hold than we have of
persons released from imprisonment, and, at the very mo-
ment when they need moral help, supply it. We can take
firmer hold on the details which lead to intemperance, and
set forward in many ways the temperance reforms. We can

i6i

be more ready than we are to welcome exiles on their
arrival, and to place them in their new home. We can
foster all the efforts by which the working-man becomes a
land-holder, tied to the soil, and master of his home. We
can quicken education and give it infinite life, so that those
who learn how to count and how to read shall take in also
honor, purity, truth, as eternal elements of life.

I hope we may enter on all such foundation-work for a city
whose foundations are purity, honor,, faith, and love. This
is the subsoiling which is beneath all political advancement,
all manufacturing or mercantile prosperity, all charitable or-
ganization. Never an autumn canvass for an election comes,
with its free expense for partisan purposes, but one wishes
that a tenth part of that money had been spent five years
before in lifting up boys, in keeping girls pure, in opening
noble avenues to life, in making manly men and womanly
women. It is only in such work that your social advance
has any hope, but with such work your social prospect is
certain. You are working on the foundations, and your city
stands.

If such a club as I described, for study and for action in
subsoiling, should form itself again, you would not need five
years to see in your statistics the sure fruit of its planting. I
could name thirty young men — say from twenty years old to
sixty-five or seventy, but still young — who would work to-
gether successfully in such a society : brave in theology ;
optimists by conviction ; sure of success, because children of
God; practical, because New Englanders; and strong with
the strength of those who mean to lead and lift the people,
and not to thwart them, to snub them, or to fool them.
A club of thirty or forty such men, meeting, not like the
Examiner Club to discuss philosophy, not like the Thursday
Club to talk of science or manufacture, not like the Saturday
Clubs to discuss politics, but to purify the moral tone, and to
improve the social order of Boston has now its chance. The
chance is as large as the work. The work is to make here
the ideal city, — a city sweet as Arcadia, healthy, brave, and
pure; a city which has the eternal foundations.

Of that city, the maker and builder is God.

INCREASE OF LIFE.

"Because I live, ye shall live also." — John xiv., 19.

To Jesus Christ, the unseen world and the world which is
seen are one world and the same. We talk of " the other
world," " the future world," " the world above " : he does
not speak so. He speaks of heaven as if it were now and
here, or might be ; and, when they are confused with what
he says, it is often because they see double where he sees
singly. Nay : when he appears to be confused by what they
say, — as sometimes happens, — the best account we can give
is that they are talking of this visible world only, while he
talks at once of the visible and invisible. There are a hun-
dred texts which show his feeling, — " Lo ! I am with you
alway, even unto the end of the world." " It is my Father
who doeth these works at which you wonder. You do not
see him ; but, all the same, he is here." " Father, I know
that thou hearest me always. I would not have spoken
aloud but for the help of these who are standing by." And,
when he expresses his trouble because language and meta-
phor fail him as they do, it is in this very difficulty. Lan-
guage, having been made by people who rely on their senses,
to answer the purposes of the visible and tangible world,
breaks down, and breaks down very badly, when it is applied
to the range, vastly wider, of that unseen world, which per-
meates this world, and in which this world floats as a straw
floats in the ocean.

Many of you remember our dear friend Starr King's cel-
ebrated discourse on " Substance and Shadow." He was at
work there to remove exactly this difficulty which the Mas-
ter tried to remove, nor is there work more essential for
the Master's apostle. While we sat and listened to Mr.
King, we felt and knew what Jesus teaches. The things
which endure are faith and hope and love. Life is the sub-

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stance, the hard-pan foundation, from which these forms and
things around us are born. We cannot see life, nor handle
it nor smell it nor hear it nor taste it. But life is ; and with-
out it nothing can even appear to be. In the beginning is
the Word. Mr. King made us wonder that we had cared so
much for this or that little thing, which is but a bubble
tossed on the eternal ocean. For the moment, you said you
would not be so fooled again. You would take fast hold on
love, which you found to be a reality. You would live in
hope, or in the infinite world, seeing that is the real world.
You would trust wholly in God, seeing all being is from him ;
and these little things that perish in the using should fall into
their own inferior place in your regard or thought or action.
While that mood lasted, you caught the true Christian notion
of life. There are not two lives, — a life of heaven there
and a life of earth here. These two lives are one life. As.
the Lord's Prayer says, " God's will is done on earth as it is
in heaven." This opens out the' meaning of the more figura-
tive phrase, "The kingdom of God is at hand."

The knowledge, that life is indeed larger than the little
world we see, grows upon us in a thousand ways. The
charm, always new, of watching a baby's life, rests in our
interest in the steps of such growth. The little thing first
learns its own hands, that they are its own. A little more,
and it knows its mother's face, and that she also is its own.
By and by, its world enlarges ; and at last it knows the whole
nursery, which seems a universe indeed, while it is a novelty,
so much larger than the petty world the child was in before.

Such steps as these are really enlarging our life all the
time afterward, though we do not perhaps note them with
quite such eager curiosity. But it is just such a step, when
the school-boy, who but yesterday was first in his class and
could talk of nothing but the ambitions of the school-room,
finds himself the smallest boy in a great mercantile house,
where his existence is hardly suspected and nobody knows
his name. He learns, by hard rubs perhaps, that the world
is much larger than he thought. Yet his chief, the very
"grand Cyrus" of them all, the master of masters, has to
learn the same lesson. He takes his holiday on some favor-
able year, he crosses the ocean, he has or thinks he has some
business with one of the merchant lords of London or of
Paris ; and, when the interview has been arranged, after
some negotiation, he finds that he was never heard of before,

164

that now his name is forgotten, that there are perhaps a hun-
dred others waiting for their turn, and that he, the first
tradesman in his own county, may be yet a very small person
in the larger world. So in the world of politics, in the world
of literature, in the ambitions of fashion and society, pre-
cisely because we are infinite beings, — beings whose nature
cannot be limited, — we find all the time that there is far
more outside of us in life than we have ever yet attained to.
We cannot often enough say that life gives us more, nature
gives us more, the more we take. Yes, and the more life
gives or nature gives, the more they offer.

The robin in its nest looks into a world made up of a few
leaves and boughs around. As the feathers of its wings
grow, it flutters a little from the branch, and is astonished to
find that the orchard is so large. The bird of passage, when
the instinct bred by the season carries it far north or far
south, learns that the covert of a few trees, orchard or grove,
was nothing to this larger world. Man, of all animals, com-
passes the whole globe; and then man, in turn, studies the
universe outside of it, and finds that this world is a speck,
and only a speck, in that universe of whose laws he finds
out more and more every day, for they are not beyond the
ken of a child of God.

The village boy growing to manhood finds that he is a
member of the State as well as of the village. He does not
lose his interest in the base-ball club or the singing-class,
because he has gained an interest in the politics of the State,
or is at work for the State Fair, or has been chosen to the
Legislature. Then a great crisis comes upon him, and his
life enlarges again. Sumter is fired on, and he takes a com-
mission from the President, and enters the service of the
nation. Still, he belongs to the village, and to the State.
His life as a citizen of the State does not cease because he
is an officer of the nation. Such is the illustration of the
common life, — life here and life in heaven, — which Jesus
Christ is always trying to make us comprehend, even by sym-
bols which he owns are inadequate. You do live in Chester
Square or in Union Park ; but you also live in Massachusetts,
and have duties and pleasures which to that life belong.
More than this, you are a citizen of the United States, and
as such have other duties and relations. Nay : even if you
do not cross oceans or continents, you are also a citizen of
the world, and as such have a life yet larger. More than
this, says the Saviour of men, you live in heaven, and have

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relations, pleasures, and duties, as a child of God, as a child
of heaven. They are not apart from to-day's duties or pleas-
ures. Rather they are all knit in with them. Nor are they
the life of a to-morrow, unattainable until to-day is done with.
They are the life of to-day, all mixed in with life which is
visible and tangible. A woman's new life — when her first
child is in her arms, wholly dependent on her — is, or may
be, simply the life of a ministering angel. She does not care
for herself, save as she cares for the child which depends on
her. Her question is not, " Is the room too hot for me ? " but
" Is it too hot for him ? " It is not, " What will entertain me ? "
but, "What will entertain him?" That measure of love is
no more perfect in the ministry of an angel than is it in the
ministry of any mother who surrenders herself to her child.
So of the loyal, absorbed faith of a soldier going into battle.
It is not, "Shall I best shelter myself here ?" but, "How shall
1 best protect the men?" It is not, "Shall I get through
easiest thus?" but, " How shall I best serve the cause?" No
angel or archangel in any hierarchy of God can surpass that
loyalty to a cause. And such faith as that, where it exists,
manifests the law, the purpose, the system of God's own
heaven. Such love as that mother's, such faith as that sol-
dier's, are not to be spoken of as like the heavenly qualities:
they are the heavenly qualities. What Jesus is trying to
make us see is that heaven thus has its part and place in the
world of time, and may wholly master it, if we will. To bor-
row a striking figure which I once heard Dr. Bush employ,
the earth is as full of heaven as a sponge is full of water.
Every pore is saturated and crowded with it. And the true
child of God, who knows his own dignity, is not forever dis-
tinguishing between the sponge and what it holds, between
things of time and things of eternity. How can he discrim-
inate? Both are God's work. Both are in God's order. He
can sweep a floor to God's glory as well as sing a psalm to
his glory. As the true citizen does his duty, and does it of
course and without question, never stopping to say, I do this
as a Charlestown man, or I do this as a Massachusetts man,
or I do this as an American, or this as a citizen of the world,
but knows and feels that the one relation belongs to the other,
reinforces it, and gains strength from it, just so the child of
God lives his earthly life and his heavenly life at once and
together. He does not define nor dissect nor analyze. There
is no separation nor distinction. He speaks at once with
the tongues of men and of angels. He does the deed at

1 66

once of earth and of heaven. He does his own will, — yes,
and he does his Father's will in the same act. For he has so
wrought out the divinity of his own nature that his life is
hid in God's life. Of which union the perfect statement was
made, when Jesus said, " I and my Father are one." For
which also he prayed for us, when we prayed that we might
be one, as they two are one.

Careless people sometimes express surprise when they find
the same man exhibiting what they call the most opposite
characters, that he is at once so practical and so ideal. Mr.
Emerson, for instance, idealist of the idealists, teaches the
most obdurate common-sense in the homeliest Saxon dialect.
So Professor Peirce, who could weigh one comet against
another in his scales, who could count the oscillations of the
rays of the Pleiades and untangle the cords of the attrac-
tions of Orion, was, through and through, an idealist, never
so much at home as when he spoke of the foundations of
ethics, and in most weighty phrase, rendered homage to the
truth. It is only careless people who are so surprised.
Earth being all full of heaven, the surprising thing would
be if this were not so. The man really practical will be
thoroughly ideal. The child of God truly heavenly will deal
with things of time as simply and as certainly as God does.
Here in your Gospels is Matthew, whom you call and call
rightly a man of affairs, tax-gatherer, merchant, — gives you
your parables of usury, and buying and selling and all prac-
tical affairs. Yes ; and it is he who writes down your beati-
tudes, with that mystic, " Blessed are the pure in heart, for
they shall see God." It is he who writes, " Fear not, little
flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the king-
dom." It is he who sings, shall I say the eternal song of
welcome : ' Come unto me, ye that labor and are heavy-
laden ; and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you,
and learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye
shall find rest to your souls." So easily and certainly does
a child of God find the eternal truth, and speak it, in the
midst of earth's affairs.

Film by film, shred by shred, this child of God lays
off one and another of the environments which fetter him.
The baby is not held longer in his mother's arms : he
totters alone. At last, he is master of the house, and may
roam where he will. Nay, the day comes when the doubtful
mother must let him run outdoors under his own control.

\6y

He grows to youtk or manhood, and makes his own home.
Not even orders from father or mother rule him longer. Per-
haps he passes from land to land, acquires the sway of
new languages, and is not bound even to one country. Per-
haps his word controls other men. What he writes is read
by all thinkers, what he thinks is applied in all laws. Per-
haps he startles a generation of sleepers, and they take up
their beds and walk. All this steady enlargement of life
and power- is certain, because he is God's child. The soul
in him controls muscle, nerve, sense, fibre, blood-vessels,
and brain. The God in him controls the organic frame of
an earthly tabernacle. One step more, and the sweet singer,
who yesterday wrote some psalm of praise for a few com-
panions, casts off this earthly house of a mortal tabernacle,
and joins in the chorus of a nobler and larger worship.

The careful reasoner who, with the little tricks of two or
three earthly algebras, untangled the problems of the uni-
verse, drops off the house of an earthly tabernacle, sees as
he is seen and knows as he is known, and rejoices in the
untangled heavenly verities. The faithful friend, who let
no hour pass unless he had ministered to this orphan, had
braced up yonder hesitant, had lifted him who was fallen,
or comforted her who was starving, casts off this frail
house of an earthly tabernacle ; and lo ! infinite resource
with which to minister, no lack of time for endeavor, and no
grinding burden of fatigue. She who, for months and years,
lay gently on the sick-bed, who received from one and
another a thousand tender ministrations to her pain, and
repaid them all in her thankful patience, — she casts off this
frail house of this earthly tabernacle ; and lo ! with the same
love, with the same patience, with the same gratitude, she is
ministering to them and to ten thousand more, in this glad
freedom of disembodied life. As the baby passes into the
boy, the boy into the youth, the youth into the man, so, in
one more change, not unlike these others, the child of God
stands free in the untrammelled life of heaven.

