UNITARIANISM. (continued 4)

And so I came to have a difficulty with the kind of prayer- meetings in which I was brought up as a boy, and which I used to lead as a young and earnest minister. I have heard kinds of prayers which have seemed to me reflections on the goodness and the kindness of our Father in heaven. I remember one man I used to hear him over and over again, week by week who would pray, It is time for thee, O God, to work! And, as I came to think of it, it hurt my sense of reverence. I shrank from it. And I could not believe that God was going to let thousands of souls in China or Africa perish merely because Christians in America did not pray hard enough and long enough for their salvation. Why should they meet with eternal doom on account of the lack of enthusiasm or devotion of people of whom they have never heard?

So I used to find myself troubled about this question of praying so hard for the salvation of other people's souls. If, as the old creeds tell us, it is settled from all eternity as to just who is to be saved and who is to be lost, there would hardly seem place for a vital prayer; and if, as a friend of mine, a minister, and a very liberal and broad one, though in one of the older churches, said to me, "I believe that God will save every single soul that he can save," then do you not see again that it touches this kind of prayer? If he cannot save them, then why should I beg him to do it? If he can, and loves them better than I do, again, why should I plead with him after that fashion to do it?

These, frankly and freely spoken, are some of the difficulties connected with a certain theory of prayer.

I gladly put all that now behind my back, and come to the grand and positive side of my theme. I wish to tell you what I myself believe in regard to this matter of prayer. And, in the first place, let me suggest to you that prayers, even the prayers of the past, any of them, the most objectionable types, are not made up only of petition; they are not all begging, teasing for things. There enter into their composition gratitude, adoration, reverence, aspiration, a sense of communion with the spiritual Being, a longing for higher and finer things; a sense of refuge in time of trouble, a sense of strength in time of need, a sense of hope, uplift, and outlook as we glance towards the future. A prayer, then, you see, is a very composite thing, not a simple thing, not merely made up of the element of pleading with God to give us certain things that we cannot come into possession of by ordinary means.

Right here let me stop long enough to ask you to attend a little carefully to the teaching of Jesus on the subject of prayer. You will see he chimes in almost perfectly with the things I have been saying. If we followed his directions literally, we should never pray in public at all. He says, Enter into your chamber, and shut to the door, and commune with the Father in secret. He does not advocate long prayers, nor this kind of pleading, begging prayers that I have referred to. Do you remember the story of the unjust judge? Jesus tells this parable on purpose to enforce the point I have been speaking of. He says: Here is an unjust judge: a widow brings her case before him. She pleads with him until she tires him out; and at last he says, although I am an unjust judge, and fear neither God nor men, because with her continual praying she wearies me, I will grant her petition. Jesus does not say you are to weary God out in order to get your petitions granted, but just the opposite. How much more shall God give good gifts unto those that ask him Read once more that other story of the man who rises at night and goes to a neighbor for assistance. The neighbor, for the sake of being gracious and kind, will rise, although it gives him trouble and he does not wish to, and grant his request. But God is not like that neighbor: he does not need to be wearied or roused to make him care for our interests. This is the teaching, you will notice, of Jesus. If there is anything that appears like contrary teaching, you will find it in the supposed Gospel of John, written by an anonymous author, in which quite different doctrines are taught in regard to a good many things from those that are reported of Jesus in the other gospels.

Now I wish to come to my own personal position concerning the subject of prayer. It is fitting is it not that we should open our hearts with gratitude to God, no matter what has come to us of good or bright, of beautiful, sweet and true things, no matter through what channel, by the ministry of what friend, as the result of the working of no matter how many natural forces. Trace it to its source, and that source is always of necessity the one fountain, the one eternal Giver. And, if there be no more than courtesy in our hearts, ought it not to be easy and fitting for us to think, at least, if we do not say, Thank you, Father? Not only thanksgiving, but adoration.

Any uplook to something beautiful and high and fine above you partakes of the nature of worship. So that prayer which is worship, is it not altogether fitting and sweet and true? Only as we look up do we ever rise up, do we ever attain to anything finer and better.

And then there is communion. Is it true that God is Spirit, and that he is Father of his children, also spirit? Are we made in his likeness? Is there community of nature between him and us? I believe that he is human in all essential qualities, and that we are divine in all essential qualities. I believe the only difference between God and man is a difference not of kind, but of degree, and that there is, possibility of constant interchange of thought, of feeling, communion, between God and his children. Profound, wonderful truth it seems to me is expressed in those beautiful words of Tennyson's:

"Speak to him thou, for he hears, And spirit with spirit may meet. Closer is he than breathing, And nearer than hands and feet."

Communion then possible, the very life of that which is divine within us!

Then I do not believe for one moment that prayer is only a sort of spiritual gymnastics, that it produces results in us merely by the exercise of spiritual feelings and emotions. I believe that in the moral and spiritual realms prayer does produce actual results that would not be produced in any other way. This, however, mark you carefully, not by producing any change in God, only changing our relations towards God. Can I illustrate it? I have a flower, for example, a plant in a flower-pot in my room. It seems to be perishing for the lack of something. It may be that the elements in the air do not properly feed it: it may be that it is hungry for light. At any rate, I try it: I take it out into the sunshine, I let the air breathe upon it, the dews fall upon it, the rains touch it and revive it and the plant brightens up, grows, blossoms, becomes beautiful and fragrant. Have I changed natural laws any? Not to one parunticle. I have changed the relation of my plant and the air; and I have produced a result of life and beauty where would have been ugliness and death.

So I believe in prayer in that sense, that it may and does change the spiritual attitude of the soul towards God so that we come into entirely new relations with him, and the spiritual life in us grows, unfolds, becomes beautiful and sweet, not because we have changed God, but because we have got into a new set of relations with him.

If I thought that I could change God by a prayer, that I could interfere in the slightest degree with the working of any of the natural forces, I would never dare to open my lips in prayer again so long as I live. We do not need to change God: we need simply to change our attitude towards him, change our relations to him. Is not this true in every department of human life? How is it that you produce results anywhere? You wish a mountain stream to work for you. Do you change the laws of motion? You adapt your machinery to those laws of motion, and all the power of God becomes yours. You do not change him, you change yourself, your attitude towards him. And so in every one of the discoveries, in every one of the revolutions, that have come to the world, simply by discovering God's methods, and humbly adapting our ways to those methods Thus the forces of God, which are changeless and eternal, produce for us results which they would not have produced but for adapting our lives to the working of their ways.

A great many people do not think they ever pray. I have never seen a man yet who did not pray. You cannot live, and not pray: you cannot escape it if you try. Take Montgomery's famous old definition, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, Uttered or unexpressed, The motion of a hidden fir That trembles in the breast."

Soul's sincere desire. Yes, the body's desire, the mind's desire, the heart's desire, any desire, any outreach of life, is a prayer, an appeal for something that only the universe, that only God, can bestow. So, no matter whether you think you are religious or not, you are a praying man so long as you are a living man; and you cannot escape the fact if you try. It is merely a question whether you are a loving praying man or some other kind.

There is another aspect of prayer to which I wish to call your attention. Prayer is the refuge of a soul in trouble. It does not mean here, again, that you change God any. Can you not understand what it means to go to God, as it were, and fling yourself, like a child, against his breast and feel yourself folded in the everlasting arms? Your sorrow may not be removed, the burden may not be taken away, the life of your friend may not be saved, the sickness may not be healed; but there is comfort, there is strength, there is peace, there is help. Why, even in our human life do you not know how it is? You go to some friend you trust and love with your trouble. Perhaps he cannot lift it with one of his fingers; but he can tell you that he loves you, he cares, he would help you if only he were able. He can put his arm around you, he can say, God bless you; and you are stronger. You go away with lifted shoulder and with head that fronts the heavens; and you are able to bear the burden. Is there nothing akin to this in the sense of coming into intimate relations with the eternal Father, when troubled, pressed, when the outside world is dark, and feeling that here is refuge in a love deeper, higher, unspeakably more tender than that of the dearest friend that ever lived?

