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broader horizon of truth. He begins in ignorance, but he is ever growing in knowledge.

In our ignorance, when we have seen but little of truth, and seen that little but dimly, we identify the Holy with the merely terrible, the powerful, the inscrutable, the useful, or the beautiful; and we adopt as its symbols, the thunder and lightning, winds and rain, ocean and storin, majestic river or placid lake, shady grove or winding brook, the animal, the bow or spear by means of which we are fed, clothed, and protected; but as experience rolls back the darkness, which made all around us appear huge and spectral, purges and extends our vision, these become inadequate representatives of our religious ideas; they fail to shadow forth the holy to our understandings; and we leave them and rise to that which appears to be free from their limited. and evanescent nature, to that which is unlimited, all-sufficient, and unfailing.

We are creatures of growth; it is, therefore, impossible that all our institutions should not be mutable and transitory. We are forever discovering new fields of truth, and every new discovery requires a new institution, or the modification of an old one. We might as well demand that the sciences of physiology, chemistry, and astronomy should wear eternally the same form, as that religious institutions should be unchangeable, and that those which satisfied our fathers should always satisfy us.

All things change their forms. Literature, art, science, governments, change under the very eye of the spectator. Religious institutions are subject to the same universal law. Like the individuals of our race, they pass away and leave us to deck their tombs, or in our despair, to exclaim that we will lie down in the grave with them. But as the race itself does not die, as new generations crowd upon the departing to supply their places, so does the reproductive energy of religion survive all mutations of forms, and so do new institutions arise to gladden us with their youth and freshness, to carry us further onward in our progress, and upward nearer to that which "is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever."

CHAPTER I.-CHRISTIANITY.

About two thousand years ago, mankind, having exhausted all their old religious institutions, received from their heavenly Father through the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth a

new institution which was equal to their advanced position, and capable of aiding and directing their future progress.

But this institution must be spoken of as one which was, not as one which is. Notwithstanding the vast territories it acquired, the mighty influence it once exerted over the destinies of humanity, and its promises of immortality, it is now but the mere shadow of a sovereign, and its empire is falling in ruins. What remains of it is only the body after the spirit has left it. It is no longer animated by a living soul. The sentiment of the holy has deserted it, and it is a by-word and a mockery.

Either then Jesus did not embrace in his mind the whole of truth, or else the church has at best only partially realized his conception.

No institution, so long as it is in harmony with the progress of the understanding, can fail to command obedience or kindle enthusiasm. The church now does neither. There is a wide disparity between it and the present state of intellectual development. We have discovered truths which it cannot claim as its own; we are conscious of instincts which it disavows, and which we cannot, or will not, suppress. Whose is the fault? Is it the fault of humanity, of Jesus, or of the church?

Humanity cannot be blamed, for humanity's law is to grow; it has an inherent right to seek for truth, and it is under no obligation to shut its eyes to the facts which unfold themselves to its observation. It is not the fault of Jesus, unless it can be proved that all he contemplated has been realized, that mankind have risen to as pure, and as happy a state as he proposed; have indeed fully comprehended him, taken in his entire thought, and reduced it to practice. Nobody will pretend this. The fault then must be borne by the church.

The church even in its best days was far below the conception of Jesus. It never comprehended him, and was always a very inadequate symbol of the holy as he understood it.

Christianity, as it existed in the mind of Jesus, was the type of the most perfect religious institution to which the human race will, probably, ever attain. It was the point where the sentiment and the institution, the idea and the symbol, the conception and its realization appear to meet and become one. But the contemporaries of Jesus were not equal to this profound thought. They could not com

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prehend the God-Man, the deep meaning of his assertion, "I and my Father are one.' spake uttered truths for all nations, and for all times; He spake as never man but what he uttered was necessarily measured by the capacity of those who heard him-not by his own. The less never comprehends the greater. Their minds must have been equal to his in order to have been able to take in the full import of his words. apprehend a great and glorious meaning in what he said; They might as they didthey might kindle at the truths he revealed to their understandings, and even glory in dying at the stake to defend them; but they would invariably and inevitably narrow them down to their own inferior intellects, and interpret them by their own previous modes of thinking and believing.

The disciples themselves, the familiar friends, the chosen apostles of Jesus, notwithstanding all the advantages of personal intercourse and personal explanations, never fully apprehended him. They mistook him for the Jewish Messiah, and even after his resurrection and ascension, they supposed it to have been his mission to "restore the kingdom to Israel." Though commanded to preach the Gospel to "every creature," they never once imagined that they were to preach it to any people but the Jewish, till the circumstances, which preceded and followed Peter's visit to Cornelius the Roman centurion, took place to correct their error. It was not till then that any one of them could say, "Of a truth, I perceive that God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation he that feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted with him." If this was true of the disciples, how much more true must it have been of those who received the words of Jesus at second or third hand, and without any of the personal explanations or commentaries necessary to unfold their meaning?