The revelation of life in Jesus Christ is not simply the
fact of his personal reappearance after death. Before he
died, he had quickened the life of the world, renewed it
enlarged it. " I am the resurrection and the life : whoso
liveth and believeth in me shall never die." Whoever lives
with that control of sense and organ by the living soul which
to the Christian man is possible, whoever rises superior to

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pain, hunger, want, whoever lives with the divine life of a
son of God, that man knows he does not die. The answer
falls fitly on the wretched plaint of Martha, dissatisfied, as
well she might be, with the faith of her country and of her
time. She sobs out her doleful creed : "I know that he shall
rise again, at that distant resurrection, at that last day, which
is, oh, so wretchedly far away ! " How often has that mourn-
ful plaint of that Jewish woman been repeated by persons
who have been taught the same Eastern doctrine of a sus-
pended animation, even in Christian churches ! Christ will
have none of it. "Dead! Do you think I shall die? You
believe in me ! Do you think any child of God dies ? If he
once learns to live, if he live in the large life, — the life that
believes, that loves, that hopes, — he knows he cannot die."

It is indeed a faith which it needs such as Jesus to instil.
Those who knew him took it in and made it real. For us,
we drink at the same fountain. The promise was not an
empty promise; and when the moment comes, when the
cloud opens and the heaven reveals itself, the Comforter,
who is the Holy Spirit, speaks to us. Nor is it any new doc-
trine. It is the word which spoke from the beginning. The
Comforter speaks to say that the world of God is larger
than this world of man. The life of God is larger than this
life, hemmed in by the powers of five senses only, and unable
to know more or to do more. The Father of perfect love
is always training us for that larger life and those fuller pow-
ers. Sometimes he shows us that this is possible. When he
calls the careful thinker who has exhausted earthly processes,
or the brave leader who has quickened a thousand thousand
lives, nay, the loving boy who has shown me what the king-
dom of heaven is and what it is like, or the unselfish mother
whose life has been all made up of help and blessing to
those around her, — when God lifts these into a life unem-
bodied, and therefore unseen, he teaches me again the lesson
which Jesus was teaching always. Such lives have larger
sphere and duty ; for God's purpose is larger than these
cramped places and these passing hours. Who lives as they
have lived, and with such faith as their faith, these never die.

THE KINGS WORK,

"I must walk to-day and to-morrow and the day following; for it
cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem." — Luke xiii., 33.

However carelessly you choose to read the New Testa-
ment, you cannot but be impressed with the calm steadiness
of the last march to Jerusalem. " I must go to-day, to-
morrow, and the clay following ; for a prophet cannot perish
out of Jerusalem." He must go, for he is about his Father's
business.

Annas and Caiaphas do not expect him, do not want him.
"He will not be here this time," they say, "to upset and
confuse everything. He is no fool. We have given him a
warning that his room is better than his company." For
such men always put themselves in the place of him they
judge. Caiaphas always thinks of Jesus as governed by
Caiaphas' own motive. So, when people are guessing to-day
about a public man, Will he do this, will he do that? you
can see what the guesser is by his solution of the problem.
But, in the great crisis of the world, Jesus moves on his own
line, led by his own motive. To the surprise of all and the
indignation of all, he appears again at the city, as surely as
the feast comes round. " It cannot be otherwise. I must
go." It is just as a gallant officer takes his column under
fire, though he is to be the first man to fall, and knows he is.

Such is the central example of perfect devotion to the
work God gives us to do, — work for that kingdom in which
we are all citizens, and of which God is the King. It is one
of the great compensations of our time for some of its
supposed losses of faith, that it can see more easily than any
other time has seen what this business of the King is, in
which we are all enlisted. To our time there ought to be no
danger that man or woman should fall back into an imbecile
regret that God has no work for either of them to do.
Every morning wakes us up to a life so large that the nays-

I/O

tery is, rather, how the fifteen waking hours shall begin to
answer its requisitions. Every man now sees the King's
work every hour. The clanger is only that he shall be at-
tracted to too many parts of it, and shall not pull steadily
at his own rope. For the inter-union of nations and tribes,
and the ready communication between land and land, compel
every man to see that he is his brother's keeper, and that his
failure involves wide calamity. It brings the corresponding
encouragement, that duty faithfully done is done in the King's
work, and for a sphere no less than the whole world.

In conversation in a literary circle the other clay, I heard
the opinion expressed that the delicate work of those old
essay-writers, who described with an exquisite finish the
amusing niceties or pettinesses of village life, would never
again command the interest of the great body of readers.
Such detail as you find in Washington Irving's Sketch Book,
in Miss Mitford's Sketches of Our Village and Belford Regis,
or even the nicer studies of the detail of life by Charles
Lamb and Leigh Hunt, or some of the descriptions most
admired in the Spectator, are now considered by the younger
generation as petty rather than fine. The opinion I heard
expressed was this : that in Young America and Young
England every youth and every maiden now feel what it is
to be " citizens of the world." The English lad knows that
the morning drum-beat of England is all the time resounding,
as the sun rises on her different lands. The American lad
knows that his kindred "vex every ocean" with their trade,
push their gigantic game beyond the Arctic and Antarctic
Circles ; and that there is no dialect so barbarous but that
men of his race have translated into it the oracles of his
faith. This girl will be married, when her lover is well es-
tablished in Japan. That minister mailed a pamphlet, which
was asked for, to the Griqua diamond-fields. Your ladies'
club in the vestry heard Miss Twitched tell how the Papapigo
girls made hard gingerbread at Hampton ; and the young
woman, who sang your Christmas hymns so prettily at the
Unity, is to-day teaching Spanish children their catechism,
under the shadow of the Andes. This thing is happening
all the time. So there is not the old danger that people will
be eaten up by the conceit of Nazareth, or will immure
themselves in hermitages in Bethlehem.

In the analogies of war, the duty of working for the cause
is perfectly understood. The great word "honor," in a

171

soldier's interpretation of it, means that he subordinates him-
self entirely to the cause. Do you remember that little Eng-
lish poem which describes the martyrdom of a soldier of the
Buffs in China? They had been taken prisoners by the
Chinese, he and some Sepoy companions. All of them
were bidden to perform Ko-tow — that is, to touch the fore-
head to the ground — before some idol. The Sepoys did it
readily enough, and were let off. The English soldier would
not do it.

" Let swarthy heathen cringe and kneel,
An English lad must die."

And he died. But I do not dare tell how many noble men
that death of that unknown private fired to manhood. Regi-
ments marching to war in our rebellion took up those words,
took them to heart, and carried them to duty. The honor
of the soldier was represented in the sacrifice. He must
be about the business which is so much larger than his own
life. And men learn in war to keep this idea before them
always. Personal inconvenience takes its own proper and
insignificant place. I remember an anecdote of twenty years
ago, which has quite another tone, regarding one of the most
finical and elegant young men I had ever known. I have
not seen him since he was the most exquisitely dressed, the
most elegantly nurtured, the most precisely ordered young
man of my acquaintance about town. The clock struck for
him. The gun fired. He was at his duty, and was placed
on the staff of one of our most dashing leaders, perhaps
because he knew all languages, and would entertain the
French princes, if need were, without a slip in his accent.
But the work of war is not talking with French princes.
He had not been on duty a month, when at midnight
he was summoned to direct a confidential party in a rapid
movement to secure some contraband arms. The story
of his soliloquy on his return has hung to me like a watch-
word, precisely because of the triviality of the detail.
Soaked to the skin, covered with dirt from tip to toe, hungry,
cold, cross, the elegant pet of society dragged himself up-
stairs to go to his bed at sunrise. His meditations were
overheard through the thin plank of the barrack. " So,
Alfred," he said to himself, "this is war. You've had
nothing to eat. You've had nothing to drink. Nobody saw
you. Nobody thanks you. Nobody will thank you. You've
caught a cold that will keep you barking a month. You've
spoiled a good suit of clothes. You've ruined a good pair

172

of boots. You are frozen and hungry and mad. Yes, Alfred,
— but you got the guns ! "

No man who has served in the army will fail to appreciate
his satisfaction and the point of the homely anecdote. The
work in hand was done. Who cared for the cost or sac-
rifice ? Of such experiences, of which the war was full, the
moral value is in an inverse proportion to the importance of
the end secured. It is not when the fall of Vicksburg is
won by a night's watching that you learn the lesson. You
do not need any lesson there. Then you see that the game
is worth the candle. But it was in the lesser things that
men learned how they also serve who only stand and wait.

But that sense of honor is not to be confined to soldiers.
Eugene Sue, in his terrible novel, The Wandering yew, made
us all familiar, a generation ago, with the absolute fineness
of organization in which the Jesuit community, one and all,
are trained to obey the orders of their general. In the
midst of the terror of the book, in the horror of that sense
of an awful fate entangling and controlling every action of
every person, as the snake in the Laocoon controls every
limb of each child, the one redeeming and helpful element
was the vision the book gave you of the consecration of
noble men and women to a great cause, — a cause outside
themselves, and vastly larger than themselves, for which
they were willing to live, for which they were ready to die,
if it were God's will. The excellence of the book, all that
which was not sensational or morbid in it, was this success
in transferring the notion of honor from half-feudal sur-
roundings, from the association of armies or of courts, to
what men call the mean details of common life. The post-
boy who harnessed a horse was on honor : the lackey was on
honor, as he knocked at the door, and waited for an answer
to his message. The method of the Jesuit Order, so ingen-
ious and so sure to preserve itself, is well worth the study
of any man of religion or any man of affairs who would
learn how to co-ordinate men with each other, and how to
assign to each his convenient place. And, when the faith-
ful companion, no matter how low his grade in the hierarchy,
feels that it is God's will he is doing, then nothing can be
more grand than such devotion. But, when he has advanced
so far as to see that it is the carnal ambition of men very
low in their ambition, which orders him here or there as
a chessman in their game, nothing can be more awful than

i73

his slavery. Of this awful picture, the redeeming side is in
the possible devotion of man to a great cause. Because he
is God's child, he is willing to do God's work. Because
God's will is to be done by God's children, God's children
volunteer. The King's work must go forward ; and to the
King's work are their lives devoted.

Where Ignatius Loyola stopped short, content with form-
ing his little Society of Jesus, with its various centres, head-
centres, and a general, Jesus Christ himself never stopped.
'• I go away," he said. The King would take command in
person. Such devotion to the Father's work and will as he
had shown, he expected that we could show, and it was all
he wanted us to show. Such lifting this world upward as he
had tried, not vainly, he believed that we should carry for-
ward. Just such devotion to a cause as the soldier shows
to his flag in battle, as the Jesuit shows to the poor paper
order of his general, Jesus expects us all to show to that
stead}', heavenward progress of the world, which, as he
shows, is God's purpose and command. "I must go about
my Father's business," he says ; " and you must go about it.
As he has sent me into the world, even so have I, also, sent
you into the world."

"The King's work must go forward. There is no stop
possible. If it is in my hand, entrusted to me, I must carry
it forward." Well for any man or woman who, early in life,
works out this formula for the place or duty which is assigned
to him in men's affairs. Duty is no separate business, no
part of my self-culture, no service for which I am to be paid
at the ticket office of heaven. Duty is my part of the infinite
service, which an infinite number of God's children must
render before God's kingdom comes. It is lifted from a
little personal affair to its own place in close relationship
with the movement of the universe. It seems to me not
hard to make even children understand this, and enter into
the enthusiasm of work thus rendered in the common cause
for the Father of us all. Let the girl know that she does
not do this merely to please her mother or to oblige her
father, but that she counts as one in the great company who
are pushing forward the King's work, — she also is an officer
in the army, and to her also has he assigned work to be
done. I shall never forget the enthusiasm of a young friend
whom I had asked to carry forward some part of our work
here for the families of soldiers absent in the war, — not a
duty with any romance attached, — nothing which you would

174

print in a newspaper or a biography, — the humblest of min-
istrations, in snuffy tenement houses of discomfort or need.
But she said to me afterward, " I walked on air as I left
you, for I was in the service also." She felt how great
a thing it is to be fellow-workman with the King, to serve at
his side in the place he has appointed.

Of this loyal service in the King's work, to-day teaches
one of the central lessons. It needs consecration, — yes!
determination, — yes ! One must go to Jerusalem, though
Jerusalem means Calvary and crucifixion. One must march
to-day, to-morrow, and the day following. And then, when
one looks clown on the city, when one sees it in its glory and
beauty, one may be, often will be, mocked by a false tri-
umph. Here they are cheering him behind and before.
Here are others coming out to meet him with the same
enthusiasm. And it is not false enthusiasm : it is true. And
it seems to mean so much ! How easy to see that picture
with the side-lights of our own time ! I remember, to look
back twenty years again, that it was my duty to preach in
Providence on the 21st of July, 1861, when we knew that
the first battle of the war was going on. I was speaking to
the wives and daughters of fifty or a hundred men of the
First Rhode Island Infantry, which regiment we knew was
hotly engaged while we were in church. We woke Monday
morning to paeans of victory. All had opened so well ! A
disgraced and defeated enemy was by that time in flight to
Richmond. From hour to hour, as I came to Boston and
afterward, these tidings of encouragement came in, — so many
palm branches thrown before our feet, — till, at the office
where I was working here in Boston, at one o'clock, there
entered one of your merchant princes, — one of the men who
has reliable private advices, — to tell us of the crash of Bull
Run, that all our proud army was flung back in flight, and
that Washington was swarming with stragglers and run-
aways.