And this suggests another point. I have no doubt that sometimes, in my attempts to lead the devotions of this congregation, I use words which, if I were to sit down and critically analyze, I could not logically justify. I do not mean to; but, perhaps, sometimes I do. What of it? When my children were small, and my little boy came and climbed up in my lap and expressed himself in all sorts of illogical and foolish ways, telling me every sort of thing he wanted, impossible things, unwise things, things I could not get for him, things I would not get if I could, because I thought myself wiser than he, did these things trouble me? I loved to have him pour out his whole little soul into mine, because he was my child and because I did not expect him to be over-wise. It was this simple touch of kinship, this simple communion of father and child, which was sweet and tender and true.

So I believe with my whole soul that God loves us, his little children, with an unspeakable tenderness, a tenderness infinitely beyond that with which any earthly father ever loved a child, and that we can go to him freely and pour out our hearts, whether it is wise in expression or unwise; only let us do it with the feeling, "Not my will, Father, but Thine, be done," not as though we were trying to persuade him to do things for us that he would not otherwise do, but merely as the pouring out of our gratitude, our tenderness, our love.

There is another thing that needs just a word of suggestion. I believe that we ought to pray to God, not in the sense of begging for things, but sympathetically bringing in the arms of our sympathy all those we love and all those we hate, if there are any, and all things that live on the face of the earth. There is a hint of what I mean in those beautiful words of Tennyson's:

"For what are men better than sheep or goats That nourish a blind life within the brain, If, knowing God, they lift not hands in prayer Both for themselves and those who call them friend? For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."

Let us reach out our arms of sympathy to all the world and bring the world sympathetically into the presence of our Father. So our own hearts and loves will broaden, until they, too, are divine.

And, then, there is one other thing. What a strength prayer has been to the grandest souls of the ages! Never was truer, finer truth written than those magnificent words of Isaiah: "Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint!"

Take Jesus in his hour of agony, take Savonarola with his struggle, take Huss, Wyclif, Luther, take all the grand souls of the ages when they have simply stood with the feeling, One with God is a majority, and ready to face the world, if need be, in the conviction that they spoke for and represented the truth. The times of which Lowell speaks:

"Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own."

This sense that God is for the truth and right, and, if you are standing for the truth and right, the Almighty Power is backing you up, the ground you stand on impregnable, because of that position. You do not expect God to work miracles, you do not expect him to do anything; but simply the sense that you are in his presence, that you are on his side, re- enforces you more than a thousand men could re-enforce an army in the time of its need. This is the great sense of surety that the poet Clough had in mind, when he wrote those wonderfully fine words:

"It fortifies my soul to know That, though I perish, Truth is so; That howsoe'er I stray or range, Whate'er I do, thou dost not change. I steadier step when I recall That, if I slip, thou dost not fall." Here is the confidence, the strength, that comes from prayer, from communion with God, from the sense of being in his presence, from a feeling of fellowship with the Divine.

The truest and finest, the sweetest prayer must come oft of the loving, the sympathetic, the tender soul. No selfish prayer can expect to enter into the heart of God. You will note in the words that Jesus teaches his disciples, it is not "My" Father, it is "Our" Father. And, if we wish to pray in the divine spirit, we shall broaden that "Our" until it includes not only our family, our church, our city, our State, our nation, our humanity, but until it includes all life that swims or walks or flies, feeling that it is the one life of the Father that is in us all. For, as Coleridge has finely put it, He prayeth best who loveth best All things, both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all.

THE WORSHIP OF GOD

THERE are those who in religious matters, as well as in all other departments of life, are content to walk unquestioningly the path which the footsteps of previous generations have made easy and familiar. But there are others and these among the more thoughtful and earnest minds to whom it is not enough to utter earnest words concerning enthusiasm and devotion, consecration and worship. These spiritual attitudes and exercises must first be made to appear reasonable to them, fitting, fitting to their conception of God, fitting to their ideas of that which is highest and finest in man.

So there are many things that pass to-day as forms of worship, many ideas connected with worship, which this class of minds cannot heartily and fully accept. Some of them do not seem to them fitting, as they look upward towards God. They cannot, for example, believe that God cares for flattery, cares to sit on his throne, and be told by his creatures how great and how wonderful he is. They cannot think that he cares to have presents brought to him, gifts offered on his altar, as men say. They cannot believe that he really is anxious for many of these external forms and ceremonies, which seem to the onlooker to constitute the essential element of much that passes as popular worship.

And then, on the other hand, man has grown into a sense of dignity. He has a higher and loftier idea of his own nature and of what is fitting to a man; and he cannot any longer heartily enter into the meaning of words which speak of him as a worm of the dust, which seem to him to intimate that God cares to have him prostrate himself in utter humiliation, to speak of himself always as a miserable sinner, as one without any good in him.

Many of these things from the point of view of the man himself no longer constitute the real conviction, the real feeling of the noblest hearts; and so there are many who are troubled over this question of worship, who are not quite sure as to how much spiritual significance it may any longer retain, not quite sure as to how vital a part it may play in the development of the religious life of man.

We find an adequate and perfectly natural explanation of some of these phases of worship that trouble us to-day, as we look back and note some of the steps in the religious development of the race. I shall not raise the question as to how or where or in what way the act of human worship began. I will simply say that one of the first manifestations of that which came to be religious worship which we are able to trace at the present time is to be found in the burial-mounds of the dead. Men reverenced the memory of the chief of the tribe who had passed into the invisible. They did not believe that he had ceased to exist: they rather looked upon him as having become, because invisible, a higher ruler. They thought of him as still interested in the welfare of the tribe, still its guardian, still its avenger, still demanding of the tribe the same reverence that it paid to him while he was yet alive; and his followers clothed him with all the human attributes with which they were familiar during the time he was among them. He was still hungry, he was still thirsty, he still wanted his old-time weapons, all those things he was familiar with during his earthly career. And so they brought food, and laid it on the burial-mound above his body; and they poured out their libations of drink to quench his spiritual thirst.

These were very real beliefs on the part of man universally during a certain stage of his mental, his moral, his spiritual growth. It was a very natural step beyond this to the origin of sacrifices. All sacrifice began right here. It was a religious meal, in which God and his worshippers equally shared. Some animal, supposed to partake of a life similar to that which distinguished the god and the worshipper, too, is sacrificed. It is cooked, and the worshippers partake of the meal; and they fully believe that the god joins in it also. And then the drink they partake of, and pour out their libation for the invisible spirit.

So the first sacrifice was a meal eaten together; and just as, for example, to-day you see a remnant of this idea when a man eats with an Arab, although the Arab may discover five minutes after that it was his bitterest foe, he finds himself at least during a little time bound to amity and peace by the fact that they have shared this sacred meal together, so in the act of sacrifice it was believed that the worshipper consecrated himself in loyalty to his God, and that the God consecrated himself in faithfulness to his worshippers as their guardian and protector. Here is given the central significance of sacrifices that have made so large a part of the religious ceremonial of the world.

These are not peculiar to what we call pagan people. Do you remember the story of how, after the flood, Noah offers a sacrifice, and God up in heaven is represented as smelling the flavor of the burning meat and as rejoicing in it, accepting the offering, and pledging himself to guard and care for his worshippers? Do you remember, also, that story of Jacob, how, when he is on his journey, he falls asleep, and has his wonderful dream, and sees the ladder starting at his feet and ending at the throne of God, up and down which the angels are passing? When he wakes in the morning, he says, "Surely, this is holy ground"; and he takes the stone on which he slept, and sets it up as an altar, and pours out the sacred oil as an offering to his God.

All the way through the Old Testament, in the history of the Hebrew people, you trace these same ideas that you find in the life of almost all the other nations of the world. It was only a step beyond this to the idea of presenting gifts to God, no matter what the nature of that gift might be. And, as men came to make him these sacred offerings, they came also to believe and in the most natural way in the world that, the more costly the gift, the more likely it was to be accepted on the part of its sublime recipient.

