way" of charity leads us towards this recognition of the Supreme which makes men brothers in weakness as well as in strength, fellows in infirmity as well as in capacity. It is on this ground that the saint can sit down with the bandit, that the Saviour's feet can be washed and anointed by the woman of sin. It is not erroneously charged upon the denomination to which we have referred, that its work has hitherto been more critical than creative; that it has shown itself better trained in the outward gymnastic of argument than in the inward exercise of devotion. A new period is, however, dawning upon its responsibilities. While no human organization can hope to be free from human imperfection, it is not the less bound to deserve, in as great a measure as possible, the epithets of Liberal and of Christian. It is no part of our present purpose to attempt an exhaustive definition of these two terms, nor is it necessary or wise to record any such definition as adequate and final. The growth of culture and the accumulations of experience cast a changing light upon our mental obligations, and a creed which is liberal to-day may be narrow and intolerant to-morrow. The form, therefore, of what is liberal and Christian is continually undergoing modifications, whose growth is insensible, and whose culminations. are sudden. But the spirit of what is liberal and Christian does not change. It was the same in the days of Jesus, of Paul, of Dante, of Luther, and in our own time. And as all forms and opinions have made a wide circuit since the beginnings of Christianity, it will be safe to conclude that the spirit of the liberal Christian Church lies not so much in what we believe, as in the manner in which we believe it. Where faith is fervent, people are always much more absorbed in the substance of belief than concerned with its formulas. And where social culture is not retarded and perverted by political ends, the believing man seeks to extend to others the divine peace which he himself enjoys. which he himself enjoys. If his neighbors are poor, he is beneficent; if they are malignant, he is magnanimous; if they are inordinate and luxurious, he is moderate. And, though he may have little familiarity with those about him, he will in the end prove, like the leaven hid in the meal, to have exercised a subtile influence over them, to have wrought a noiseless metamorphosis. And this, though he may have been taught to believe that those who differ from him in the letter of their creed cannot share the benefits of his faith. His intellectual limitations may shut out those wide views of human fallibility which make all opinions secondary; leaving zeal, service, and sincerity as the true tests of a man's religiousness. His judgment may be compelled to condemn those who differ from him; but his heart will not repudiate them, and his concern for them will be constant and benevolent. It cannot be necessary for us in the present day to stand and say that a man is not saved by the form of what he believes. The dominant religious sense of the community no longer sanctions the transfer to the Divine of passions and modes of thought and of action which belong to humanity. It is more important for us to assert, that neither is a man saved by what he disbelieves. When you have unmade the intellectual foundation of a hundred creeds, you have made no Church for yourself. When your newer or nicer logic has overturned the fallacies of no matter what councils or canons, you have yet not given man a guide for faith or an example for life. If you try to do this, you will find that the ground of religious experience lies beyond the shortcomings of other men, and your own. No fault of yours need deprive you of the comfort of recognizing an eternal standard of perfection which is always present for your study and endeavor; and no fault of theirs absolves you from the necessity of measuring your own thoughts and efforts by that standard. He who is religious believes in the efficiency of faith. He knows error to be as inevitable to himself as to others. But he knows that the results of faith are so much greater than the hindrances of error, that he seeks, in the culture of the one, the true and only remedy against the incursions of the other. This two-fold recognition of the fallibility of human thought, and of the infallibility of moral instinct, will not allow any party of men to assume a certain set of opinions, assertatory or negatory, and to insist that religious progress lies inevitably in the direction of those opinions. If such opinions are the best one can arrive at, and if he have stated and supported them with all the power and honesty of his nature, he has done a creditable work, and has lent one individual's assistance to the world's progress. For this progress is forwarded only by genuine activity. It is the real movement of mind alone that stirs and stimulates the inert masses, led by sympathy, and insisting always that you should touch, if you would teach them. But, when you have rendered this service, it is not at all certain that the direction of your efforts was, singly and in itself, the true and ultimate direction of progress. In order to know this, you must know something The world's progress is a very complex matter; and your settlement of its direction is at best but a subjective one, binding to yourself, but not incumbent on others. In fact, this attempt to enforce upon the community conclusions