I will not say it is always so ; but it is so very, very often.
The apparent triumph has to fade in failure before real
victory comes. The French proverb says, it is true, that it is
only the first step which costs. But nobody would ever say
so, one who knows life in its reality and seriousness. Life
has proved a thousand times that the triumph of Palm Sun-
day, the victory of the first step, is a false triumph and a

i75

false victory. It is only he who endures to the end who is
saved. And he who is on the King's work expects and
knows that he will meet the King's enemies. On Monday,
the King's Son will meet in his father's temple money-
changers and sellers of sacrifice, men who sell worship tor
money. They are the lineal descendants, the present rep-
resentatives of that half of the patriarch Jacob which was
cheat and truckster. They made his father's house a den
of thieves. Tuesday, the Son of the King will meet cap-
tious priests, to ask who gave him his authority. He will
meet crafty Sadducees who would catch him in his talk. He
will silence these, only to meet others who would embroil
him with the governor. They would be glad indeed to lay
hands on him. It is Wednesday of the same week on which
the King's Son tells these wondering brethren of his of the
certain crash and fall of the glory that they see around them
in this false Jerusalem. It is Thursday on which the lines
draw tighter and tighter. Judas is dealing with Caiaphas and
his crew; and the King's Son knows that he is thus wounded
even in the house of his friends. Friday dawns, and sees
him a prisoner, bound. The cock crows at sunrise ; and he
turns to look his reproaches on the faithless Peter who has
denied him. The sun sets on Friday, on the tomb in which
he is buried. Such is the week which follows your triumph
of that beginning. And that test of our companions and
partners, that test of ourselves, will come most likely to you
and me. You must not say, " I will volunteer for the King's
work, if the King will give me work which is distinguished
and easy and agreeable:" The stage-manager, who was
asked to arrange a play by amateurs for some great charitv,
told me that all the ladies wanted to play Juliet, and all the
gentlemen to play Romeo. The King's work admits none of
that sort of volunteering. We must not say we will go and
fight, if the King will assure us that there are no enemies or if
we may fight in iron-clads. It is because there are enemies
and are no iron-clads that the King needs his children. And
these children — if the false triumph of Olivet do not turn
their heads with vanity, — if they do not think the prize won
because children cry "Hosanna" — may, with every new day,
carry out the King's work more skilfully and win his purpose
more completely. One could not but think of all this on
Thursday. Mr. Brooks described to us the brilliant opening
of his Union Reading Room, he described next its conflict
with Pharisees and Sadducees and doctors learned in that

176

dried-up law ; and not till then did we see it come out
strong, flat-footed, and manly on the working plane of real
life. One could trace the same steps in Mr. Tilden's allusion
to temperance reformation. That reform has a plenty of Oli-
vet triumphs, mass-meetings, and wayside friends, cheering
and promising. It meets its share, as well, of critics and
cross-questioners, — doctors learned in the law and chiefs of
administration, eager to send it back to the fastnesses of the
rural valleys from which it came. It is not till, in the gray
of a cold morning, after a night of tears and horror, there
meet together in some garden of a new life some child of
God, all broken with despair, and the other child of God, who
is eager in the Father's work, — it is not till then that the true
new life asserts itself, and, for the repentant, new hope
comes in.

Our Easter rejoicings of next week are but painted uphol-
stery, unless we be thus enlisted in the King's work for weal
and for woe. Who seeks a lesson in Palm Sunday and in
Passion Week must learn that lesson of manly, of womanly
endurance, — that victory is not in the shouting or in the mul-
titude. The real victory is sure when a loyal child, for
darkness or for light, for death or for resurrection, goes
steadily about his Father's business.

THE VICTORY OF THE FEW.

"And the number of names together were about a hundred and
twenty." — Acts i., 15.

If this little company had simply preserved its own exist-
ence, at this modest standard of the beginning, — with its
simple worship, its loyal faith, and its hearty mutual love, —
if it existed now after eighteen hundred and fifty years, one
hundred and twenty men and women, honoring while they
loved the Leader of their lives, wherever it held its meetings,
whatever its language or its home, it would be to-day by
far the most interesting society in the world, as it would be
the most extraordinary. No other organization of men
and women exists, which existed that day, excepting the
Jewish Church. And the Jewish Church, without priest or
"temple or altar or sacrifice, without Pharisee or Sadducee,
and without the expectation of a Messiah, is so changed in
its old age that its best friends could hardly recognize it in
these surroundings. If the hundred and twenty of the be-
ginning had never added one to their number, had they sim-
ply testified through eighteen centuries and a half that God
is our Father, heaven our home, man man's brother, and
Jesus the leader of his life, here would have been a specta-
cle for men and ages. Our wise men would wisely study,
our poets and artists would rejoice that here was one relic of
a pure age and one memorial of a matchless life, and our
men of religion would see that here was the mystery of
mysteries. "This handful of people," we should say, "has
proved, so far as eighteen centuries of time can prove, that
somehow they are allied to eternity."

Precisely this thing has happened in these centuries, with
some noteworthy additions. This company still exists, pro-
claiming the central truths of life, — that we are children of
the Power that rules the universe, that among ourselves we
bear a common life, as brothers with brothers, and that this
life is unending or infinite. This company, thus united, pro-

i78

claims now as it did then that God is our Father, that we
must bear each other's burdens, and that we live forever. It
announces now as it did then that from Jesus Christ, whom
men crucified on Calvary, it gained that enlargement of life
to which these infinite conceptions belong. And to-day as
then, when men tell you he is dead, this company who take
his name says that life is infinite, and that man, who is an
infinite child of an infinite God, can never die. It maintains
for him the love and the gratitude it maintained then. It
calls itself by his name. It tenderly remembers the crisis
days of his life and fate. But it is with this addition to what
was then in the upper chamber in Jerusalem. It is not to-
day one hundred and twenty poor people, frightened by a
catastrophe, hiding from the police, doubtful about to-mor-
row, who thus honor him and remember him. There is no
petty tribe of savages, nor empire stretching round the world,
which does not know his name either in fear or in joy. It is
not a company like that of strangers to each other, — a few
[erusalem citizens, with a few fishermen from a lake-side far
away, an outcast Samaritan here, and an outcast Tyrian
there, a centurion speaking Latin, and a traveller speaking
Greek, who have met with an Edomite Arab or with the
grateful, gentle-woman of Cesarea. It is not such a mixed
company, attracted from so many different lives by the mag-
netism of his life. Whole nations acknowledge that life and
its power, quickening every drop of the life of national
being. Codes and constitutions are construed by jurists,
with careful reference to his instructions, which have become
the foundations of law. New enterprises of reform recom-
mend themselves by showing that they obey his sugges-
tions or are by his spirit inspired. So that, if our cold
Western tongues could quicken themselves to use the strains
of Eastern fervor, we should sing alike, with the understand-
ing as with the spirit, the words which call him King of
kings and Lord of lords, and say more certainly than ever
that he shall reign whose right it is to reign.

We do not mean that this wave of steady triumph shall
stop with the end of the nineteenth century. There is no
danger that it shall. We. may fairly use our festival to-day,
by considering the infinite means which have created this
advance of the power of Jesus Christ, and by considering as
well the way in which these same means shall advance his
kingdom in the future. People say that the belief in a
historical record grows fainter as time passes by. So let it

179

be. But, on the other hand, the certainty of the majesty of
life increases with each new exhibition of its sway. The
thing that has been shall be ; and the course which the world
has taken in nineteen hundred years of its history may
well be taken as an indication of its course in centuries
which are to come.

I need no better statement of the means which have en-
larged the Church of Christ and extended his power than
the statement now fairly celebrated, made a century ago by
the historian Gibbon. Men of my profession were scandal-
ized by it then, and well they might be ; for never was a more
witty or a more true exhibition of the narrowness, bigotry,
and cruelty which have, alas ! too often connected themselves
with the priestly functions. But, for all that, the essential
truth of the statement remains, — a statement which, like
Renan's statements, has ten thousand times the value of any
plea of any advocate, however loyal or sincere. Gibbon
says that the growth of the Church at the beginning was
favored by the five following causes : —

By the inflexible zeal of the Christians.

By the miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive Church.

By the pure and austere morals of the Christians.

By the union and discipline of the Christian republic,
which gradually formed an independent State in the heart of
the Roman Empire.

By the doctrine of a future life, improved by every circum-
stance which could give weight to that important truth.

In this enumeration, I use Gibbon's own words.

i. Now, to see how far these traits are effective, and to
speak of them one by one ; — we may well be grateful to-day
for that " inflexible zeal " which carried the new life every-
where. It is easy for a lazy and an indifferent age to criti-
cise it. But, for one, I am glad that I am not a savage,
half-dressed in a wolf-skin, tracking a wild boar somewhere
in Kent, or taking my chance for life, as I might or not find
a few oysters left by an ebbing tide. And that is certainly
what I should have been but for the enthusiasm of the men
who, by their Christian enthusiasm, made Britain the garden
of its time. Indeed, in whatever cause, I am fond of say-
ing that I have never known any enterprise succeed, which
had not a fanatic hitched to it somewhere. And the world
knows perfectly well, in a thousand experiences, what be-
comes of reasonable systems, well-balanced and propor-

i8o

tioned, which have trusted to their own decorous propriety
and even roundness to force them upon the attention of
mankind. Such lessons speak to us, in our time, as to our
duty upon the age before us. Not without zeal, inflexible
indeed, and intolerant so far as vice and dirt and disease
are concerned, are we to lift this age up to be a nobler and
better age than any which has gone before. If Paul had
waited at Antioch till Nero sent a delegation to him with
a "letter missive" to say that the first Congregational
Church in Rome had organized itself in the palace, and
wished to ordain Paul to its ministry, Rome would never
have been a Christian citv, and we should never have been
here. And, if we propose to wait here till blackguard boys
and criminals just out of prison come to us to say that they
have found by experience that the way of' transgressors is
hard, and that they hope we will kindly baptize and reform
them, Boston will never be a Christian citv. This is cer-

7 J

tain. It is not such a city to-day. And not Athens in its
lazy quest for something new, not Corinth in the scandalous
lust of its by-ways, not Rome beneath the heel of a Caesar,
ever offered more prizes than Boston offers for inflexible,
nay, for intolerant zeal.

2. "The pure and austere morals " of the early Church make
another of the causes assigned by Gibbon for its success.
This, again, was in the Master's line and purpose. No zeal
will achieve a permanent victory, if the man behind be not
through and through reliable. As Jesus himself said, no
amount of talk in God's service compares with work in his
service. Your prophet may be a matchless preacher; but
the first John Baptist who prepares the way of the Lord
is greater than he. The world has been teaching that lesson
ever since in these centuries. This and that prophesier has
risen and proclaimed ; and, if he had the weight of char-
acter behind, if, to the word which proclaimed, he added the
energy of the life which did, he has succeeded. But the world
has rightly held every John Baptist, every Saint Francis or
Saint Bernard, every Fe'nelon or Vincent de Paul, to that ter-
rible test of the Master, — "Why do ye call me Lord, Lord,
and do not the things that I say ? " The same test applies
to-day, and tomes into the horoscope by which Christian
successes are to be prophesied. Man or woman, preacher
or poet, church or society, must expect to be judged by it.
Character first and creed tested by character ; not creed first
and character tested by creed. That is the Jewish system,

i8i

and that system failed. The Christian system and the Chris-
tian future depend to-day, as they depended then, on the
pure and austere morals of all who have it in hand.

So far does the present age recognize this truth, that the
one new demand made in our own immediate generation is
the interesting appeal for the formation of schools of ethical
culture, — congregations even, of people who, while they want
to do right, do not mean to be annoyed by worship or logic
or creed or ritual of religion. Both in Europe and America
there are men and women who are so heartily wearied by the
endless quarrels of churches, by the unwarranted assumptions
of priests, and by the unmeaning formalities of old worship,
that they squarely say they will have none of them. "Give
us pure and austere morals, and we will ask no more." That
request could be granted, but for the presence with us of God
almighty. The Holy Spirit is here as well as these men and
women and children whom we see. And this Spirit will
speak ; and man will answer to the end of time. All the
same is it sure that this Spirk will exact now, as he exacted
from the hundred and twenty in the beginning, pure and
austere morals. "Thou shalt do this.'' "Thou shalt not do
that." And the true children will obey.