So human sacrifices arose; for there could be no more sacred gift than for a man to offer his own child or his own wife to God. The gods were looked upon as sometimes demanding these tremendous sacrifices as the conditions of their mercy or their care. I refer you for illustration to one of the most striking and touching of Tennyson's poems. I think it is entitled "The Victim." There had been famine in the land, and the priests have announced that they have learned that the gods demand as an offering that which is most sacred and most dear to the heart of the king; and the question is as to whether it is his son, his boy, or his wife. They think it must be the boy, because he was the one that would continue the kingly line; but the wife detects the gladness of her husband when he sees that the boy is to be selected, and knows by that sense of relief that passes over his face that the priests have made a mistake, and that she herself is to be the victim. And so, in her love for him and for the people, she rushes upon the sacrificial knife.

All these ideas, you see, are perfectly natural in certain stages of human development, logically reasoned out in view of their thought of the gods and of their relations to them and of what these gods must desire at their hands. It is not only among the very early beliefs that you find these ideas controlling the thought and action of men. Study the ancient classical times as they are reflected in the Iliad, in the Odyssey, or in Virgil's Aeneid, and you will find that the gods were very human in all their feelings, their thoughts, their passions. As, in the Old Testament, Yahweh is reported to have been a jealous God, not willing that respect should be paid to anybody but himself, so you find the old Greek and Roman deities very jealous as to what were regarded as their rights, as to what the people must pay to them; and, if they are angry, they can be appeased if an offering rare and costly enough be brought by the worshipper. You can buy their favor; you can ward off their anger, if only you can offer them something which is precious enough so that they are ready to accept it at the worshipper's hands.

These are not merely Old Testament ideas, nor only pagan ideas. Some years ago, when I was in Rome, I visited among others one of the many churches dedicated to Mary under one name or another; and there was a statue of the Virgin by the altar, and it impressed me very much to see that it was loaded down with gifts. Every place on the statue itself to which anything could be attached, anything on the altar around it, was weighted down with gold chains, with jewels, with precious gifts of every kind. These had been brought as thank-offerings, expressions of worship, or pledges connected with a petition, because I have brought thee this gift, have mercy, do this for me which I need.

So these old ideas are vital still, and live on in the modern world. And yet modern and magnificent are those utterances of the old Hebrew prophet, who had so completely outgrown the common customs even of his time, when he represents God as saying that he is weary of all these external offerings. He says: I do not want the cattle brought to my temples. Those that wander on a thousand hills are already mine. If I were hungry, I would not ask thee. He does not want the rivers of oil poured out. What does he want? The old prophet says, What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God? And some of the later writers caught a glimpse of the same spiritual truth when they said, Not burnt- offerings, not calves of a year old; when they cry out, Shall I bring the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? No, it is a broken and contrite heart, a heart sorry for its sin, a heart consecrating itself to righteousness and truth, this inner, spiritual worship.

The prophets, you see, were climbing up to that magnificent ideal so finely set up by Jesus as reported in the Gospel from which I read our lesson this morning. They had not only believed that God was to be worshipped after these external fashions, but that there was some special place, not only where it was easier to think of him, but where he demanded the offering should be brought. He said to the woman at the well: You think it is Mount Gerizim where the people ought to worship, and the Jews think it is Mount Moriah; but I say unto you that neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall men worship the Father. God is spirit, the universal spirit, every place a temple, every spot hallowed, if only those that worship him do so in spirit and in truth.

You see, then, how up these stairways of gradual approach the human race, in the person of its highest and finest representatives, has climbed, how near it has come to the spiritual ideal of God and the spiritual thought of that which he requires at our hands.

Is worship, then, so far as external form is concerned, to pass away? By no manner of means, as I think. As you analyze any one of these old primitive acts of worship, no matter how crude, no matter how cruel, how bloody, how repulsive it may be to-day from the outlook of our higher civilization, you will note that it has in it an element which, I believe, is permanent, and can never be outgrown. Whatever else there is, there is always the sense of a Presence, Invisible, mighty, high, and, from the point of view of the worshipper, holy and set apart. There is always the feeling of being in the shadow of the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity. There is always the sense of uplooking, of worship, in the higher sense of that term. Always, at any rate, the germ of these; and this, it seems to me, we may be sure and certain, however it may clothe itself in the future, shall never pass away.

I wish now, if there are any who think it is not befitting the greatness, the nobleness of man that he should bow himself in the presence of the highest, humiliate himself, if you choose to use that term, in acts of worship, I wish now, I say, to consider worship under two or three aspects, and see what it means. And, in the first place, I ask you to note that the ability to worship is always the measure of the rank of a being, it is the test and the standard of greatness.

As you look over the animal world, which one of them are we accustomed to think of as coming the nearest to man? What one do we love to have most with us, to associate most with our joys, with the peace of our homes? Is it not the dog? And as you examine the dog, study carefully his nature and characteristics, do you not note that there is in his nature a hint, a suggestion, of that which is the root of all worship? The dog is the one animal with which man is accustomed familiarly to associate himself, who looks up with an incipient reverence, love, almost worship, to his master. And it is this quality in the dog that enables him to look up, and, however dimly, feel the life of some one that is above him, that lifts him into our society, and makes us feel this tenderness of heart-kinship with that which is finest in his nature.

And man is man simply because he is able to look above himself. The old Greeks had an anticipation of that idea when they called man anthropos; for the meaning of the word is the upward-looker. As in imagination you go back and down to the time when man first appeared, developed from the lower life which preceded him, the first thing you can think about him as human is the opening of his eyes in wonder, the lifting of his face in curiosity and question, and the birth of adoration in his soul. This is that which made him man.

You go and study the lowest type of barbaric life to-day; and you will find that the barbarian has very little curiosity as compared with the civilized man. You will find that it is very difficult to astonish him with anything. He does not wonder. He takes everything for granted. He does not see clearly and deeply enough to appreciate the marvel. Let me illustrate from a specimen of barbaric life itself. A few years ago the chief of an Indian tribe was brought from the plains of the West to visit Washington. The idea was to impress him as much as possible with the idea of our civilization, so that he might report it to his people when he went home. After they had crossed the Mississippi on their way to the West, the gentleman in whose care he was travelling asked the chief what the one thing which he had seen during his trip was which had impressed him the most; and he said at once the St. Louis bridge. But his companion said, Are you not astonished at the Capitol of Washington? "Yes," he said, "but my people can pile stones on top of each other; but they cannot make a cobweb of steel hang in the air."

You see how that perception lifted him above the average level of his people? He was showing his capacity for higher and nobler civilization. It is just this ability in the man to wonder, to see something to wonder at, to worship, to admire, which lifts him one grade higher than that of the average level of his tribe. So that which makes man a man is the capacity in him to admire. All admiration is the essence, the root, of worship. And, the more things a man admires, the greater and nobler type of man he is seen to be. If he can admire music, if he can admire painting, if he can admire sculpture, if he can admire poetry, if he can admire literature of every kind, if he can admire grand architecture, the beautiful monuments of the world, we say, Here is a large, all-round type of man. We estimate his dignity, his greatness, by the capacity that he shows for worship in its lower type; for worship is simply looking up with admiration.

There is another quality about this worship that I wish to speak of. It is the power that is capable of transforming a man, making him over into the likeness of that which he admires. You find the man without this capacity, and you know it is hopeless to appeal to him, hopeless to set up ideals, hopeless to place before him enticing examples. There is nothing in him to which these things appeal. Take Alexander the Great. It is said he carried around with him a copy of the Iliad, and that Achilles was his ideal of a hero. Do you not see how this admiration transformed the life of the young king, and made him after the type of that which he admired? It does not make any difference what this special admiration may be. Let a man admire Beethoven, and he will cultivate instinctively the qualities that make the beauty and greatness of Beethoven's character and the wonders of his career.

