exist. Our true business is to find out where they are and what they demand. Religion, therefore, is not an invention, but a discovery.

We have said that religion is a discovery, not an invention. This only with regard to its obligations. These are not arbitrary, and are of no private interpretation. Without a fixed standard of duty, social and personal, the coming-together of men upon any ground whatever would be a moral Babel. But the religious principle, in its efficiency, is a creative one. The religion of each man, therefore, to be genuine, must have in it something original and individual, not necessarily in doctrine, but in experience. And the freedom and permission of this experience is the only source from which the poverty of creeds can be filled up. For the Church preceptive can only give a man the tools wherewith to build a religious life. If he fail to build it, he, not the Church, is responsible. No creed, whether burthened with dialectic subtilties, or straitened by intellectual simplifications, can do more than acquaint man with the highest recorded experience and intuition of the race. The experience and intuition which constitute personal religion must be built by him on the basis which these supply. Those, therefore, who complain most bitterly of the deficiencies of systems of belief and of religious instruction in general, have left out of sight the work which the individual himself must supply, and which, like the processes of natural life, must be performed by each for himself.

We know indeed that the middle region of opinion has been made to stand for the true sanctuary of the Church. Upon this ground the passions of men have attacked the consciences of their fellow-men. Blind themselves to the inner light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, they have been the leaders of those as blind as themselves. The true insight which really links together the divine and human has been contraband to their rule. But their rule has, after all, been a temporal, not a spiritual one. The limits and dogmas of their special Church have been swallowed up in the mighty sweep and comprehension of the true Church.

They might build as high, and dig as deep, and fence off as straitly, as they would; the great centre, which is God, the great circumference, which is man's recognition of Him, did not change. The largest and mightiest organization the world has ever seen may say, "There is but one Church, and I am that Church." But the true Church rebukes her through an hundred babes and sucklings of smaller dimensions. Everywhere is divine comfort, divine duty, divine hope. Everywhere are men striving to honor the truth and to help their fellow-men. And the true mother of souls replies to her ambitious daughter, "There is but one Church: it is enough for thee that thou art in it.”

The true Church, then, is at once intra and extra-theological. Its true office is neither to intensify nor to eradicate the differences of human thought, action, and intention; but to maintain a primal and a final unity beyond them all, whose acknowledgment is the morality, and whose sway is the moralization, of the human race.

The Ordinances of this Church necessarily take precedence of the separate prescriptions of sects and denominations. In order that each of us may fill the sphere of his task and labor, it is necesssary that he should limit his immediate interest to the matter in hand. Your zeal for this society or that, your co-operation in this scheme, your support of this representative or advocate, is an artifice of nature which for the time cuts you off from the generalities of philosophical thought or moral consideration. But when do you enter the sanctuary of religion? When are you actively and consciously in the Church? Not when you are occupied with A's zealotism or B's latitudinarianism. It is not while you are making an ingenious heaven and hell of your own, fenced with curious intellectual devices for excluding this man, and imprisoning that. It is when you let all this drop, your own sins and those of others, and turn to a far-reaching fact, which these cannot darken; when the peace and power of this contemplation make you believe in the value of life, the dignity of conscience, and the efficiency of conviction; when the newly created worth and sacredness

in your own person make you aware of a similar worth and sacredness as ideally existing in the persons of others. Then, for the time being, you are in the Church; and so far as the efforts of your active life are regulated by the influence of those considerations, in so far you are acting and living in the Church.