3. Again, Gibbon recognizes the effect of the miraculous
powers assigned to the primitive Church. And well he may.
True, he believes that these powers were falsely so assigned ;
but he knows that the men of that time admitted the claim.
We need not go into any definition of miracle. And we
need not weigh, for the thousandth time, the testimony which
can be piled into the scales of history. What the world was
glad to believe then, it is glad to believe now. It believed
that the spirit ruled the thing : it believed that life swayed
and moved matter. To that latent scepticism about the
power of spirit, which surrounded Abraham in the nature-
worshippers of Uz, which was at the bottom of the beastly
rites of Syria, which spoke out in the materialism of Epi-
curus and Lucretius, the Church opposed its steadfast testi-
mony. "Man's soul is greater than his body. The God of
the world is greater than the world is. Any son of God who
uses the divine life and trusts to the Infinite Spirit sways
body, flesh, world, and devil." This was, at bottom, the
reason why the world was perfectly willing to accept what
apostles, who were martyrs, told it of the wonders which
came from Jesus' love. The same world, to-day, chooses to
believe that spirit is stronger than flesh ; that God's spirit

182

is greater than the frame which it inspires. Not but there
are men now who take the brutish notion, and stand against
the heavenly truth. There are men who believe in the
machinery of their mills, and mean to make it control and
overmaster the men and women who are the workmen. "Let
these men and women die," they say : " there are more to be
found." " Steam and iron," they say, " are more than men
and women." These are the heathen of to-day. There are
other men who believe in the men and women who guide
the machinery : they care for their health and homes, care
for their children's education, care for the immortal soul.
"The soul," they say, "is more than wood and iron." These
men hold the Christian theory, and these men succeed. One
nation believes in improved muskets and cannon, in the ma-
chinery of war and tactics. Another nation believes in
schools for boys and girls, in the careful training of men
and women. When this Christian nation meets that heathen
nation, the heathen nation goes under, and the Christian
nation stands. A heathen politician to-day believes that
money is greater than men, that bribery at elections and the
skilful distribution of patronage will win success. A Chris-
tian statesman believes that men are worth more than money,
that he can do more by convincing minds and alluring souls
than he can by place or intrigue. This man believes that
spirit sways matter, and this man succeeds. And so, in the
future, man, or society, who will pledge themselves to the eter-
nal principle of all that is called miracle — namely, that the
spirit shall sway the thing — will succeed, as the primitive
Church succeeded in the beginning.

4. Of that primitive Church, as Gibbon says, another secret
was "the union and discipline of the Christian republic."
They believed in the " together." This was of course.
They were not atoms, knocked here and there by tempests,
as Lucretius said they were. They were children of God,
and shared his nature. Because children of one blood, they
were brothers in one family. Into a political system so
unsocial that a fire-club was the only association permitted
by the law, and that of mere necessity, there came this
loving family of men and women who bore each other's
burdens, and loved to do so. And they succeeded. Like
success is for us, in proportion as we use the same talisman.
And, as it was then, is it true to-day that the youngest
"Lend a Hand" Club, which unites its common forces in a
common purpose, advances the King's work more than the

i83

largest or richest church, where men and women meet with-
out meeting, unite without uniting, and do not share in one
campaign for the service of the Father. In those simple
days, if a man did not accept the " together," he did not
pretend to be a Christian. In those days, the believer who
went into solitude to "commune with nature" came back
more ready to work for man. It was left to weaker days,
of faith unsettled, and for our days, — when instead of faith
a poor sentimentality comes in, — before men or women sup-
posed that they could bear the pressure of life, or could do
its duties alone.

5. And easily chief among all the victories of the primitive
Church in this catalogue is its certainty that man is immortal.
Every preacher in every land began and ended with this
glad cry of Easter day : —

"Now Christ is risen from the dead. He is the first-fruits
of them that sleep." It was the message the world waited
for, longed for, perished for the need of. And, when the mes-
sage came, it taught " the doctrine of a future life, impressed
with every circumstance which could give weight to that im-
portant truth." These are, again, the words of the sceptic
historian. One can well see what dignity spoke in the words
even of the meanest preacher, when he found that to eager
listeners he had this certainty of life to proclaim, " as with
authority, and not as the scribes." " Here was my Master,
oh, more kind and thoughtful than your dearest friend, —
they cannot be compared ; more wise and ready than your
wisest, — oh, they cannot be compared ; he could do such
things as no other man did than he, — they cannot be com-
pared. We are all God's children ; but he, — why, I tell you, —
he knew what it was to be Son of God ! We have all asked
God's blessing ; but he, why, he lived in God, moved in God,
and in God had his being! And do you think he died, or
could die ? This is what he said, ' Because I live, ye shall
live also.' This is what he said, 'God is before all, and be-
cause God lives we live.' Well, they tried it : they nailed
him to the cross, they laid his body in the grave. And he
loved us so — loved you so, loved me so — that he came back
to that body. He spoke to me, spoke to her : he walked with
us, and he talked to us. We know now that in reality God's
children never die. Does a grain of wheat die when it is
cast into the ground ? "

In the finest passage in Bulwer's poem of " King Arthur,"

1 84

the spirit of a brave man passes from this earth in struggle
and victory, rises through ineffable splendors nearer and
nearer to the Centre of Being and Light of Life, and there
is just ready to witness and enjoy the glory of perfected
being, to receive an answer to every question which human
nature asks, when a message is brought of some act of
human ministration, for which his service is required on the
earth. The ready friend, just girt with the glories of his
spiritual body, does not hesitate, and to the earth returns.

" What rests ? The Spirit from its realm of bliss
Shot down to earth, the guide to happiness.

Pale to the waiting King, the Spirit came.
Its glory left it as the earth it neared.

In living likeness, as its corpse it came;
Wan with its wounds, the awful Shade appeared."

The story is taken, of course, from this vision of Easter
morning. To give to a world this blessing of life assured,
life unbroken, the Saviour Spirit returns to his friends, to say
once more, " I am the resurrection and the life." The men
who told that story won the world. The world of their time
accepted the truth and the testimony to it. And, in all time
afterward, the words of this morning are the words which
speak in every chamber of bereavement. " He is not here :
he is risen. This is only the place where he lay." Or " I
ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your
God."

The world was hungry, thirsty, and faint : the whole heart
was sick, and the whole head was sick. It heard this voice
of these teachers, and it took up its bed and walked. Jesus
Christ gave it life. Doctrine ? yes ; social order ? yes ;
morals ? yes ; new strength ? yes. He gave these because
he gave life, life stronger than death ; life because we are
living children of a living God ; life which cannot be fettered
in forms, swayed by palaces, or buried in tombs. Life gave
his cause the victory, and makes him Ruler of Mankind.

I MUST SEE ROME.

" Paul purposed to go to Jerusalem, saying, After I have been there,
I must see Rome." — Acts xix., 21.

Even now, when Rome is a ruin, the yearning to see Rome
often becomes a passion. Around the fallen piles where
were her palaces, there huddles only a handful of people,
if they are compared with the millions who lived there in
Paul's day. In the wreck of those palaces, they have found
a statue here, a vase there, now a mosaic, now a gem ; and,
from such raking in the ashes, they have collected museums
which attract the world. " See Rome and die," is a proverb
which speaks for this yearning. Most of you who are of my
age will remember a pathetic story, in the First Class Book, of
a poor student, who sold all his books for money to travel to
Rome, looked once from a neighboring height upon the dome
of St. Peter's and on the contour of the seven hills, and then
went home not dissatisfied. Such is the passion now. Is it
not a pleasure to think that Paul felt it then, — Paul, who has
made our modern life? This text is not the first glimpse that
we have of the eagerness in choice of objects for travel of this
prince of gentlemen. There is a glimpse of it as he seeks
Athens, with the eagerness with which a man of letters seeks
Athens now. There is a glimpse of it as he goes down to the
field of Troy to read his Homer, where Alexander read his,
where Hecuba wept and Hector died. In his after life, in
this little glimpse of hopes and projects, it is quite of course
that he who has seen Corinth and Athens should long to
see in their places the masters of Corinth and Athens.
With him, it is not what it is with us, merely the wish to see
masterpieces of art which have been carried to the capital
to adorn her galleries. Paul has dealt with Gallio, and he
would be glad to deal with Seneca. He has seen pro-con-
suls, he will be glad to see the emperor. And then what
Rome is to-day gives only the outline of what Rome was then.

. 1 86

Caesar's palace stood glorious, where we now trace its ruins
with difficulty. Temples, gigantic piles for baths, aque-
ducts which carried rivers of water to supply them, where we
see only lines of broken arches ; the forum crowded with
loungers to be counted by thousands, where to-day the
traveller presses a fern or picks up a bit of marble ; ranges
of statues, from which we admire a single torso, — all these
glories were in their exact perfection. It is in the eagerness
to see all this with his own eyes that Paul so confidently
speaks. There is an earlier intimation of the same yearn-
ing in the epistle to the little handful of Christians in Rome.
He tells them that he shall stop and see them, when he
makes his journey into Spain. There is the eager pressure
on him to carry over the world this gospel which is to renew
the world. And, of course, to a man who had the just
pride of a leader, there was the eager desire to stand in the
city which commanded, and to deal with leaders. " I must
see Rome."

Two or three years pass by, and Paul does see Rome.
And he comes not as he had expected. To Athens he had
come, a solitary traveller, in advance of his companions ; and
he waited for them there. When he landed at Neapolis, with
the eager curiosity with which an Asiatic must always look
on Europe for the first time, it was with these same compan-
ions,— two or three of them, — glad to leave the discomfort
of a Greek fishing-boat. In both these cases, he had come
because he chose to come ; and, though it were in simple
array, still he had travelled as a freeman travels. But, when
he sees Rome at last, where the Appian Way passes Albano,
it is under the escort of a company of soldiers, in a travelling
party of prisoners, of whom he is one, in the weather-worn
array of those who left the East some six months before, and
who have been shipwrecked since. He comes, because he
must come, — a file of soldiers before and a file behind. To
carry his humble packs, there trudge at the right and left a
glad company of Christian disciples, who have come out from
the city to greet him and to meet him. It is the cordial
welcome which the poorest give the poorest ; and this wel-
come has already given Paul courage. They rise on the
gentle slope of the roadway ; and one of the most experi-
enced runs forward and points to the north, where the
towers rise white against the blue. " Ecce, Roma ! " he
cries ; and Paul sees Rome.

i87

So different is the fulfilment of our most careful plans
from the hope and prayer with which we make them. Paul
means to go to Rome as a leader and teacher. He comes
here as a prisoner, waiting his trial. Such certain result,
steady and unflinching, achieved in ways most unexpected,,
is the delight of poetry and imaginative fiction. The astrol-
oger prophecies that the prince shall be killed on his birth-
day. The fond father shuts him up in his palace, that there
may be no possible murderer. And on the morning of the
birthday, as the young man lifts down a melon from the
shelf, the fatal knife slips, falls, strikes his heart, and his
father finds him cold in his own life-blood. All such tales
spring from such experiences as Paul's. The end comes by
ways the most improbable. Man proposes his course, and
that course fails. But all the same, in the steady march of
days and years, the end is sure. He sees Rome. Men and
women of intense purpose come to hate slavery. They com-
bine against it, they preach and prophesy against it. Their
method is the dissolution of the Union and the downfall of
the Constitution. And they live to see their purpose accom-
plished, in a war for the preservation of the Union and the
maintenance of the Constitution. Every method they pro-
posed is thrown on one side, but the great purpose for which
they prayed is granted. The Pope is eager to do something
for the glory of God worthy the see of Rome. He builds
St. Peter's, with its matchless architecture. To meet the
cost, he sends out the agents, who shall sell indulgences
North, South, East, and West. This profligate offer of tick-
ets, sold for money with which to enter heaven, touches the
torpid conscience of the world. Half Europe rises in protest
against him and his, turns them out of doors forever. And
so the real glory of God is advanced, and his true worship
secured, as it could not be by a thousand shrines more glo-
rious than St. Peter's. All the history of the world is thus
the history of progress which no man has dared foresee.
And history owes its charm to such surprises. Who reads
wisely is always coming upon the story of men who have
"builded better than they knew."

In grateful recognition of the share of a good God in such
unexpected victories, men refer them naturally to what we. call
"Providence," for want of a better word. What we mean is
the underflow and constant presence of the eternal law of
right, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. Of course, we
puzzle ourselves, if we imagine an outside God contriving,

1 88

centuries in advance, a certain mechanical success, like
checkmate on the chess-board of history, and for hundreds
of years pushing up pawns and pieces till he has secured it.
That is only a puzzle. But there is no such puzzle when we
see God as the present conscious power which works for
righteousness, when we see that right because it is right
must produce right and succeed, while wrong because it is
wrong can produce nothing, and must fail. If we see this,
we find real meaning in the Scripture statements that we are
working together with God. Those statements are not fig-
urative. Paul, for instance, is at work in this way. Paul
knows what he wants : he wants to strike at centres. As
Jesus bade him, he wants to work in the cities, and not
stand chattering with wayfarers. He has seen the little
cities : he must see the great city. He has seen pro-consuls :
he must see the men who sent them. His own plan is to
weave enough tent-cloth and to make enough tents, to hire a
wretched steerage passage to Ostia, and then to throw him-
self on the kindness of the Roman Church. But he is no
stickler for method. What is important is the object, and he
keeps his end in sight. At last, a prisoner before Felix and
Agrippa, he sees his chance. " I appeal to Ceesar," he cries.
And from that moment he is Caesar's ward. Rome must
care for him, Rome must protect him, Rome must feed him
and clothe him. In that happy word, Paul compels Nero to
bring to Rome the man whose word and work are in the end
to overthrow Nero's throne. This is it for a man like Paul
to be fellow-workman with a present God.

It will help you and me in our frequent discouragements, if
we can remember these great instances, whether in Script-
ure, in history, or in our own seeming failures, where the
perfect end comes, steady and glorious as the march of
Orion across the sky, though every device of ours to secure
it seems to have broken down. I have no doubt that Paul
was a good tent-maker. I suppose he knew how to choose
his stuffs, where to buy the best needles and the best thread,
how to cut the patterns with least waste, and how to meet
the rightful demands of purchasers. But it was not by tent-
making that Paul was to save the world. It was by this
steady persistence of which this text gives one little sample.
You see it in this trial before Felix, where he sacrifices the
chance of immediate acquittal for what he values so much
more, — the chance to plead before Seneca and Nero. He
never forgets the underlying purpose to proclaim God, and

1 89

God at hand. And, because he never forgets it, this God
who is at hand, this eternal Power who works for righteous-
ness, always works for him. Here is the infinite alliance :
if you do "accept the universe," your own method fails, but
vour infinite purpose is accomplished.