This ideal may be in a book, it may be embodied in fiction. I have liked always, either on the walls of my room or on the walls of my heart, to have certain portraits of persons whom I have loved, who are no longer living; and they are to me constant stimulus. They speak to me by day, and in my dreams at night their eyes follow me, and seem to look into my soul; and in their presence I could not do a mean, an unmanly thing. I love, I reverence, I worship these lofty ideals. And the quality of these characters filters down through and permeates the thought and the life.

You remember how the other aspect of this thought is illustrated by Shakspere. He says, "My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." If that with which you keep company, that you admire, is below you, it degrades; if it is above you, it lifts. In any case you are transformed, shaped into the likeness of that which you admire.

There is another aspect of this close akin to that which I have just been dealing with. It is only the worshipper who has in him any promise, any possibility, of growth. Whether it is the individual or the nation, it makes no difference. If you find no capacity to admire that which is above and beyond you, then there is no hope of progress. Take the young man who thinks he has exhausted the possibilities of the world, who has reached the stage, who prides himself on not being surprised, not being over whelmed, not admiring anything. The careful outside observer knows that, instead of having exhausted the possibilities and greatness and wonders of the universe, he has simply exhausted himself.

The man who knows how full the world is of that which is beautiful and great and true and noble walks through the universe with his head bared and bowed, and feels, as did Moses when standing in the presence of the burning bush, that he ought to take off his shoes from his feet, for the place where he is standing is holy ground. Wherever you are standing in this universe, which is full of God from star to dust particle, is holy ground; and, if you do not feel it, if you are not touched, if you are not bowed, if you are not thrilled with wonder, it is defect in you, and not lack of God.

If the musician admires his great predecessors and strives to emulate them; if the painter in the presence of the Sistine Madonna feels lifted and touched, so that he never can be content with poor work again; if the sculptor is ready to bend his knees in the presence of the Venus of Melos, as he sees her standing at the end of the long gallery in the Louvre; if the lover of his kind admires John Howard, and can never be content unless he is doing something for his fellow- men again; if we can be touched by lives like Clara Barton's, like Florence Nightingale's, like Dorothea Dix's, like the great and consecrated ones of the earth; if in any department of life we can be lifted, humbled, thrilled, at the same time with the thought of the greatness and glory and beauty that are above and beyond us, then there is hope of growth, then there is life that can come to something fine and noble in the future.

I wish, in the light of these illustrations of what worship means, to note the thought that a great many men conscientious, earnest, simple who have never been accustomed to think of themselves as religious, and perhaps would deny it if a friend suggested to them that they had in them the possibilities of worship, that perhaps they are worshippers, even if they know it not. A great many persons have thrown away the common ideals of worship, and perhaps have settled down to the idea that they are not worshippers at all, while all the time the substance and the beauty and the glory of worship are in their daily lives and always in their hearts. I want to suggest two or three grades of worship, to show that this worship climbs; and I want to call attention to the fact that on the lowest grade it is worship of God just the same as on the highest, that all worship or admiration for truth, for beauty, for good, wherever, however, manifested, is really worship of God, whether we think of it or call it by that name or not, because they all are manifestations of God.

Take the man who is touched and lifted by natural beauty, the sense of natural power; the man who loves the woods, who turns and stands to see the glory of a sunset, who is lifted by tides of emotion as he hears the surf beat on the shore, who feels bowed in the presence of the wide night sky of stars, who is humbled at the same time that he is uplifted in the presence of the mountains, who is touched by all natural scenes of beauty and peace and glory. Are not these men in their degree worshippers?

Take the feeling that is expressed in those beautiful lines of Byron. We do not think of Byron as a religious nature, but certainly he had in him the heart of worship when he could write such thoughts as these:

"'Tis midnight. On the mountains brown The cold, round moon shines deeply down; Blue roll the waters; blue the sky Seems like an ocean hung on high, Bespangled with those isles of light, So wildly, spiritually bright.

Whoever looked upon them shining And turned to earth without repining, Nor wished for wings to flee away And mix with their eternal ray?"

And Wordsworth says he feels a Presence that "Disturbs him with the joy of elevated thought, A sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused."

And so you may run all through the poets, these simply as hints, specimens, every one of them worshippers, touched by the beauty, glory, uplift of the natural world.

And then pass to the next stage, and come to the worship of the human, to the admiration of the highest and finest qualities that are manifested in the lives of men and women. Who is there that is not touched and thrilled by some story of heroic action, of heroic self- sacrifice, of consecration to duty in the face of danger and death? And no matter what this manifestation of human goodness may be, if you can be thrilled by it and lifted by it, then you have taken another step up this ladder of worship which leads you into the very presence chamber of the Divine.

Let a boy read the life of Lincoln, see his earnest thirst for knowledge, the sacrifice he was willing to pay for it, his consecration to his ideals of truth, the transparent honesty of the man, the supreme contempt with which he could look down upon anything poor or mean or low, the firmness and simplicity with which he assumes high office, the faithfulness, the unassuming devotion, that he carries into the fulfilment of the trust. Take him all the way through, study his character and admire, and you are a worshipper of that which is divine.

So in the case of Jesus, the supreme soul of history in its consecration to the Father, its simple trust in the divine love, its superiority to fear, to question, to death. When we bow ourselves in the presence of the Nazarene, we are not worshipping another God. We are worshipping his Father and our Father as lie shines in the face of Jesus, as he illumines and beautifies his life, as he makes glorious the humble pathways of Galilee, and so casts a reflected glory over the humblest pathways any of us may be called upon to tread.

The next step in our ascent brings us to the conscious worship of God himself. We cannot grasp the divine idea. The finite cannot measure or outline the infinite; and so, when we say God, we mean only the grandest ideal that we can frame, that reaches on towards, but can never adequately express the Deity. And so we worship this thought, this ideal, growing as our capacity develops, advancing as the race advances, and ever leading us Godward, as when we follow a ray of light we are travelling towards its source. And the attitude of our souls in the presence of this which is divine is truest worship. The humility of it, the exaltation of it, is beautifully phrased in two or three lines which I wish to repeat to you from Browning's Saul: "I but open my eyes, and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. And, thus looking within and around me, I ever renew (With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it, too), As by each new obeisance in spirit I climb to his feet!"

Here is the significance of the thought I had in mind at the opening. We talk about humbling ourselves. When we can bend with reverence in the presence of that which is above us, the very bending is exaltation; for it indicates the capacity to appreciate, to admire, to adore. Thus we climb up into the ability to worship God, the infinite Spirit, our Father, in spirit and in truth.

Now to raise one moment the question suggested near the opening, Are forms of worship to pass away? The reply to this seems to me perfectly clear. Those forms which sprang out of and are fitted to only lower ideals of worship, ideals which humanity outgrows, these must be left behind, or else they must be transformed, and filled with a new and higher meaning. But forms will always remain. But note one thing: they sometimes say that we Unitarians are too cold, and do not have form enough. You will see that, the higher men rise intellectually, the less there is always of outward expression.

For example, before men were able to speak with any large vocabulary, they eked out their meaning by all kinds of motions and gestures. But the most highly cultivated men to- day, in their conversation, are the ones who get the least excited and have the least recourse to gestures, because they are capable of expressing the highest, finest, and most varied thoughts by the elaborate power of speech which they have developed. And perhaps the highest and finest worship of the world will not be that which has the most elaborate ceremonial and ritual; but it will have adequate and fitting ceremonial and ritual, because it will naturally seek to express in some external way that which it feels.

I sometimes wish and perhaps you will pardon me for saying it here and now that we Unitarians were a little less afraid of adequate posture and gesture in our acts of public worship. God is, indeed, everywhere as much as he is here; but this is the place we have specially consecrated to thinking about him and to going through our stated forms of worship. And if, when you enter the house of a friend, you take off your hat, you bow the head, it seems to me it would be especially fitting to do it, when one enters a Christian church. And, in the attitude of prayer, I wish that all might find it in their hearts to sit with bended brow and closed eyes as in the presence of the Supreme, shutting out the common, the outside world, and trying to realize what it means to come consciously to the feet of the eternal One.