Could the age, in which Jesus appeared, have comprehended him, it would have been superior to him, and consequently have had no need of him. We do not seek an instructor for our children in one who is not able to teach them. Moreover, if that age could have even rightly apprehended Jesus, we should be obliged to say his mission was intended to be confined to that age, or else to admit that the human race was never to go beyond the point then attained. Either Jesus did not regard the future of humanity, or he designed to interrupt its progress, and

strike it with the curse of immobility; or else he was above his age and of course not to be understood by it. The world has not stood still since his coming; the church has always considered his kingdom as one of which there is to be no end; and we know that he was not comprehended, and that even we, with the advantage of nearly two thousand years of mental and moral progress, are far-very far below him.

If the age in which Jesus appeared could not comprehend him, it is obvious that it could not fully embody him in its institutions. It could embody no more of him than it could receive, and as it could receive only a part of him, we must admit that the church has never been more than partially Christian. Never has it been the real body of Christ. Never has it reflected the God-Man perfectly. Never has it been a true mirror of the holy. Always has the holy in the sense of the church been a very inferior thing to what it was in the mind and heart and life of Jesus.

But we must use measured terms in our condemnation of the church. We must not ask the man in the child. The church did what it could. It did its best to "form Christ” within itself, "the hope of glory," and was up to the period of its downfall as truly Christian, as the progress made by the human race admitted. It aided the growth of the human mind; enabled us to take in more truth than it had itself received; furnished us the light by which we discovered its defects; and by no means should its memory be cursed. Nobly and perseveringly did it discharge its duty; useful was it in its day and generation; and now that it has given up the ghost, we should pay it the rites of honorable burial, plant flowers over its resting place, and sometimes repair thither to bedew them with our tears.

To comprehend Jesus, to seize the holy as it was in him, and consequently the true idea of Christianity, we must, from the heights to which we have risen by aid of the church, look back and down upon the age in which he came, ascertain what was the work which there was for him to perform, and from that obtain a key to what he proposed to accomplish.

Two systems then disputed the empire of the world; spiritualism represented by the Eastern world, the old world

I use these terms, Spiritualism and Materialism, to designate two social, rather than two philosophical systems. They designate two orders, which, from time out of mind, have been called spiritual and temporal or carnal, holy and profane, heavenly and worldly, &c.

of Asia, and materialism represented by Greece and Rome. Spiritualism regards purity or holiness as predicable of spirit alone, and matter as essentially impure, possessing and capable of receiving nothing of the holy, the prison house of the soul, its only hindrance to a union with God, or absorp tion into his essence, the cause of all uncleanliness, sin, and evil, consequently to be contemned, degraded, and as far as possible annihilated. Materialism takes the other extreme, does not recognize the claims of spirit, disregards the soul, counts the body every thing, earth all, heaven nothing, and condenses itself into the advice, "Eat and drink, for to-mor row we die."

This opposition between spiritualism and materialism presupposes a necessary and original antithesis between spirit and matter. When spirit and matter are given as antagonist principles, we are obliged to admit antagonism between all the terms into which they are respectively convertible. From spirit is deduced by natural generation, God, the priesthood, faith, heaven, eternity; from matter, man, the state, reason, the earth, and time; consequently, to place spirit and matter in opposition, is to make an antithesis between God and man, the priesthood and the state, faith and reason, heaven and earth, and time and eternity.

This antithesis generates perpetual and universal war. It is necessary then to remove it and harmonize, or unite the two terms. Now, if we conceive Jesus as standing between spirit and matter, the representative of both-God-Manthe point where both meet and lose their antithesis, laying a hand on each and saying, "Be one, as I and my Father are one," thus sanctifying both and marrying them in a mystic and holy union, we shall have his secret thought and the true idea of Christianity.

The Scriptures uniformly present Jesus to us as a mediator, the middle term between two extremes, and they call his work a mediation, a reconciliation-an atonement. The church has ever considered Jesus as making an atonement. It has held on to the term at all times as with the grasp of death. The first charge it has labored to fix upon heretics has been that of rejecting the atonement, and the one all dissenters from the predominant doctrines of the day, have been most solicitous to repel is that of "denying the Lord who bought us." The whole Christian world, from the days of the apostles up to the moment in which I write, have identified Christianity with the atonement, and felt