A father watches his only son as he might watch an orchid
in a green-house, — never a frosty night, never a blast of cold,
never sunshine too hot, never a draught of unaccustomed
air. Ask him his purpose, he will say simply that he hopes
himself to help in answering the Saviour's prayer, and makes
these arrangements all in the wish that the boy may be
shielded from all temptation. Loyal and thoughtful father !
What he can he does, as best he sees and knows. But, as
it happens, God knows better. One night the father dies.
The wind blows the next morning, and the whole card-castle
of his fortune falls. That petted boy is turned out upon the
street with nothing, as we say. By which we mean he has
nothing but the memory of an earthly father's integrity and
the certainty of a heavenly Father's present love. If he has
these, he has the whole, — he has enough and more. It is
enough to put him on the very path his father sought for
him. It is enough to train him in that integrity which made
his father's only prayer. It is enough to teach him how to
stand upon his own feet, fight his own battle, and with his
own arm win God's victory. The father's method has failed;
but his wish is answered, because he did not work alone, but
was a fellow-workman with God.

Or you find it hard to lift your daily life above things,
things that " perish in the using." Bread and butter, clothes
and fashion, house-rent and insurance and fuel, the summer's
journey and the winter's repair, are too much for you. You
hear preaching and hymns about another life, but it does not
seem to be for you. You know people who talk of heaven
as if it were as near them as the next room, but it does not
seem so to you. Still, you wish it were ; and you try for it.
You go to the minister's Bible class, and that does not help
you. You read Thomas a. Kempis, and that does not help
you. You try the bold experiment of a revival, and that
does not help you. Dear child, the good God is as eager for
you as you are for yourself. He has his ways, as you have
yours. What if it happen, that, in face of your best pro-
visions, nay, without granting your most eager prayer, he lift
your darling baby from your arms, and fold the child gently
in his own ? What if he take your treasure from your home

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here to your other home there ? What he means is that
where your treasure is your heart shall be also. Life is
where those are whom we love. And! from that moment the
heaven is nearer to you which seemed so far away. You had
your way to seek it : he has his for you to find it. And you
will find it, if you trust these constant currents of his love.

From every place to every other place there are a thou-
sand possible ways, — nay, a million. It is not the little
choice of the township in the wilderness, where the puzzled
traveller is told that he may either take the hill road or the
meadow road or the road between. In those courses of life
which we are studying, our problem is more like that of the
navigator, when he has come into the offing and taken his
"departure." His home is blue behind him, his port is on
the other side of the world, and the ways thither are infinite
in number, not two or three alone. The great circle is the
shortest. But the great circle may cross a continent, — most
likely will, — and he must go by sea. He must take a part
of another great circle, and then a part of another, and then
a part of a third, and even more. And he must consider the
great sea-currents, the gulf stream, and the rest. He must
remember the trade winds, and he must avoid centres of
calm. Nay, when he has started on the best plan which an
angel could propose to him, there may come a tempest which
shall drive him from his track. It may leave his vessel so
shattered that she can only run before the wind. So that
his choice is to be made between so many courses, not
to-day only, but every day. Each day will have its right
course and its wrong. And the tack which was the right
tack with the wind of yesterday may be the wrong tack with
the wind of to-day. But here the parallel with the voyage of
life ends. For the voyage of the seas, before we trust ship
and cargo to such varied contingencies, we insist that the
commander shall have had experience of every sea, and of
calm and storm. But, for the voyage of life, we need make
no such demand. In that voyage, all that, is asked of any of
us is a loyal desire to succeed. The man who intentionally
turns backward, and tries to go backward, succeeds in going
backward. The man who tries for nothing, but lies as on
the painted surface of a painted sea, goes nowhere. But the
man who loyally tries to make the voyage God proposes,
finds in the vessel beneath him and the skies above him an
infinite purpose and power which commands success. He

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may not gain it by the route he first proposed. He may be
disappointed in his second. But he cannot go wrong. He
works with God. and in God's time he finds his goal. He
starts to see the city which hath foundations ; and in the
end, though he be storm-tost on the way, shipwrecked per-
haps, stung by serpents or deserted by friends, in the end
he rises, like Christian in the story, or like Paul when his
long task is over, the last height is surmounted, and the
city is there.

Only let a man have a purpose, and that purpose a godly
purpose. " I must see Rome ! " Must, because there was
the best place to work, and the most work to do. As a
greater than Paul, on a journey more critical, said, " I must
work to-day, to-morrow, and the day following ; for a prophet
cannot perish out of Jerusalem.-' The prospect is death.
The certainty is what men call failure, " cruel mockings, and
scourdnes " ; but the result as certain is the salvation of the
world.

It is not the way you or I would have devised. No Tac-
itus or Seneca of those times would have planned it. The
world is to be lifted to a nobler life. Men are to rule them-
selves, not to be ruled by princes. Women are to be free,
not prisoners or slaves. There is to be no slavery. Sick-
ness is to become less and less. Pain is to be forgotten.
Men and women are to live for each other, and bear each
other's burdens. For this, a carpenter from the hills of
Galilee is to proclaim the present God. For this, he is to
come to Jerusalem to proclaim him. For this, he is to be
nailed to the cross, and die. Yes ; and because he comes,
because he dies, man is free and woman is free. Sickness,
pain, and even death, are less frequent and less. Men live
as brothers more and more; and in a common life they bear
each other's burdens. So orders his Father and our Father,
his God and our God. So rules the infinite Power which
makes for righteousness.

HONOR AND IDOLATRY.

" This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far
from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the
commandments of men." — Matt, xv., 8, 9.

And in another version, Isaiah xxix., 13.

Jesus describes what is passing around him. Enthusiastic
Crowds of Galileans listen with delight to what he says, and
then go back to their homes to do much as they did before.
And here, in the moment when he speaks, he is in sharp con-
flict with a troop of smooth-spoken spies from the city, glad
to catch him in his talk, if they can. They are over-civil,
even, in their manner, perhaps a little as one is apt to over-
do respect, when he talks to a crazy man. They honor God
with their lips ; but, as to his real empire over the world,
they are at best indifferent. To describe them, Jesus uses
the words with which Isaiah described their fathers seven
hundred years before.

As it happens, and perhaps, as he foresaw, he describes
precisely the way in which the world was going to treat him.
More and more did the passion grow for honoring him — with
the lips. Honor passed through all the stages of human ven-
eration, and then passed beyond them. Worship passed from
the worship of a teacher, even from the worship of an em-
peror, to the worship of a God. The Nazarene carpenter
— whom his own townsmen turned out of the meeting-house,
whom his countrymen wanted to stone, and did at last
crucify — was lifted, by after-ages of lip-service, to sit on
the throne of God as God's equal, and at last to be wor-
shipped as God himself. Yes, and of the men who did this
he would say so sadly, " Why call me Lord, Lord, and do
not the things which I say?" The humblest vine-dresser
who gave him a cup of cold water, in thankfulness for his
tenderness to a child, was more apt to do the things that he
said than those purpled and crimsoned bishops, who, in
their liturgies, bent their heads in reverence of his name.

Such experience is not without parallel in other affairs of

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men. The history of human sovereignty repeats it in one or
another form not widelv differing from each other. Charles
the Great of France conquers Europe, and his court is the
grandest in the world. In the course of a century or two,
his descendants receive all the honors he received, and more.
But honors are not power. And, while the sovereign sits
almost fettered on the throne, some master of the palace
orders the troops here and there ; and the poor sovereign
cannot so much as send a message across his own kingdom.
The Japanese for the last two centuries, up to our own time,
had reduced this thing to a perfect system. The emperor,
supreme in rank, if rank were all. was venerated as not even
gods were venerated. At one time, he sat motionless for
hours every morning on the imperial throne, thus to typify
and to preserve the peace of his kingdom. If he turned to
look right or left, by misfortune, calamity was threatened
by his imprudence. His food was brought to him in new
vessels every day. And, once in seven years, the acting
sovereign of Japan made him a state visit, with every ex-
pression of homage. From time to time, in the intervals, the
same acting sovereign sent him embassies with presents.
But, all this time, this supreme emperor, so called, this High
Gate, or Mikado, who represented the dynasty which for
more than two thousand years had held the rule in Japan,
had not a shred of power. He could not appoint a servant
in his own household. Far less could he send a soldier here
or enforce an edict there. Such luxuries as power and com-
mand belonged to the tycoon and to other "inferior"
princes.

To precisely such barren homage did men reduce Jesus
Christ in the course of ages. Throne? Yes! King of kings
and Lord of lords, if calling him King and Lord would an-
swer ; " Very God," if a sounding name will answer. But,
when any son of man would know what he said, proposed,
wished, or prayed for, that son of man must go, not to him,
but to his viceroy. For a thousand years, the Pope of
Rome held this viceroyship for Western Europe, and the
patriarchs of the Greek Church for Eastern Europe ; and
whoever needed help or direction went to them. And, when
this awful tycoonship broke down, still, for two or three hun-
dred years, a host of inferior princes have struggled for the
same viceroyship, and, under the forms of one or another
infallible Church, have kept men parted alike from Saviour
and from God.

194

All this time, these people — prince, bishop, priest, and all
— reverenced him with their lips, called him "Lord, Lord,'-
rendered to him every form of homage. To this hour, men
shall bow their heads in the creed when his name is named,
who, before the same service is over, shall acknowledge
that some viceroy of human imperfection is to interpret his
instructions, and administer religion in his name. But
suppose I go to such viceroys or vicars. How much do I
learn, — whether of his spoken instructions, — or how much
even of the spirit of his life do I imbibe ? Suppose you had
an eager pupil, not harassed by scepticism, certain in his
regard and love, who wanted only to reproduce Christ's
work in this end of this nineteenth century. The last thing
you would do with him, if you knew what you were about,
would be to set him upon studying the proclamations of
Popes. Nay, the worst thing you could set him to would be
the study of Calvin's Institutes, or of the canons of any
Church now existing. If you do know what you are about,
and what he wants, your wisest course is to show him the
men and women who have shown the most moral force in
history, — who, as we wisely say, are most Christ-like. Show
him the steadiness and perseverance of John Eliot. Show
him the faith of Saint Francis. Show him the quaint good
sense of Oberlin. Show him the tenderness and resolution
of Mary Ware. Show him the daring of Selwyn. Show him
the breadth of purpose of Xavier. Let him find out that to
be a follower of Christ is to carry manhood to the highest
power, to work out the highest heroism of the hero, the finest
chivalry of the gentleman, — that all these things follow to the
son of God. And if, by such lesser examples, you bring
him to the central example, if he find there the most tender-
ness, the most manly manliness, the most chivalrous chiv-
alry, and the noblest triumph, why he will learn the " noble
lesson" which the first and best of the world have learned,
exactly as they learned it. Sad enough that he is not led to
it by any men, because they are honoring Christ with their
lips ! That service is worthless, unless they are honoring him
in their lives.

The true way to honor Christ is to follow him. Do as he
did. Then you show that you love him, and hold him in rev-
erence. See him as he was, and do not bury him behind
your purple robes, — no, nor crown him with your thorny
• no, nor give him a reed for his sceptre. That was

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what Pilate did ; and how many men have done it since who
pretended to revere him !. He needs no monarch's robe to
give him command. He needs no crown and no sceptre.
He leads because he is leader. And when you see him as he
is, and know him as he is, you will follow.

The living generation of men has undertaken, in good
faith, to produce Jesus Christ again to the world he served.
From the beginning, in nineteen centuries, there has been no
such loyal effort to show him as he was as we have seen in
the last fifty years. This work has wrought much destruc-
tion of what had been called sacred. There was some neces-
sary dust and much noise, as the scaffolds and upholstery of
centuries were pulled down. Criticism has been sometimes
irreverent, and often foolish. But the result is that men
know Jesus Christ the better, and the result will be that they
will know him more. They honor him more, even if they
worship him less. I spoke here three months ago of this
determined Christian realism of our time, the resolution "to
see with the eyes of those that looked on." I read that day
from Mrs. Greenough's poem of Mary Magdalene, one of the
recent efforts to tell the story in this realistic way. Well, the
next morning I sent the copy of that poem which I had here
to a distant city. God so ordered that the pretty volume fell
into the hands of a woman wholly broken down in the vice
which men say is most incurable. My friend, who had the
book, had been pleading with this poor creature ; and, with
the hardness of despair, the girl had bidden her go her way,
and had said, " I have chosen mine." But, as God ordered, at
the same moment the girl took this book from her, and read
it. When she had read it, that very night she said to the
Christian friend who lent it : " Where you lead, I will follow.
What you ask, I will do." That softening of a rebellious
heart, that readiness to follow Jesus Christ, was what came
to her when for the first time, probably, in her life she was
able to get some glimpse of what he was. I dare say she
had bowed her head in the creed. I think very likely that
she had been taught to repeat, that

" The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from
Everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, of one
substance with the Father, took man's nature."