satisfactory to yourself, and this want of perception of the inevitable limits in the final virtue and justice of any one direction, is in our day the cause of much that is fantastic, and inconsistent with the harmonious evolution of society. more. Individual minds are much like the energized broomstick of Goethe's fable, which, having been ordered to bring water to wash the floor, brings enough to drench the house and those in it. Many a student can give the watchword of action to his energies; but only the master knows the word of recall. Many know how to begin: few know where to leave off. Two eminent Americans of the present day may exemplify for us these antithetical differences. One of these, Mr. Sumner, at the commencement of his humanitarian career, looked around him for an object, and was at fault. Like most young philanthropists, he began with a purely critical and negative mode of action; attacking the shortcomings of society in its military régime; upholding the ideal duties of peace and nonresistance; and shivering more than one lance against the imperfections of prison discipline. These works proved to have little objective justification; but the honesty and energy, the moral and mental resources, made evident by them, soon won the sympathies of the public. Mr. Sumner was promoted from a fanciful to a substantial sphere of action, and in the death-grapple of his country with slavery did eminent service; filling up the imaginative sketch of his youth with years of solid achievement. Mr. Phillips, on the other hand, was sooner fortunate in finding a beast to bestride, and vaulted with one leap into the saddle of a great and practical reform. But, that reform once handsomely under way, he shows an indiscriminate love of the steeple-chase, which will bring him in contact with more than one windmill. He attacks vital and trivial questions with the same zeal and with the same ability; is as eloquent in defence of a sophism as of a truth. The only lesson we wish at present to draw from his course is a practical one, that of the limitations of direction necessary to social uses. The tool that undermines and removes a nuisance, in the undiscriminating continuance of its office, will make its mark upon institutions most useful and venerable. What we want here is the master wisdom, which with a new word imposes a new task and a new direction. This self-critical power is not often found in the man. To enforce it is one of the lessons of the Church. Sincere advocates of progress who rail at the intrinsic imperfections of the visible Church, and exclaim at the largeness of the territory she still leaves unreclaimed, forget that the Church is, like the State, a representative institution. It is an ideal creation, that proves to be justified by a real necessity. Divine perfection is the object of its pursuit, never of its attainment. The eternal steadfastness of the object consoles the perpetual deficiency in its accomplishment. But this is not a failure, since the effort towards the divine proves to be the real source of moral power in man; as the unsatisfied effort of the earth towards the sun enters into the dynamic conditions of its real and legitimate movement. The doctrine of the Church represents the highest religious consciousness of man: its practice represents the average faith and . virtue of the masses. It were vain and absurd to ask, that either the one or the other of these should be conclusive and perfect. This would be to shut the doors upon progress at once. Yet progress in the Church is a greater fact than progress out of it. Besides standing for the best attainable discipline and doctrine, the Church stands for the unattainable glory, not to be spurned either in doctrine or in discipline, which offers its immortal prize for the study of the race. The Church actual, in the sum of its representation, cannot go beyond the standpoint of its constituency. Nor can the Church ideal wholly impart the secret of its virtue to any one man, class, age, or period. So, what we commonly call the Church will necessarily represent the ignorance as well as the knowledge of mankind, their superstition as well as their illumination. This proves nothing against the validity of its office, which rests, not upon the perfection of its attainment, but upon that of its ultimate object. - Of Greek art, Immanuel Kant says, "The age, as well as. the people, in which the quick impulse to legalized sociality, through which a people forms a lasting commonwealth, had to struggle with the great difficulties surrounding the hard problem, how to combine freedom and equality with a constraint more esteemed and obeyed through duty than through fear. Such an age and such a people were obliged first to discover the art of the reciprocal impartment of the ideas of the most cultured to the ruder portion of the community; the toning-down of the extension and refinement of the first to the natural simplicity and originality of the last. In this way only could they discover that medium between the higher culture and self-sufficing nature, which constitutes the true standard for taste, as a universal human sense." This average of Greek art is also the average of Christian faith. The true mission of the Church in all ages is to find this common ground between the highest and the lowest moral culture, between the subtlest and the simplest spirituality. For religion is not a science, since its fundamental |