Hence we see why the mere discussion, adoption, and rejection of opinions produces so little religious life, adds so little to the moral power of the race. The fact that such a one is wrong does not put you in the right. The narrowness of his creed does not widen your heart. The satisfaction that you take in contrasting the supposed justice of your views with the supposed insufficiency of his is not a religious one. If you wish to be in the Church, you had better not try to put him out of it, since the first consequence of your true membership will be your recognition of his. Nor will it do for you to seize upon certain points of opinion, miscalled articles of faith, and impose them either upon his recognition or upon his repudiation. In the religionary dogmatism of mankind, many things are assigned to the jurisdiction of faith which lie strictly within the province of opinion. All circumstances established by evidence must be matters of opinion. It is every man's right and duty to weigh and decide these for himself. If he allow another man or set of men to decide them for him, he only adopts the opinions of others, in accordance with a secondary opinion of his own. He will deal with this class of facts according to his intelligence and opportunity, for neither of which he is responsible. They have not in themselves power either to advance or retard the process of his redemption from the absolute dominion of nature, and the slavery of self. The power they have rests in their symbolical and sympathetic relation to religious truth; and this is an important, but not a primal power. But religious truths are truths of reflection and of consciousness. They have their slow development in the region of human society. All their steps prove to be necessary and sacred. Wisdom is justified of all her children, of her babes as well as of her full-grown These truths elevate, enlarge, and enlighten opinion.

men.

But they distance man's power of conception and of expres sion too far to be adequately embodied in any thing that he can utter or formulate. Their true embodiment will be found in the sincerity of zeal, the disinterestedness of effort, and the perseverance of hope and endeavor. Even these give the ideal truth a very imperfect illustration.

The religious progress of the day proves to be more efficiently represented by the party dismissing traditional authority, than by that retaining it. The advance of human intelligence in our time sees clearly that the conception of the divine lies entirely beyond the question of the so-called "supernatural." The divine is not historical, but intuitive; not demonstrated, but discovered. The unity and height of persuasion by which a man builds out of human materials a life of transcendent purity, piety, and power, is a divine fact. But it is a fact of moral efficiency and of personal inspiration. The literalness of the truth of conscience; the simplicity of the real values of life, and their surpassing delight; the power of the human to apprehend standards of excellence far beyond its experience, and to work after them; the capacity and dignity of the weak as well as of the strong, these considerations were united in the splendors of Christianity. They are beyond the resources of worship and the formulas of doctrine. A life of patient, useful Christian days is evidence that the individual believed them. To give them full expression and illustration was a task beyond his human powers, and one never appointed him.

While the true progress of faith is from the temporary and special, towards the substantial and eternal, one thing is to be remembered; viz., that the reality and exigency of this faith should leave us little time and energy to spare in attacking the limitations of others. If we would show what religion is, we must not waste too much of our power in showing what it is not. Nor must we overlook the appropriateness of symbols to truths that philosophy cannot formulate, nor language express. The ideal philosophy, the only one of the present day that will stand the test of time, acknowledges the substantial justice of the modes of thought which created such

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landmarks, while it removes the rubbish of their material interpretation and slavish enforcement. True religion, in the least cultured individual, brings that which is wiser and freer than these, the mere bandages and envelopes of experience. But, while there is religion in going beyond myths and symbols, to their meaning, we shall not necessarily find it in their mere intellectual disproof and dismissal, especially where this is imbittered by contempt and uncharity towards those who still hold them. Such contempt and uncharity do not lie within the scope of the true Church, either in its preceptive or in its receptive function. To reform institutions, we must first understand them. He who has never seized the delicate sense, the moral truth, and spiritual justice veiled in the. hitherto popular theology, is not in a position to put any thing better in its place. As a proof of this, we may assert, that, in the denomination which admits the most liberal construction of religious dogmas, those most distinguished by efficient zeal have usually made the whole circuit of the Christian faith, beginning at the literal and arriving at the spiritual interpretation. "First that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." We have all a religious as well as a physical childhood to pass through. Baptism comes before communion, and we must enter as infants where we hope to abide as men.

us.

In order that those who come after us shall inherit our progress as well as our starting point, it becomes us to ask what the true attitude of faith should be, for them and for We need not fear to affirm, that it will be an attitude intent, humble, and receptive, -intent upon the ever-new revelation of what each day leaves little understood, receptive of its great lessons, humble before the magnitudes of duty and of possibility in which we fail, yet towards which is the only outlook of the soul, shrouded and prisoned else in the fallacies of self and of sense. This attitude will leave us little polemic bitterness towards others. Their shortcoming and ours will not seem so very different, when measured by the absolute standard which forms the culmination of our moral and religious thought. St. Paul's "more excellent