I love these simple, fitting, external manifestations of the worshipful spirit; and, if we do not substitute them for the worship, and think we worship when we bend the knee, this appropriate expression of the spirit, or feeling, it seems to ought to help cultivate the feeling and the spirit, and make it easier for us to be conscious of the presence of the Divine.

We are men, then, in the highest sense of the term, only as we are worshippers. And the more worshipful we are, in high and true sense of that word, the nobler and higher manhood, and the grander the possibilities in us of de intellectual, moral, spiritual growth.

Let us, then, cultivate the admiring, the wondering, the worshipful attitude of heart and mind, and recognize on lowest steps of this ladder that lifts to God, the presence of the same divine power and beauty and glory as that which we see clearly on the highest, and know that always, when we are worshipping any manifestation of God, we are shipping Him who is spirit, in spirit and in truth.

When on some strain of music Our thoughts are wafted high; When, touched with tender pity, Kind teardrops dim the eye; When thrilled with scenes of grandeur, Or moved to deeds of love, Do we not give thee worship, O God in heaven above? For Thou art all life's beauty, And Thou art all its good: By Thy tides are we lifted To every lofty mood. Whatever good is in us, Whatever good we see, And every high endeavor, Are they not all from Thee?

MORALITY NATURAL, NOT STATUTORY.

IT is very common for people to identify their special type of religion or their theological opinions with religion itself, and feel that those who do not agree with them are in the rue sense not religious. Not only this. It is perhaps quite less common for them to identify their particular type of religion with the fundamental ideas of morality, and think that the people who do not agree with them are undermining the moral stability of the world. For example, those who question the absolute authority of the Catholic Church are looked upon the authorities of that Church as the enemies, not only of religion, but as the enemies of society, the enemies of humanity, as doing what they can to shake the very foundations of he social order. You will find a great many Protestant theologians who seem to hold the opinion that, if you dare to question the authenticity or authority of some particular nook in the Bible, you are not only an enemy of religion, but you are an enemy of morality. You are doing what you can to disturb the stability of the world.

But, if we look at the matter with a little care, we shall see that we ought to turn it quite around, look at it from another point of view. Though every Bible, every particle of religious literature, every hymn, every prayer on the face of the earth, were blotted out of existence to-day, religion would not be touched. Religious books did not create religion, did not make man a religious being. It is the religious nature of man that made the Bibles, that uttered itself in prayers, that created the rituals, that sung the hymns and chanted the anthems. It is man, a religious being, who makes religious institutions, who creates all the external aspects and appearances of the religious life. And the same is true precisely in regard to moral precepts. If the Ten Commandments were blotted out of the memory of man, if every single ethical teaching of Jesus should perish, if the high and fine moral precepts of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and all the great teachers of the pagan world should cease to exist, if there were not a printed moral precept on earth, morality would not be touched. It is not these that have created morality. It is the natural moral nature of man that has written all the commandments, whether they have come to us by the hand of Moses or of Gautama or Mohammed or Confucius or Seneca, or no matter who the medium may have been.

Man is a moral being, naturally, essentially, eternally, and this is a moral universe, inherently, necessarily, eternally; and, though all the external expression of moral thought and feeling should be lost, the human race would simply reproduce them again.

It is sometimes well for us to get down to the bed-rock in our thinking, and find how natural and necessary the great foundations are. The Hindu priests used to tell their followers that the earth, which was flat, rested on certain pillars, which rested again on some other foundation beneath them, and so on until thought was weary in trying to trace that upon which the earth was supposed to find its stability. And they also told their followers that, if they did not bring offerings, if they did not pay the special respect which was due to the gods, if they were not obedient to heir teachings, these pillars would give way, and the earth would be precipitated into the abyss.

But we have found, as a result of our modern study of he universe, that the earth needs no pillars on which to rest; but it swings freely in its orbit, as the old verse that used to read in my schoolboy days says, "Hangs on nothing in the air," part of the universal system of things, stable in its eternal sound and motion, kept and cared for by the power that lever sleeps and never is weary. So, by studying into the foundations of the moral nature of man, we have discovered a last that it needs no artificial props or supports, but that morality is inherent, natural and eternal.

I shall not raise the question, which is rather curious than practical, as to whether there are any beginnings of moral feeling in the animal world below man. For our purpose this morning it is enough to note that the minute that man appears conscience appears, and that conscience is an act which springs out of social relations. In other words, when the first man rose to the ability to look into the face of his fellow and think of the other man as another self, like himself in feelings, in possibilities of pleasure or pain, when this first man was able imaginatively to put himself in: he place of this other, then morality as a practical fact was Dorn.

We may imagine, for the purpose of illustration, this man saying: Here is another being who appears to be like myself. He is capable of suffering pain, as I am. He does not like pain any better than I do. Therefore, I have no right to make him suffer that which I do not wish to suffer myself. This other man is capable of pleasure. He desires certain things, similar things to those which I desire. If I do not wish him to take these things away from me, I have no right to take them away from him.

I do not mean that this was thought out in this clear way, but that, when there was the first dim perception of this other self, with similar feelings, similar possibilities, similar pleasures, similar pains, then there became a conscience, because there was a consciousness of this similarity of nature. Morality, then, is born as a social fact.

To go a little deeper, and in order to trace the natural and historical growth of the moral ideal, let me say that morality in its deepest and truest sense is born of the fact of sex, because it is right in there that we find the root and the germ of permanent social relations. And I wish you to note another very significant fact. You hear people talking about selfishness and unselfishness, as though they were direct contraries, mutually exclusive of each other, as though, in order to make a selfish man unselfish, you must completely reverse his nature, so to speak. I do not think this is true at all. Unselfishness naturally and necessarily springs out of selfishness, and, in the deepest sense of the word, is not at all contradictory to that.

For example: A man falls in love with a woman. This, on one side of it, is as selfish as anything you can possibly conceive. But do you not see by what subtle and divine chemistry the selfishness is straightway transformed, lifted up, glorified, and becomes unselfishness? The very love that he professes for her makes it necessary for his own happiness that she should be happy, so that, in seeking for his own selfish gratification, he is devoting himself unselfishly to the happiness of somebody else.

And, when a child is born, do you not see, again, how the two selfishnesses, the father's and the mother's, selfishly, if you please, brooding over and loving the child, at once go out of themselves, consecrating time and care and thought and love, and even health or life itself, if need be, for the welfare of the child?

Right in there, then, out of this fact of sex and in the becoming of the family, are born love and sympathy, and tenderness and mutual care, all those things which are the highest and finest constituent elements of the noblest developments of the moral nature of men.

Imagination plays a large part in the development of morality; for you must be able to put yourself imaginatively in the place of another before you can feel for that other, and in that way recognize the rights of that other and be ready to grant these rights to that other. So we find that morality at first is a narrow thing: it is confined perhaps to the little family, the father, the mother, the child, bound together by these ties of kinship, of love, of sympathy, devoting themselves to each other; but they may look upon some other family as their natural enemies, and feel no necessity whatever to apply these same principles of love and tenderness and care beyond the limits of their own little circle.

So you find, as you study the growth of the moral nature of man, that it is confined at first to the family, then to the patriarchal family, then the tribe; but the fiction of kinship is still kept up, and, while the member of the primeval tribe feels he has no right to rob or murder within the limits of his tribe, he has no compunction whatever about robbing or murdering or injuring the members of some other tribe. So the moral principle in its practical working is limited to the range of the sympathy of the tribe, which does not go beyond the tribal limits. We see how that principle works still in the world, from the beginning clear up to the highest reaches which we have as yet attained.