But neither the act of homage nor the statement of doc-
trine had saved her from temptation or had loosened the
power of sin. When she saw what his way of saving people
was, she chose that way of salvation. She did not love her

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sin. Poor wretch, nobody knew better than she the depths
to which it sunk her. And when she saw him, and when she
knew something of that life, she yielded herself to it as those
did in his day, of whom the whole record is they "turned
and followed."

It is almost a thing of certainty that, as the world chooses
thus to take its Saviour by the hand and to look in his face,
we shall hear the complaint that we treat him with irrever-
ence. "Master, rebuke the multitude." This is what the
people, fond of outside pageantry, said then ; and what they
say now. Of this remarkable book of Dr. Clarke's, The
Legend of Thomas Didymus, we shall be told that he takes
undue liberties with the person and character of Jesus Christ.
" He has placed words in the Saviour's lips which we do not
find in St. John." Yes; and did not St. John tell you that he
had only written a fragment of the history ? So a chamber-
maid of Queen Elizabeth might complain that the royal
robes of State were hung in the closets and that the throne-
room looks dreary, when the Queen dresses herself for ser-
vice and rides out to command her army. So the priests of
Apollo did complain that no man came to do sacrifice before
the Image of the Sun, when the rejoicing world had gone
after the Son of Righteousness. The habit of the first
school of painters was to invest Christ's figure with differ-
ent raiment and coloring from that which became a man.
Later down, a sacred "glory" had to be painted around his
head. And to this hour there is scarcely a picture of him
which is not either too soft to be strong or too rugged to be
tender. Whoever does try to lead us to a more real sense
of his manhood, which is to show us better how divine he
is must not dread such criticism. He must do his beste
that we may see the most tender tenderness, the most rugged
manhood, the most firm resolution, the most living life.
Then only do we know why and how he moved the young
man who had great possessions, the poor woman of Tyre,
the tax-gatherer at his office, or the centurion at the cross.
Into the market-place of Capernaum, or under the shade
of the orchard in the country here, came one whom
men called the carpenter of Nazareth. The children were
not afraid of him, for his welcome was such as they
had never known before. Young men and women talked
with him, found him cordial, sympathetic, so wise, and so
hearty. Puzzled people, who had handled back and forth
all the problems, talked with him. He was not puzzled,

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and to him there were no problems. Timid people talked
to him, and found him all courage. Sick people talked
to him, and found such vitality as was a fountain of
health. Some of these people were so fascinated that they
could not leave him. What he did, they tried to do. What
he said, they tried to obey. He wanted them for a purpose
he had in hand, and to that purpose they devoted themselves.

The purpose was to make all men and women like him, —
more manly, more womanly, — till they were perfect as is the
living God. Of all that company, the one who knew him
best was sure to be the one most like him ; who knew him
best, was sure to be the one who followed most heartily ; who
knew him best, was sure to be the one who succeeded most
completely. Yes j and he who knew him best would certainly
honor him most as he would wish to be honored. It might
not be by calling him " Very God of the substance of God" ;
it might not be by clothing him with a robe of purple ; it
would not be by banishing him to sit in majesty on some
secluded throne. Honor would come where obedience was
rendered ; and when Oberlin made light shine in darkness,
when John Eliot buried the tomahawk, when Mary Ware
watched by the dying peasants at Osmotherley, then was it
and thus was it that they rendered to him the fit and only
homage.

It has been my good fortune once and again to know the
pupils of a great artist, who loved him, honored him, and
would have died for him. I have known the aides of a great
general, who believed in him, honored him, and would gladly
die for him. I have had the good fortune to know men who
loved great women with all the passion and energy of life;
and I have known women who, with all the passion and
energy of life, loved great men. But never, in any such
cases of life enlivened by life, does he who so drinks at the
fountain expect to honor fitly with the lips him or her who
has so quickened life and inflamed passion. Always, where
passion is perfect and life is true, always this is the wish and
prayer: O God, that I may be worthy of that which he has
been to me ! O God, that I may do something to show him
that I apprehend and comprehend ! O God, help me to carry
out his purpose ! Help me, indeed, to make real the life
which from him I have derived. Well! Is that the law of
life in these separate instructions and inspirations ? All the
more is it the law of life when Mary or Martha sit at Jesus'
feet, when Mary Magdalene finds the devils are cast out,

198

when Simon and Matthew find what life is and what it is for.
Those men and women do not go about shouting " Ho-
sanna ! " They are not constructing creeds, — nay, they are
not so much as writing hymns. Hymns write themselves,
and creeds compose themselves. They are not taking
thought how they shall best build him a monument. Rather,
with all their might would they live in his life, and carry out
his unfinished plan.

This is as true to-day as it was then. Nor does the detail
seem difficult. No man need say the clays of miracle are
gone who sees how one act of love repeats itself to-day, or
how any loving life lifts up what is fallen down, just as his
did. You and I cannot work his miracles, you say. Then
we must work ours. There are no lepers for us to cleanse,
but there is dirt enough all around us for our cleaning, —
homes grimy with dirt, which you and I might make cheer-
ful ; nay, hearts impure, which you and I might sweeten and
freshen. He opened the eyes of the blind. Yes ; and there
is not one of us but may provide one page more for the read-
ing of the long midnight of these brothers and sisters of ours
whom we vainly teach to read if, when their fingers can trace
the letter on the page, there are no letters for their tracing.
He cast out devils in his exceeding love. And you and I, —
are we sure we have exhausted all our power in that direc-
tion ? He made another place of that Samaritan village ; he
made another woman of that Samaritan outcast. And you
and I ? How many outcasts from other lands cross our lives
every day ! And have we tenderly and manfully done all we
can do for them ? He gave to sinners new courage, because
he had hand and word and promise for them all. There are
enough left for us to try the same experiment.

And all this may be without a man's once bowing head in
his honor; nay, without a man's naming his name. What
does he care for that ? " Blaspheme me, if you choose," he
says proudly to the world : " that is easily forgiven." Only
carry forward the work. Build up the perfect kingdom.
Come yourself to his Father, as he came, and do the thing
he did. No fear but there will be sufficient honor. Yes, the
honor most grateful, when all tears shall be wiped from all
eyes, when every man shall sit under his own vine and fig-
tree, when God's will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.

THE UNITARIAN PRINCIPLES.

" Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."

— Ephesians iv., 3.

We are God's children, not merely his creatures. That is,
we inherit something of God's nature ; in the Bible phrase,
we are partakers of the divine nature. When we feel and
own this, we know that we are of the same nature with other
men and women. We are drawn to them and they to us in
unity of the spirit.

In every-day life, we see some people who feel this, and
like to feel it, and some who do not want to feel it. Some
people like to draw together, to act with others and to agree
with others. Other people hate to agree. They take you up
on the first word where discussion is possible. They do not
listen to the end of the sentence. Such men never form
partnerships ; or, if they do, they quarrel with their partners
and dissolve. They do not join in societies. They do not
subscribe to contributions. Such a man never crosses the
street to speak to a friend. Indeed, he does not know what
the word " friend " means. He might be a partaker of the
divine nature, but he does not choose to be. He chooses to
live apart from his fellow-men.

A similar type of men, not living in absolute loneliness,
separate in groups from others. They are' partisans, secta-
rians. The type of these men are the separatists in Scripture
whom our Bible calls Pharisees. " We are holier than thou,"

— this was their motto. " This people, which knoweth not
the law, is cursed," — that is their theory. "Rule or ruin," —
that is their plan.

Paul had tried this plan very thoroughly. He was well
sick of it. He had worked through, and come out upon the
great Christian theory, which is that God is Father of us all,
that we have all something of the divine spirit. There is,
therefore, a unity of the spirit, which we can all preserve, and

200

in which we may live and move and have our being as one.
It is with this hope that Paul writes so largely in this text,
and begs them to all keep the unity of the spirit in the bond
of peace.

This idea of unity of the spirit is at the bottom of all our
modern systems of toleration in religion. Jew and Gentile,
Quaker, Episcopalian, Methodist, Romanist, and Greek, —
all, in our time, share equally before the law. They may
quarrel in their weekly newspapers, but the State does
not care. The State acts as Gallio did. The State says :
"You must keep the peace so far, that every man may
worship as he pleases. You must keep the unity of the
spirit in the bond of peace." So far has Christianity tri-
umphed in law. For this is the Christian principle.

It was first asserted in political combinations, in the King-
dom of Hungary, as late as the year 1563. After hateful
discord between different religious parties, in which Roman
Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Socinians were all en-
gaged, the three Protestant bodies agreed on a basis of
union. This secured to all denominations, or to all persons,
freedom of religion, whatever their belief. For a while, the
Protestants held by each other in standing for this toleration.
Because they were thus united, and were also agreed in
maintaining unity, or the unity of religion, they were called
"Uniti " or " Unitarii." It is in this union for toleration to
all, that the word "Unitarian" first came into existence.

In that particular case, the Lutherans and Calvinists, so
soon as they came into power, gave up the decree of tolera-
tion. The Socinians only, the party which, in controversies
about Jesus Christ, held that he was the Son of God, but
not God himself, were the only body which held to the
" Unitarian " position. The name " Unitarian ': thus at-
tached itself especially to them ; and, by gradual dispersion
from Hungary through Europe, it now designates the relig-
ious body to which we belong. It is in this first struggle for
toleration that the word has its honorable origin.

The word is itself so good a word, it refers to a truth so
great, and is in its origin so honorable, that our title to it
has been seriously challenged. Thus, I find in the English
" Church Dictionary " of Archdeacon Hook, a most estima-
ble clergyman of the English Church of our time, represent-
ing in that Church the old-fashioned Anglican view, or what
is familiarly called in England " the high and dry division,"

201

that he gives this definition of " Unitarians " : " A title
which certain heretics, who do not worship the true God,
assume most unfairly, to convey the impression that those
who worship the one and only God do not hold the doc-
trine of the Divine Unity. Christians worship the Trinity
in Unity, and the Unity in Trinity." Thus, Dr. Hook would
be glad to have the Church of England known to be a Uni-
tarian Church. But Dr. Hook is certainly mistaken in say-
ing that the Unitarians have "assumed" this name. The
earliest account of the historical origin of the word seems
to be that which I have given. The doctrine known as the
doctrine of Unitarians is, indeed, as old as the. time of the
apostles ; but the name came, as almost all names come,
without anybody's previous device. Just as the names
" Methodist " or "Quaker" or "Episcopalian" have at-
tached themselves to different branches of the Church, the
name " Unitarian " has attached itself to our branch of the
Church. We could not help it, if we would. Fortunately, we
would not help it, if we could. Simply, it is ours to remem-
ber that the name which the world likes to give to us stands
for as great a reality as the oneness of God, and the conse-
quent oneness of man, who is the child of God. It follows
from our very position that we ought to be the last people in
the world to cavil about names. Our central statement
being that all men are children of God, — the statement of
the divinity of human nature, — we are, of all believers, those
who should be most shy of partisanship or of sect, which is
to say, of Phariseeism.

All the same, however, Unitarians exist, and have a
religious life parted as far as the poles from the religious
life of people who believe in sect and rely on dogma. I
have sometimes found myself in correspondence or in con-
versation with persons relying on creeds, and as sure of their
doctrine as the high-priest Caiaphas was of his, who did
not seem to me to have the faintest idea what I meant by
the word " Religion." Thus, if you train a man to consider
that forms are the essence of religious life, you cannot make
him understand what you mean by "spirit" or "spiritual
communion." The religious life of Unitarians, and what is
properly called their faith, cannot, from the nature of the
case, be defined in a creed. For a creed is limited and
means to be limited, and the religious life and faith of Uni-
tarians are unlimited and mean to be unlimited. Still, truth

is truth, life is life. The divine life, shown in human order,
will show itself in ways resembling each other. And so it is
that, even without a written creed and without any authori-
tative statement of form or dogma, the position of the Uni-
tarian Church is probably more intelligible than that of any
other communion in Christendom. True, in bringing to-
gether the writings of any religious communion, it would
be found necessary to throw out on the right or on the left
what the florists would call '"sports," — the fanciful or ex-
rated statements made bv stronglv marked indivi
men, fond of showing their independence, and afraid to work
in harness. The same liberty would be necessary in com-
paring Unitarian writers. But I believe that, with all our
freedom, we should have fewer occasions to ask this indul-
gence — if it be one — than any other religious communion.
And, as I have said, the relig em which has gained

the name " Unitarian "* seems more intelligible, because more
harmonious within itself, than is any other relig: -:em

now known under a Christian name.

What is this religious system ?

First and chiefly, the Unitarian Church Is man as

the child of God. This is a fact, and not a metaphor. God
is our Father in truth, and no: natter of .

expression. We are his children in truth, and we are all his
children. From this central truth, statement! .otal

depravitv or o: . .vater drops from hot

iron. We have no part nor lot with them. We take the
new-born child as the child of God, train him child of

. treat him as a child of God, bid him pray to God as a
child prays to a father, and trust him as a child trus
father. He is never to be afraid of God : he is to consult
God about everything, and work with him about even-thing.
Man and God are together, and nobody and nothing are to
part them. Least of all shall any form of religion put them
asunder.