Take the next step, and find a city like ancient Athens. Still, perhaps, the fiction of kinship is maintained. All the citizens of Athens are regarded as members of the same great tribe or family. But even in the time of Plato, whom we are accustomed to look upon as one of the great teachers of the world, there was no thought of any moral obligation to anybody who lived in Sparta, lived in any other city of Greece, and less was there any thought of moral obligation as touching or taking in the outside barbarian. So when the city grew into a nation, and we came to a point where the world substantially stands to-day, do you not see that practically the same principle holds, that, while we recognize in some abstract sort of fashion that we ought to do justice and be kind to people beyond our own limits, yet all our political economy, all our national ideas, are accustomed to emphasize the fact that we must be just and righteous to our own people, but that aggression, injustice of almost any kind, is venial in our treatment of the inhabitants of another country? And it may even flame up into the fire of a wordy patriotism in certain conditions; and love of country may mean hatred and injustice towards the inhabitants of another country, or particularly towards the people of another race.

Let me give you a practical illustration of it. What are the relations in which we stand to-day towards Spain? I have unbounded admiration for the patience, on the whole, for the justice, the sense of right, which characterize the American people. I doubt if there is another nation on the face of the earth to-day that would have gone through the last two or three years of our experience, and maintained such an attitude of impartiality, of faithfulness, of justice, of right. And yet, if we examine ourselves, we shall find that it is immensely difficult for us to put ourselves in the place of a Spaniard, to look at the Cuban question from his point of view, to try to be fair, to be just to him. It is immensely difficult, I say, for us to look at one of these international questions from the point of view of another race, cherishing other religious and social ideas, having another style of government.

And there is another illustration of it that has recently occurred here in our country, which is sadder still to me. Only a little while ago a postmaster in the South was shot by a mob. The mob surrounds his house, murders him and his child, wounds other members of the family, burns down his home; and why? Under no impulse whatever except that of pure and simple race prejudice, the utter inability of a white man to put himself in the position of a black to such an extent as to recognize, plead for, or defend his inherent rights as a man.

I am not casting any aspersion on the South in what I am saying, none whatever. Were the conditions reversed, perhaps we should be no better. It is not a practical problem with us. If there were two or three times as many colored men in the State of New York as there are white men, then we might understand the question. Let us not mentally cast any stones at the people across the line. I point it out simply as illustrating the difficulty that we have in recognizing the rights, the moral rights, of people beyond the limits of that sympathy to which we have been accustomed and for a long period trained.

I believe the day will come when we shall be as jealous of the right of a man as we are now of the right of an American. We are not yet. There have been foregleams and prophecies of it in the past. Long ago a Latin writer said, I am a man, and whatever is human is not foreign to me. But think what a lone and isolated utterance that has been for hundreds of years. Jesus taught us to pray, not my Father, but our Father, and we do pray it every day in the-year; but how many are the people in any of the churches that dream of living it? A hundred years ago that heretic, who is still looked upon as the bugaboo of all that is fine and good, Thomas Paine, wrote, "The world is my country, and to do good is my religion," a sentence so fine that it has been carved on the base of the statue of William Lloyd Garrison on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, as being a fitting symbol of his own philanthropic life.

How many of us have risen to the idea of making these grand sentiments the ruling principles of our lives? But along the lines of moral growth it is to come. The day will be when, as I said, we shall feel as keenly whatever touches the right of any man as to-day we feel that which touches the right of one of our own people; and the moral growth of the world will reach beyond that. I love to dream of a day when men will no longer forget the inherent rights of any inhabitant of the air or of the waters or of the woods or any of the domesticated animals that we have come to associate with our lives.

We feel towards them to-day as in the old days a man felt towards another man who was his slave, that he had a right to abuse, to maltreat, even to kill, if he pleased. We have not yet become civilized enough, so that we feel it incumbent upon us to recognize the fact that animals can suffer pain, that animals can enjoy the air or the sunshine, and that they have a right to each when they do not trespass upon the larger rights of humanity. I was something of a boy when it first came over me that it was not as amusing to animals to be shot and killed as it was to me to shoot and kill them. From the time I was able to lift a gun I had always carried one; but I soon learned that for me there was no pleasure in taking needlessly the life of anything that lived. We are only partially civilized as yet in the treatment of our domesticated animals. How many people think of the torture of the curb bit, of the check, of neglect in the case of cold, of thirst, of hunger? How many people, I say, civilized and in our best society, are careful yet as to the comfort, the rights, of those that serve them in these humble capacities?

The time will come when our moral sympathetic sense shall widen its boundaries even farther yet, and shall take in the trees and the shrubs, the waters, the hills, all the natural and beautiful features of the world. I believe that by and by it will be regarded as immoral, as unmanly, to deface, to mar, that which God has made so glorious and so beautiful. As soon as man develops, then, his power of sympathy, so that it can take the world in its arms, so soon he will have grown to the stature of the Divine in the unfolding of his moral nature.

I wish now to raise the question, for a moment, as to what is to be our guide in regard to moral facts and moral actions. I was trained, and perhaps most of you were, to believe that I was unquestioningly to follow my conscience, that whatever conscience told me to do was necessarily right. The conscience has been spoken of as though it were a sort of little deity set to rule man's nature, this little kingdom of thought and feeling and action. But conscience is nothing of the kind. Half of the consciences of the world to-day are all wrong.

Let me hint by way of illustration what I mean: Calvin was just as conscientious in burning Servetus as Servetus was in pursuing that course of action which led him to the stake. One of them was wrong in following his conscience, then. You take it to-day: some people will tell you there is a certain day in the week that you must observe as sacred. Your conscience tells you there is another day in the week that you must observe as sacred. Can both be right? Many of the greatest tragedies of the world have come about through these controversies and confusions of conscience. The Quaker in old Boston went at the cart's tail, in disgrace, because he followed his conscience; and the Puritan put him there because he followed his conscience. Were both of them right? The inquisitor in Spain put to death hundreds and thousands of people conscientiously; and the hundreds and thousands of people conscientiously went to their deaths.

What is conscience, then? Conscience is not a moral guide. It is simply that monitor within that reiterates to us forever and forever and forever, Do right. But conscience does not tell us what is right. We must decide those questions as a matter of calm study and judgment in the light of human experience. It is the judgment that should tell us whether a thing is right or wrong. And how shall we know whether it is right or wrong? Simply by the consequences. That which helps, that which lifts man up, that which adds to the happiness and the well-being of the world, as the result of human experience, is right. That which hurts, that which injures men and women, that which takes away from their welfare and happiness, that is wrong. All these things, as we shall see before I get through, are inherent in the nature of things, not created by statute, not the result of the moral teaching of anybody.

This leads me to extend this idea a little farther, and to raise the question as to what is the standard by which you are to judge moral action. If you will think it out with a little care, you will find that the standard of all moral action may be summed up in the one word "life." Life, first, as continuance; second, to use a philosophical term, content, that which it includes. Life, this is the standard of right and wrong.

To illustrate, take me physically, leave out of account all the rest of my nature now for a moment, and consider me as an animal. From the point of view of my body, that which conduces to length of life, to fullness, to completion, to enjoyment of life, is right, the only right, from this physical point of view. That which threatens my life, that which takes away my sum of strength, injures my health, takes away from my possibility of enjoyment, that, from a physical point of view, is wrong; and there can be no other right or wrong from the point of view of the body.

But I am not simply body. So this principle must be modified. Come up to the fact that I am an intellectual being. In order to develop myself intellectually, I may have to forego things that would be pleasant on the bodily plane. I sacrifice the lower for the higher; and that which would be right on the physical plane becomes relatively wrong now, because it interferes with something that is higher and more important.

Rise one step to man as an affectional being. If you wish to develop him to the finest and highest here, you may not only be obliged under certain conditions to sacrifice the body, but you may be obliged to sacrifice his intellectual development. In order that he may be the best up here, he must put the others sometimes, relatively, under his feet. So, again, that which would be right on the physical plane or the intellectual plane becomes relatively wrong, if it interferes with that which is higher still.

And so, if you recognize man as a spiritual being, a child of God, then you say it is right, if need be, to put all these other things under his feet, in order that he may attain the highest and best that he is capable of here. But you see it is life all the way, it is the physical life or it is the mental life or it is the affectional life or it is the spiritual life; and that which is necessary for the cultivation and development of these different grades of life becomes on those grades right, and that which threatens or injures one or either of these grades becomes, so far as that grade is concerned, wrong.