It is the fashion to say, with a sneer, that the Unitarian
system is a system of negations. But what can be more
positive than this, its central statement, — that man is son of
God and God father of man ? You must contradict lies. If
the devil comes before you, you must rebuke him. And if
ten or twelve dark centuries, which come to be known as the
" dark ages," culminate in that awful negation that man is
incapable of good, that he is unlike God, that he is lost and

203

is exposed to damnation, then, if you know you are God's
child, you must deny such a negation as that. And, as
always, your two negatives become an affirmative. Your
Church stands on the infinite affirmation of the " humanity of
God and the divinity of man.'' *

2. This, as I have said, is the centre ; and it is the most
important statement of the Unitarian position. It is proba-
bly held in the private convictions of almost all Christians;
but it is contradicted in words in all the written creeds, ex-
cepting those of the liberal churches. It states the relations
of man with God. This follows, of course, that man with
man, each of us, must honor his fellow-man. He must bear
his brother's burdens. Thus, all men must be equal before
the law. So far as the Declaration of Independence and the
Bill of Rights proclaimed this equality, they were Unitarian
documents. So long as slavery was the law of the Southern
States, the Unitarian Church was virtually impossible in the
Southern States. No religious system which divides priest-
hood from people, as the Roman Catholic Church seems to
do, can fairly mount to the lofty height of this principle.
The Unitarian Church of necessity recognizes the brother-
hood of man.

3. It follows, almost of necessity, that it devotes itself to
building up the kingdom of God in- the world. For this, it
certainly has good authority. It does not wince at any of
the great texts which ask us to be perfect as our Father in
heaven is perfect, which ask that God's kingdom may come
on earth as in heaven, which say that Christ's disciples will
do greater things than he does, which say that the King
meant that all should come to his supper. It accepts them
fully, without any attempt to tone them down. Really believ-
ing that God is at hand, the Unitarian Church really believes
that God's kingdom is to come here, and says that its busi-
ness is to make it come. If it had no such business, it would
have no right to be.

4. From the belief that man is of the nature of God, it
follows that man is immortal. "God is not the God of the
dead, but of the living." To the Unitarian Church, death is
an accident, important, but not critical. Like the change
when an infant's body becomes the body of a man, is the

* I had occasion to use this happy expression seme morths nnce, and was sorry to
find it cued : en as if the. choice of the words were my < wn. The idea, of

course, is per: , ,e, and as old, at least, as the New Testamert. But I quoted

this exact statement from a v<-r.- instructive and suggestive essay by my friend, Rev.
Edwin C. L. Browne, of CI- S-C

204

change when a man throws off the earthly house of this tab-
ernacle and puts on the heavenly house. But the man re-
mains, child of God and of his nature. His character or
stamp remains. If improving, well. If failing, ill. But the
man lives, of his Father's nature, in his Father's care, and
under his Father's law.

5. Again, from the certainty that man is child of God and
of the same nature, there follows a certain evident compara-
tive indifference even to well-approved human methods of
worship or of education. To the Unitarian Church, any
form must be judged by its power to express the present
truth : it must be tried by its fruits, and only so. Or, in
other words, if we are all God's children, if we are "all kings
and priests," we shall certainly come to God, each and all,
with our own questions to receive from him his own answers.
And it is certain that he wants us to. It is here that there
comes in a certain eclecticism in the choice of worship, which
may look like arrogance, and is sometimes so called. Thus,
in the Unitarian chapel at Cambridge, they venture to sing
the Latin hymns of the Roman Church, which a High-Church
Episcopal college hardly dares to sing, for fear the hymn
should be misconstrued by somebody. And thus, on the
other hand, it is very certain that the Unitarian Church
accepts its preachers and other ministers only for the good
they do, and cannot claim for them any functional merit or
authority.

6. But instruction, help, progress, will come in from all
history, precisely because the Church holds man to be God's
child. Such help will come from the noble lessons God has
taught to his noblest children in history. Nobody is to be
set aside as "common or unclean." Something will be
learned from every one who has really sought God ; for to
this Church it is certain that that man has reallv found him.
What God has said to Wesley or Whiterield, to Fenelon or to
Francis, to Bernard or to Ambrose or Augustine, thus be-
comes God's word, and not the mere fancy of a man. All
history thus becomes sacred, and is studied with a tenderness
and care with which no Pharisee can study Gentile history.
Here is it that there comes in that respect with which the
Unitarian Church regards men not Christians, such teachers
of the world as Spinoza, as Philo and Plato, Buddha and Con-
fucius,— a respect for which it is often calumniated. "Honor
all men " is a direction which cuts low down. And the in-
struction given to Peter on the house-top ranged much fur-

205

ther than the mere etiquette of the intercourse between Jew
and Roman. "Honor all men" makes it easier to-dav for

the Unitarian missionary to deal with a Ute Indian or with
a Fiji Islander or with a Brahmin in Hindoostan. They
meet, not as enemies on two sides of an entrenchment, but
as the common children of one God.

It is thus that the Unitarian Church, naturally recognizing
Jesus Christ as Leader and Lord of the whole Church, makes
him the most Real Being in history, while the Church of the
dark ages has succeeded in making him the most Unreal.
As God visits every soul and gives help to every child, how
certain is it that this Son of God, who receives the spirit of
God without measure, who shows in his energy, his purity,
his tenderness, and his unselfishness the fulness of every
attribute of life, — how certain it is that he will be able to ex-
hibit to us God's will and law completely ! There is nothing
unnatural in such an exhibition of perfect manhood. It is,
on the other hand, perfectly natural. The world was not
deceived in expecting it. It was precisely what the love of
God would have intended. The world was not wrong in be-
lieving it had come. It was precisely what the world had a
right to wait for. True, the world was wrong in worshipping
him, who bade it worship his Father and his God. But it is
easy to understand the origin of such homage. When the
world sees its mistake, all the more it sees that the Son of
God, who has stood nearest to God, who has understood him
completely, and relied upon him implicitly, is its sure guide
in the interpretation of God's wishes and his kingdom. It is
thus that, as it happens, the latitudinarians, the men who
were not sectarians, have been in all ages those who have
led back the Church to that tender allegiance to Jesus which
the pretences of Schoolmen had made well-nigh impossible.
Such men as the Waldenses, in their mountain valleys, broke
from the Roman Church because the Pope came between
them and their Saviour. And you find, when you look up
their confessions, that these men would not let their Saviour
take the place of their God. So Thomas a. Kempis, and the
brethren of the life in common, were dreaded by their own
time as heretics. It is doubted whether they are not outside
the fold. All the same, it is Thomas a. Kempis who shows
every believer how he may commune with God as Jesus
Christ did ; and has done, who shall say how much, to help
forward such communion. It is John Milton, who will hardly
enter a house of worship, who can find no church broad

206

enough for his heresies, who writes for you your Hymn of the
Nativity, and in Paradise Regained brings you face to face
with your Saviour. And in these later days, in our' own
generation, all saturated with what you called the Unitarian
Heresy, when you can hardly find a scholar who, in good
faith, is willing to repeat the language of the Athanasian
Creed as to Christ's per- u find such Christian realism

as no age has known before. You find that the heretic of a
century he who is making your Saviour to be more

near to you and more dear than he has been for a_

7. From all these convictions, it follows as matter of ne-
cessity that the Unitarian Church demands purity of charac-
ter from those who belong to it. Strictly sp _. this is
all that it demands. It as other things ; but character
is essential. It is glad to have good in its mt-ml
It is glad to have intelligible I *y. It :
the results of the study of the past. But it must have purity
of life. Idle to preach the possible perfection of mankind,
if the man who preach or the congregation who hear are
satisfied with imperfection. Idle to bring to ]<
the reverence due to the Leader of the world, if we do not
follow in his tootsteps. " Why do you say, Lord. Lord, and
do not the things which I say '. " In a Unitarian church
there might be forty theorit "ination, but there
must be one determined resolve for purity of life.

I see that people are as eager as ever to condense the
foundations of religious life, in brief and hallowed sentences.
Fortunately for us, the Unitarian Church has no reason to
dread the severe simplicity of Scripture. The common
phrase, " The Four Gospels are a good enough creed for
me," has for us a substantial meaning and foundation. To
those who ask a briefer statement, I am apt to say that ti
are convenient texts which Jesus taught at the well-side : —

"God is a spirit, and they that worship him mu -hip

him in spirit and in trut!

" I must do the will of him that sent me, and finish his
work."

'• Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields : they are
white already to har

It would not be difficult thus to state all the special prin-
ciples of the Unitarian Church in such expressions, at once
venerable and familiar. That Church, in brief, exists, —

"To do the will of God, our Father, who is in heaven

207

" To follow Jesus Christ, his well-beloved Son, who is the
Saviour of the world."

It looks on all men as made of one blood in all nations of
the world, and it teaches all men " to bear their brother's
burdens."' To those who try. it promises that the M spirit
of God, the holy spirit, shall lead them into all truth."

It is, of course, at once the hardest religioi m. and

the easiest. — hardest, because it offers no short cuts to
favor, no leap into heaven, no sudden completion of all duty.
Man's dutv is as eternal as God's life : man must walk with
God. But this is easiest, because it is the spirit of God
which works in the life of man. Man's life is hid with Christ
in God, when he loyally devotes himself to his Father's pur-
pose. And from trie Infinite Fountain man receives infinite
supply.

The (Edipus Tyrannus and Christianity.

"There hath no temptation taken you but such as man can hear." —
I. COR. x., 15.

The University has devoted loyal pains, study, care, and
time, to the reproduction of a great Greek tragedy, which
in the last few weeks it has exhibited to those most inter-
ested. The occasion has its lessons for us all here, as well
as for scholars.

The tragic dramas of the Greeks were founded almost
without exception on one idea, which now, when spoken of
among scholars, is named by their name. These tragedies
describe the struggle of a brave man against the Absolute
Fate which involves his certain ruin. Such a struggle, wher-
ever it appears to exist in life, is now spoken of as tragic,
or sometimes as Greek, because from such struggles the
great Greek tragic poets — -Kschylus, Sophocles, and Eurip-
ides— made their plots. Such struggles have been treated
by modern authors, but not exclusively. But they are the
frequent and almost only subject of the Greek tragedy.

In the case of the tragedy of King (Edipus, which was
chosen for exhibition by the University, an oracle, announc-
ing the will of the gods, had pronounced at his birth that
he should kill his father. To avoid that destiny, his father
exposed him to the beasts to die at his birth. As always in
such stories, this exposure insured his life. In young man-
hood, he, having been also warned by an oracle that he
should kill his father, leaves the court of the king who had
brought him up, and in a brawl kills his own father, not know-

ing who he was. He then marries bis own mother, equally
unconsciously. He and she are wholly innocent in purp
but, as the two or three hours of the play prove to them the
horrid truth, she kills herself and he blinds himself, that he
may never see liis own children. Such is the penalty, or
sacrifice, by which th< ' the wrath of the gods, or buy

back their favor for Thebes. Vou see that from the begin-
ning CEdipus is innocent of intentional wrong. Jn the fatal
brawl in which, unconsciously, he kills his father, he acts on
the defensive, one against three. All the same, parricide is
to these gods a (rime, incest is a crime. All this time, he
must not plead that the gods ordered his guilt in advance.
He must do penance, though, according to the story, be is a
pure-minded ruler and innocent ol intentional wrong. 1 he-
tragic interest of the story turns on his real innocence and
that of his poor wife, Jocasta.

Such in the great Greek tragedy was the fate of one inno-
cent man and one innocent woman.

Such notions of the gods above them sank deep in the
mythology of those countries and times. Our special inn
now with such tragedy comes from the fact that, near a
thousand years afterwards, the superstition of the Dark A
transferred to all men and all women the same horrible fate
which in the play fell on CEdipus and Jocasta. The gre
victory of Christian faith had been the dethroning of the
Greek gods, Jupiter, Apollo, and the rest, and the ac-
knowledging of one God only, of whom a Jewish writer
said, "In sum, he is All." From their petty realms, God'fl
empire was so enlarged as to include all heaven and all
worlds. And then, as if to match this magnificent enlarge-
ment, the ages, darkest both in reason and in faith, exte;
such little curses as ora< lid pronounce on CEdipus or

on Orestes, and, with the fell sweep of universal cruelty,
damned all mankind in one condemnation. According to
this later fable, when one man, Adam, committed one sin,
all hi-, descendants were condemned to a common penalty.
In that lesser case of CEdipus, he had committed un
sciously an act which, if he had meant it, would have been a
crime, but, in this most comprehensive and most horrible
fable, all men and all women, without doing anything, had
sinned. Nay, before they did anything, they sinned. They
sinned when Adam sinned ; and, in his sin, they were
damned. The purest, the most unselfish, the most spiritual,

2IO

men braver than QEdipus, women more loving than Jocasta,
might struggle against this fate imposed by the Ruler of the
Universe, but they struggled in vain. The terror and the
grief which held captive a Greek audience, as they witnessed
the conflict of one man wound in the gripe of this awful
doom, are multiplied in the theology of the Dark Ages a
thousand-fold. All mankind are damned. All mankind
struggles. And all mankind fails.

To add to such accumulated horror, the theology of the
Dark Ages contrives one terror more, to make more complete
the blind cruelty of its God. The QEdipus of the play, to
take the convenient illustration now before us, is innocent in
intention ; but still he has done the deed of which he is
charged. Nay, the hot passions of youth led him to that
deed. It may be excused, but it has been committed. In
the larger and more horrible fable, by which the Dark Ages
reconstruct the history of the world, it is a Son of God, ab-
solutely and wholly innocent, confessedly innocent, innocent
in fact, innocent in appearance, innocent in intention, who is
seized upon for punishment. And the punishment heaped
upon him is not any poor blinding of the eyes. It is not the
mortal struggle of his crucifixion. It is, by an ingenuity of
which no Greek dramatist was ever capable, — the accumu-
lated and infinite punishment which all men ever deserved
for all sin ever accomplished, — it is this which, to accom-
plish the needs of a cruel Divinity, misnamed justice, is
heaped all at once on one absolutely sinless and pure.