Life, then, continuance, fullness, joy, use, this is the standard of right and wrong; a standard which no book ever set up, which no book can ever overthrow; a standard which is inherent, natural, necessary, a part of the very nature of things.

I wish now for a moment I must of course do it briefly to consider the relation of religion to this natural morality. And perhaps you will hardly be ready some of you, at any rate for the statement which I propose to make, that sometimes, in order to be grandly moral, a man must be irreligious. I mean, of course, from the point of view of the conventional religion of his time, he must be ready to be regarded as irreligious. In the earliest development of the religious and moral life of a tribe, very likely, the two went hand in hand, side by side; for the dead chief now worshipped as god would be looked upon as in favor of those customs or practices which the tribe had come to regard as right. But religion perhaps you will know by this time, if you have thought of it carefully is the most conservative thing in the world. Naturally, it is the last thing that people are willing to change. This reluctance grows out of their reverence, grows out of their worshipful nature, grows out of their fear that they may be wrong.

But now let me illustrate what I mean. Religion, standing still in this way, has become an institution, a set of beliefs, of rites and ceremonies, which do not change. The moral experience of the people goes right on; and so it sometimes comes to pass that the moral ideal has outgrown the religious ideal of the community. And now, as a practical illustration to illume the whole point, let us go back to ancient Athens for a moment at the time of Socrates. Here we are confronted with the curious fact that Socrates, who has been regarded from that day to this as the most grandly moral man of his time, the one man who taught the highest and noblest human ideals, is put to death as an irreligious man. The popular religion of the time cast him out, and put the hemlock to his lips; and at the same time his teaching in regard to righteousness and truth was unspeakably ahead of the popular religion of his day.

Let us come to the modern Athens for a moment, to the time of Theodore Parker in Boston. We are confronted here, again, with this strange fact. There was not a church in Boston that could abide him, not even the Unitarian churches; and in the prayer-meetings of the day they were beseeching God to take him out of the world, because they thought he was such a force for evil. And at the same time Theodore Parker stood for the very highest, tenderest, truest moral ideal of his age.

There was no man walking the earth at that time who so grandly voiced the real law of God as did Theodore Parker. And yet he was outcast by the popular religious sentiment of his time.

This, then, is what I mean when I say that we ought to be careful, and study and think in forming our religious ideals, and see that we do not identify our own unwillingness to think with the eternal and changeless law of God. This is what I have meant in some of the strictures which I have uttered during the last year upon some of the theological creeds of the time. The people have grown to be better than their creeds, but they have not yet developed the courage to make those creeds utter the highest and finest things which they think and feel. This is what I have meant when I have said that the character of God as outlined in many of these creeds is away behind and below the noblest and finest and sweetest ideals of what we regard as fitting even to humanity to-day.

Religion, then, may be ahead of the moral ideal or it may be behind it. The particular type of religion I mean, of course, which is being held at any particular time in the history of the world. But the moral ideal of necessity goes on, keeping step with the social experience of the race.

I must touch briefly now just one other point of practical importance that we need to guard, in order to be tender and true in our dealings with our fellow-men. You will find, if you look over the face of society, that there are two kinds of morality, frequently quite inconsistent with each other; and sometimes the poorer of the two kinds is held in higher esteem than the better. I mean there is conventional morality, and there is real morality.

As a hint of illustration: An American woman goes to Turkey to-day; and she is shocked by the customs of the women and their style of dress. It seems to her that no woman can possibly be moral who, although she covers her head, can appear on the street with feet and ankles bare. But this same Turkish woman is shocked beyond the possibility of utterance to know that in Europe and America women carefully cover their feet, but expose their faces and their shoulders. It seems terrible to her, and she cannot understand how a European or American woman can have any regard for the principles of delicacy and morality.

Do you not see how, in both cases here, it is purely a matter of convention? No real question of morality is touched in either case. I speak of this to prepare you to note how conscience can be as troubled over things which are purely conventional as it can over things which are downright and real. Let me use another illustration, going a little deeper in the matter. Here is a man, for example, who is terribly shocked because his neighbor takes a drive with his family on Sunday afternoon. It seems to him an outrage on all the principles of public and social morality; and he is eager to get up a society to abolish such customs, that seem to him to threaten the prosperity of all that is good in the world. But this same man, perhaps, has been trained in a way of conducting his business that, while legal, is not strictly fair. This man may be hard and cruel towards his employees. He may cherish bitter hatreds towards his rivals. In his heart he may be transgressing the law of vital ethics, while fighting with all the power of his nature for that which does not touch any real question of right or wrong at all.

Or take a woman who, while shocked at the transgression of some social custom in which she has been trained from her childhood, or, for example, has come to think that a certain way of observing Lent, on which we have just entered, is absolutely necessary to the safety of religion and morals both, is yet quite willing, and without a qualm of conscience, on the slightest hint of a suspicion, to tear into tatters the character of one of her neighbors or friends, does not hesitate to slander, perhaps is unjust or cruel to the servants that make the house comfortable and beautiful for her; in other words, transgressing the real laws of right and wrong, she is shocked and troubled over the transgression on the part of others of some purely conventional statute, the keeping or breach of which has no real bearing on the welfare of the world.

A good many of our social judgments are like the case of the old lady pardon me, if it should make you smile, but it illustrates the case who criticised with a great deal of severity a neighbor and friend who wore feathers on her bonnet. Somebody said to her, But the ribbons on your bonnet are quite as expensive as the feathers that you criticise. "Yes," she said, "I know they are; but you have got to draw the line somewhere, and I choose to draw it at feathers." So you find a great many people on every hand in society who are choosing to draw these lines purely artificial, purely conventional in regard to matters of supposed right or wrong, while they are not as careful to look down deeply into the essential principles of that which is inherently right or wrong.

And now at the end I wish to suggest what is a theme large enough for a sermon by itself, and say that these laws of righteousness are so inherent that they are self-executed; and by no possibility did any soul from the beginning of the world ever escape the adequate result of his wrong-doing. The old Hebrews, as manifested in the Book of Job, the Psalms, and all through the Old Testament, taught the idea, which was common at that time in the world, that the favor of God was to be judged by the external prosperity of men and women. The Old Testament promises long life and wealth and all sorts of good things to the people who do right; and I find on every hand in the modern world people who have inherited this way of looking at things. I have heard people say: I have tried to do right, and I am not prosperous. I wonder why I am treated so? I have heard women say, I have tried to be a good mother: why is my child taken away from me? As though there was any sort of relation between the two facts. I hear people say, Don't talk to me about the justice of God, when here is a man, who has been dishonest all his life long, who has prospered, and become rich and lives in a fine house, drives his horses, and owns a yacht. As if there was any sort of connection between the two, as though a man merely because he had a fine house and owned a yacht was escaping the punishment of his unjust and selfish life.

Remember, friends, look a little below the surface. There is no possibility of escape. I break some law of my body; do I escape the result? I break some law of my mind; do I escape the result? I break some law of my affectional nature; is nothing to happen? I break a law of my spiritual nature; does nothing take place as the result of it? You might as well say that the law of gravity can be suspended, that a man can fling himself over the edge of a precipice, and come to no harm. The precipice over the edge of which you fling yourself may be a physical one, may be a mental one, an affectional one, a spiritual one; but the moral gravity of the universe is never mocked, and the man who breaks any of God's laws never goes free. He may discover that he has broken it, be sorry for it, begin to keep it again, and recover himself; but the consequences are sure, inevitable, eternal.