By an exaggeration so awful do the Darkest Ages of the
world parody horrors, little in this comparison, of the Greek
tragedians.

We owe this awful parody, in the first instance, to the
genius and passion of the African Augustine, who credited
the race of men with such depravity as he supposed he him-
self was born to. That would be a curious study which
should show how far the idea of Fate or Destiny, as a god
above God, stronger than the God of men, was borrowed by
the Christian Fathers from this Greek Destiny, stronger than
Jupiter and Apollo, and holding them in its iron rule. But
I have not the scholarship for that study ; nor is this the fit
place for it, if I had. For our present purpose, it is enough
to say that, if Jesus Christ is an authority in Christianity,
that idea of Fate is no part of the Christian system. There is
no reference to it in the Four Gospels. There is even no

21 I

refutation or reply to it, more than any affirmation of it.
You would say that the danger of such a doctrine had never
been called to Christ's attention. It is certain that the fear
of destiny is not a Jewish term. The Jews believed that
their God was all powerful, and could do what seemed good
to him. As a metaphysical subtlety, the discussion between
free will and foreknowledge is played through in the book
of the Wisdom of Sirach. But it did not trouble the Jewish
conscience. So that all Christ's illustrations point exactly
the other way. With him, God is Father, and is Father of
infinite tenderness. He forgives where he chooses. The
prodigal has only to return sorry, and to say he is sorry, and
he is clasped in his father's arms.

The child, however weak, however fallible, is still sent into
his Father's harvest field, and told to work with his God.
He may doubt as to his own skill ; but, by every word of par-
able and every personal direction, he is encouraged. He is
assured of the infinite alliance. That God has any prejudice
against him is never implied. That anybody has sinned for
him in advance is never implied in the Gospels. All that
is extorted by preposterous misreadings from Paul's letters.
But Paul, too, like his Master, steadfastly tells the child that
God is eager to reverse every injury which human failure
has brought upon the world, and to bring in the empire of
perfect love.

If this tragic fable of one oracle' of fate, damning with
depravity all mankind before they were born, had ever
really commanded the faith of the Christian world, there
would have been the end of the Christian religion. " Any
thing rather than that," men would have said, and said justly.
Happily, the Master was stronger than his interpreters.
Happily, the life of Jesus Christ himself was known of all
men. The words he spoke, the stories he told, were on all
men's lips. And the simplest clown, who could make noth-
ing of the long-drawn inferences of the theologians, could
make out, were it only in a poor picture, the story of the
Marriage Feast, and could take to heart the tender forgive-
ness of the Prodigal Son. The Christian world was better
than its creed, as, thank God, it is to-day. A loving God,
indeed, was not willing to leave it to any accident which
might bring or refuse the message of the Christian gospel.
As Paul said to those savage Lycaonians, God never left him-
self without witness in that he did good. " In that he did

212

good." Say what you please of sorrow, pestilence, famine,
still, on the whole, men know and acknowledge that whoever
rules this world rules it well. He does good. Put* it in an-
other phrase, men love to live. They are eager to live.
The love of life is their strongest passion. To save it, they
implore tyrants, they sacrifice wealth, they exhaust ingenuity.
Our age is the first, indeed, which has reduced to a scientific
statement the other theory, — that this world is the worst pos-
sible world and this life the worst possible life. We owe this
argument to the philosopher Schopenhauer, who did his
best to make other people believe it. But that he did not
believe it himself was clear enough from the simple fact that
he continued to live out his threescore years and ten. On
his theory of morals and of life, if it had been more than a
philosophical ingenuity, he would have put a pistol to his
head, and there should have been an end to life. But he,
too, loved to live, as all men love to live. It is clear that
the fly loves to play in the air, the fish loves to swim in the
sea, the bird loves to soar, the kitten loves to play, the dog
loves to bask in the sun, the horse in the pasture loves to
run, the cattle on a thousand hills love to crop the herbage.
I believe that grass loves to grow and flowers to open. Cer-
tain is it that man loves to live. Never a sun rises but it
rises on a landscape of beauty and a world of happiness.
And the " mists and exhalations," the diamond in the dew-
drop and the daisy in the grass, the sparrow on the twig or
the bee in the blossom, consciously or unconsciously sing the
praise of the power who gives them food and life, and makes
up a world in which they are glad to live.

From this simple faith, men lapse, — and this is a terrible
misfortune, — when they separate their God from the world
he made. The carelessness of selfishness, or the narrowness
of priests, or the subtlety of philosophers puts God outside
his world, sitting on some Olympus or in some seventh
heaven ; and, inside of it, another set of powers, which they
call " Nature," works its will, God supposed to be ignorant
or indifferent, or, as in the case of OZdipus, impotent. For
Jupiter himself, in that fable, could not have saved G£dipus
from murdering his father. Such danger does not belong to
those times alone. It was the danger of the Pharisees' pre-
cision. Jesus points out to them that they have one religion
by which they pull a sheep out of the pit, and another relig-
ion in which they conform to the traditions of their law. If
CEdipus and Creon and priest and people could have under-

213

stood, alike, that they were all at that moment crossing the
purpose of their God ; if, in whatever solemn inquest, they
had found from what filthy mill-pool or man-made Gehenna
came the malaria which was poisoning their city; if, in what-
ever solemnity, they had restored its conditions to the sweet
salubrity of the forest or of the wilderness, working with
their God for the good of his children, — they would have
learned and have taught the eternal lesson that it is in him,
and only in him, that we live and move and have our being.
All the idea that our sacrifices are to pacify him or our
prayers to move him, when he is far away or does not wish to
be pacified, belong to our separation of him from the laws of
the world that he has made.

Of course, the circumstances to which a man is born dic-
tate, to a certain extent, his early temptations ; and the moral
condition of the world as he finds it dictates his temptations
afterward. But temptations are not sins. You have heard,
in the Scripture lesson, how sternly Ezekiel challenges and
refutes the idea that the iniquity of the fathers is to be vis-
ited in punishment or as guilt upon their children. What-
ever the second commandment implied on that point, Ezekiel
insists that each man stands for himself, and by his own sins
stands or falls. Of course, for instance, that man has horri-
ble temptations, who has been born from drunken parents to
inherit, from their lust and intemperance, appetites which he
has to resist his life long. But he is a child of God also, and
with the divine spirit he inherits from his heavenly Father
he can resist these earthly enticements. He has power to
loosen sin and to retain sin, if he will. " There is no temp-
tation appointed him but such as he can bear." He lives in
God, if he will. He shares God's nature. He is God's
child.

Slowly but surely, the world learns that great lesson. It
lives in him. It has no other life. He lives in the world.
He has no purpose but its good. As the world feels that
perfect Love more perfectly, there are not so many tragedies
nor subjects for tragedy, — that is true, — but there is life more
successful because more simple, more glad because more
divine. Nor let us, because we are impatient of the slow-
ness of the world's advance on this line, — let us not per-
suade ourselves that it fails. If any oracle to-day sent word
to any city that its ruler's son or any beggar's brat in its
gutter was damned by a fate which would compel him to
commit murder, the men and women who uttered that lying

214

oracle would be haled before its courts and punished to the
utmost. If it were the Archbishop of Canterbury, if it were
the President of the University, if it were the most learned
philosopher in the land, if all three of them united in such
slander against the love of God, they would be tried for
defamation of the character of the baby about whom they
prophesied, tried for conspiracy to defame if they united in
their oracle, and they would all be justly punished for fore-
casting woe. Thus to press to the ridiculous the most
solemn of these superstitions of the past is wise and fair, if
we learn, as we ought, that at bottom in the hearts of men is
more of the surety of God and of his perfect love. On that
surety, laws have made themselves, customs formed them-
selves, and States been founded. As the world goes forward
in that surety, the little children learn that this is God's
hand from which they take the dandelion and the buttercup,
that these are God's leaves which are dancing on the trees
and his blossoms which perfume the air, that this miracle,
in which a month since the bare twigs of the winter budded,
bourgeoned, and blossomed in the fresh glory of the spring,
was the present God, giving, as he always gives, new gifts
unto men. As the children grow in this knowledge, as
young men and maidens are happy in it, as hard-working
men and women consecrate their daily labor in this cer-
tainty, the more certainly will there die away even the mem-
ories of the old curses, whether pronounced by priests or
argued out by logicians. Sorrow will come, — yes! It is the
gate of wisdom, and man must pass through it as he ascends
to higher life. But no man knows so well as he who passes
through it that in the goodness fresh every morning and
new every evening, the goodness which makes the heavens
blaze with light, and makes every inch of the earth a miracle
of wonder, there is the constant assurance of unchanging
love. It is the repetition of constant blessing which we
never asked for nor imagined, which surrounds even our
remembered sorrows with the light and glory of God's ten-
derness. It teaches us that they were no curses of any
avenger, but that they also have their place, though it be
not for us to tell where, in the courses of his unvarying ten-
derness. It is not any arguing away of pain that enables us
to bear our sorrows. It is the constant renewal of the gifts
— call them great, call them small, infinite, and unceasing —
of a Father's love.

215

Just in proportion as any man knows that God is spirit,
just so far as he separates him from the limitations of Time
and Space, so far do the worries vanish about his going
hither or resting there, about his looking backward or his
foreknowing. He IS without time. I do not say that any
man understands how God IS. But I do say that a man
used to the contemplation of the infinite, were it only in
mathematical study, knows why he cannot understand it.
It is no more strange that I cannot see how God exists in all
time than that I cannot imagine his existence in all space.

The world will have fewer subjects for tragedies, as it feels
more and more that God is ; as it feels his presence in all
Nature, and knows that it is he whom it praises as it extols
her wonders, — fewer subjects for tragedies, but it must be
one of the last objects for loving wisdom to provide its chil-
dren with subjects for lamentation. Literature changes,
manners change, science changes, governments change.
All things become new, as the world comes to feel that in
him we live and move and have our being, that in sum he
is All, and that this All loves every child with equal tender-
ness, and leads every child with perfect wisdom.

INDEX.

Abolition of Pauperism, .

Abraham Lincoln, quoted, .

All Things New, . . . .

America, Religion of, . .

Apostles' Creed, . . . .

Arthur Clough, quoted, . .

Benevolent Fraternity, . .

Boston, the Possible, . .
Brown, Howard N., quoted,
Brown, E. C. L., quoted,

70
2

61
127

89
105

159

154

203

Charles I., Sunday Proclamation, . 4

Children in the Wood, .... 44

Christian Realism, 76

Christian States, 72

Christ. Leader and Lord, ... 205

Christ's Plan, 67

Christ, the Friend 52

Christ, the Giver, 44

Commonwealth, 76

Commonwealth of Love, . . . 153

Davidis, Francis, 1

Easter, 177

Eastern Mystery, 127

East Tennessee, Gospel in, . . . 27

Elias, Revelation of 87

Eliot, George, quoted, .... 149

Ellis, Rufus, quoted, 18

England, Decrease of Crime, . . 14

Established Church in Boston, . 16

Eugene Sue, quoted, 172

Faith, Hope, and Love, .... 38

Follow me, 194

Four Mottoes, The, 39

Fuller, Margaret, quoted, . . . 125

Furness, W. H., quoted, . . . 135

Gadarenes, 29

Gibbon's Account of Success of

the Gospel, 179

Gibbon on Preaching, 94

Gifts unto Men, 46

God is a Spirit, 113

Holmes, O. W., quoted, .... 22

Honor and Idolatry, .... 192

Hook, Archdeacon, quoted, . . . 200

Hungary, Edict of Toleration, . . 202

I must see Rome, 185

Increase of Life, 162

Indifference, 146

In the Name of Christ, .... 148

King's Work, The, 168

Law and Gospel, 20

Lives of Saints, 2

Living God, M1

Look up Legion 39

Louisiana, Territory of, ... . 62

Mary Magdalene, a Poem, ... 97

Men of Gadara, 29

Ministry at Large, 159

Missionary Hospital at Canton, . 49

New England's Genius, .... 65

Newspapers, Sunday, 6

New Year's, Sunday, ..... 61

North American Review, cited, . 25

Not Less, but More, .... 86

CEdipus Tyrannus, 208

Parable and Bible, 137

Peter Parker, Dr., 48

Pork Market in Gadara, .... 31

Possible Boston, 154

Predestination, 211

Renan, Ernest, quoted 143

Religion of America, .... 127

Revivals of Religion, 151

Ritualistic Clergymen, .... 91

Sartor Resartus, 106

Send me, 122

Sermon on the Mount 75

Son of Man, 57

South Congregational Liturgy, . . 79

Sterling, John, quoted, .... 87

Substance and Shadow, .... 162

Subsoiling, 13

Sunday Laws, 3

Sunday Travel, 7

The King's Work, 169

These Three abide, 36

Things Above, 78

Thomas Carlyle, 104

Together, m

Unitarian Name 200

Unitarian Principles 199

Victory of the Few, 177

Vineland in New Jersey, ... 74

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Full text of "June to May; the sermons of a year, preached at the South Congregational Church in Boston, in 1880 and 1881"

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