You look at a man who is externally prospering, and because of this you say he is not suffering the result of the evil he has done. Go back with me to Homer's Odyssey at the time when Ulysses and his companions fell into the hands of the sorceress, and his companions were turned into swine. Would you go and look at these swine, and say they are not suffering anything? See how comfortable they are. See with what gusto they eat the food that is cast into their troughs. See how happy they are as swine. They are not suffering anything Is it nothing to become swinish, merely because you have your beautiful pen to live in? Is a not suffering the result of his moral wrong when he debases and degrades and deteriorates his own nature, and becomes less a man, because he is surrounded with all that is glorious and beautiful that art can supply? Look within whatever department of nature where the law has been disobeyed, and there forever and forever read the result, the inevitable law, that the soul that sinneth, in so far as it sinneth, it shall die.

REWARD AND PUNISHMENT.

Two WEEKS ago I preached a sermon, the subject of which was "Morality Natural, not Statutory." Judging by the conversations which I have had and letters which I have received, it has aroused a good deal of question and criticism in certain quarters. This must be for one of three reasons. In the first place, the position which I took may not be a tenable one. In the second place, it is possible that the views expressed, being somewhat new and unfamiliar, were not found easy of apprehension and acceptance. In the third place, it is possible that, in endeavoring to treat so large a subject, I did not analyze and illustrate enough to make myself perfectly clear.

At any rate, the matter seems to me of such supreme importance as to make it worth my while this morning to continue the general subject by a careful and earnest treatment of the great question of reward and punishment as applied to feeling, to thought, to conduct, the whole of human life.

Let me say here at the outset, as indicating the point towards which I shall aim as my goal, that in the ordinary use of language, in the popular use of language, I do not believe in either reward or punishment: I believe only in causes and results. This, as I said, is the point that I shall aim at. Where shall I begin?

I need to ask you to consider for a moment the state of mind of man, so far as we can conceive it, when he first wakes up as a conscious being, and begins to look out over the scene of nature and human life with the endeavor to interpret facts as they appear to him. Of course, he knows nothing whatever of what we mean by natural law: he knows nothing of natural cause and of necessary result. So far as we can discover by our researches, all the tribes of men about whom we have been able to gather any information have had a belief, if not in God, at least in gods, or in spiritual existences and powers that controlled within certain limits the course of human events. It may have been the worship of ancestors, it may have been the worship of some great chief of the tribe; but these invisible beings have been able to help or hurt their followers, their worshippers; and of course they have been thought of as governing human life after substantially the same methods that they used when they were living here in the body.

That is, it has been a magical or arbitrary government of the world that has been for ages the dominant one in the human mind. People have supposed that these invisible beings desired them to do certain things, to refrain from doing certain other things, and they have expected them to reward or punish them how? By giving them that which they desired, on the one hand, or sending them something which they did not desire, on the other. They have brought the gods their offerings, their sacrifices, their words of praise, and have asked that they might be successful in war, that they might bring home the game which they sought when they went on a hunting expedition. When there have been disease, pestilence, famine, drought, no matter what the nature of the evil, they have been regarded as allotments of these divine powers sent on account of something they have done or omitted to do. It never occurred to them to interpret these as part of a natural order, because they knew nothing about any natural order. They reasoned as well as they were able to reason at that stage of culture in any particular age of the world's history which they had reached. But this has been the thought of men time out of mind concerning the method of the divine or spiritual or unseen government of the world.

Is this way of looking at it confined to primitive man, confined to pagan nations? Do we find something else, some other condition of mind, when we come to study carefully the Old Testament? Let us see. Take the first verse which I read as a part of my text. The author of this Psalm we do not know who he may have been says, "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread." As I have read this a great many times in the past, I have wondered as to the strange experience that this man must have had in human life, if this is a correct interpretation of that experience. I have been young: I do not like to admit that as yet I am old; but, whether I am or not, I have a good many times seen the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging their bread.

It seems to me that the writer of this verse was trained in a theory of the government of human affairs that does not at all match the facts. He has this magical, this arbitrary theory in his mind. It was the general conception I think, as any one will find by a careful reading of the Old Testament or study of Jewish history, the ordinary conception among the Hebrews, that God was to reward people for being good by prosperity, long life, many children, herds of cattle, distinction among his fellow-men, positions of political honor and power; and the threat of the taking away of these is frequently uttered against those that presume to do wrong. In other words, it seems to me that the ordinary theory of the government of human affairs as set forth in the Old Testament is precisely this same one that I have been considering as the natural and necessary outcome of the ignorance and inexperience of early man.

As time went on, now and then some deeper, more spiritual thinker begins to question this method of reasoning, begins to wonder whether it is quite adequate; and we have a magnificent poetical expression of this kind of critical thought in the Book of Job. This Book of Job is any way and every way worthy of your careful attention. It is the nearest to a dramatic production of anything in the Bible. James Anthony Froude said once in regard to it that, if it were translated merely as a poem and published by itself, it would take rank as a literary work among the few great masterpieces of the world.

But the thing that engages our attention this morning is not its power as a dramatic production, but its criticism of God's government of the world. It has been assumed, as I have said, and we are not through with that assumption, that, if a man suffered, if he was ill, if his wife or children were taken away from him, if his property was destroyed, somehow he had offended God, and that this was a punishment for the course of wrong-doing in which he had been engaged. But the author of the Book of Job conceives that this does not quite match the facts; so he gives us this magnificent character that he declares upright, spotless, free from wrong of any kind, who yet is suffering. He has lost his property, it has been swept away, his children have been put to death, almost everything that he cared for he has lost, and he from head to feet is sick of a loathsome disease; and he sits in the midst of his deprivation and sorrow. His friends gather around him; and with this old assumption in their minds some of them begin to taunt him. They say, Now, Job, why not confess, why not own up as to what you have been doing? Of course, you have been doing something wrong, or all this would not have happened. This is the tone that one of his critics takes. This is the kind of comfort that he receives in the midst of his sorrow. But Job protests earnestly and indignantly that it is not true. He says he is innocent, there are no secret wrongs in his life; and he wishes that he might find some way by which he could come into the presence of the great Ruler of the universe, and openly plead his cause. But his friends do not believe him.

Now the writer of the book lets us into the explanation he has thought out for this: God for a special reason is testing Job, to see whether he will be true to him in spite of the fact that he does not get the ordinary blessings that the people were accustomed to look for as the rewards of their conduct. But the writer is not consistent with the wonderful position that he makes Job assume; for, after the trial is all over, he falls in with the popular theory, and shows us Job, not with the old children who could not be brought back, but with a lot of new ones, with herds and cattle again in plenty, with honor among his fellow-citizens, with all that heart could wish in the way of worldly prosperity and peace.

So I say the writer is not quite consistent, for he falls back at the end on the old theory, and he lets us gain a glimpse behind the scenes, just enough to see that there are cases, special cases, where the popular theory does not hold; but he still seems to assume that, in a general way, we are to accept it as correct, and as explaining the facts of human life.

The Jews acted on this theory in their political history. Their prophets, their great teachers, asserted over and over again that, if they were true to their God, if they were faithful in their obedience to the law, if they lived out all these highest and finest ideals of ceremonial as well as heart righteousness, that they would be mighty as a nation, that their enemies would be put under their feet, that they would have political success and power; and yet their increasing insistence on this ceremonial and interior righteousness of thought and life was found to be no adequate defence against the Roman legions. Political success did not come to them. In spite of all their obedience, they were swept out of existence as a nation.

Now do we find any difference in teaching in the New Testament? We do; and we do not. The teaching of the New Testament is not consistent in this matter. If Jesus be correctly reported, his own teaching is not quite consistent on this subject. Let me give you one or two illustrations, that you may see what I mean. John tells us that a certain man, who had been born blind, was brought to Jesus to be cured; and the people stood about, and said to Jesus, "Who is it, this man himself or his parents, that sinned, so that he was born blind?" You see it does not occur to them that there is any natural cause for a man's being blind, apart from some sin on the part of somebody. Who is it, then, his father or mother, or he himself, that has sinned, that is the cause of it? Jesus says, "Neither this man nor his parents have sinned," and you think at first that you are going to get an adequate explanation; but he straightway adds that the man was blind in order that the works of God might be manifest in him; which we cannot accept to-day as quite an adequate explanation.