the glorious truth to which they have clung: the ship carries along the barnacles, which, had they the consciousness of theologians and ecclesiastics, would perhaps boast that they were carrying along the ship. That mighty tide of spiritual life and force, which we call the religion of Jesus Christ, carries along a thousand superstitions, false dogmas, crude speculations, and confident assertions, which would have had no chance to float on any less powerful current; which, left to themselves, would sink into the muddy bottom of the channel where they belong. What has always done the real Christian work of the world is not what gets the credit of the work: it is the essential truth, beauty, goodness, holiness of Christ's character and inflowing life, the mighty force of his glorious moral personality, inspiring the conscience and directing the will of humanity. To this, the real life of the Church and of Christian society, theologians and doctors, schoolmen and priests, have added their theories and speculations, in the shape of creeds and articles touching the nature of Christ, the constitution of the Godhead, the doctrine of the Logos; the double nature, the pre-existence of Jesus, opinions and formulas not without their use perhaps in the time in which they originated, but all of them provisional, temporary, having no permanent or essential connection with the fundamental truth. They bear to the progress of Christ very much the relation which the stones under a conqueror's feet, which he passes over and leaves behind, bear to the advance of the conqueror himself, entering and possessing the land and the cities he has won with his name and his sword. To have these metaphysical propositions, these abstruse theories, thrust at us in place of the warm and living personality of Jesus Christ himself; to have this Jesus shut up in wooden creeds, and presented to the world only in the costume of ecclesiastical systems and theological abstractions, is a terrible hindrance to that free, affectionate intercourse, which ought to make him for all the millions of our race what he always is to his true disciples, the understood, the welcome, the practical, the inspiring, and beloved Friend, Counsellor, and Saviour of their souls, here and for ever.

I know well how good people are accustomed to talk of the need of something besides the living Christ to convert the world; how they substitute theories about him for Christ himself; how they erect all sorts of sacred barriers between him and those they would fain make his disciples. But, for myself, it is not theology, it is faith in Christ, which is the way to the Father. The way to make Christians is to present Christ in his life and conversation and death, in his words and precepts and spirit; and leave him to make his own impression upon the hearts of the people. Nothing is done by theories about his nature. We want to see the Saviour himself, and feel the actual warmth and inspiration of his charac ter, of his very personality; and that it is which wins, illumines, converts, and saves our souls.

If you say that views simple and rational as these want the power to give body and shape to Christianity; that they furnish religious ideas and sentiments, but not a religion; that they might supply a secret spring of life to private souls, but do not build a public fountain round which all may gather to draw and drink,- being a faith rather than a worship,- that, alas! is an infirmity they temporarily share with Protestantism itself. But it is a lesser evil than the evil which it opposes, and which has driven it into its own extreme. If you want a body for the Christian religion, go and see where it lies in state under the catafalque of St. Peter's; candles burning round the corpse, while caparisoned bishops and priests, in all the colors of the rainbow, like butterflies over the carcass of a lamb fallen in the field, weave their traditional motions and genuflexions, and shift their laced coats and aprons round the pale remains of Christ's native simplicity, and original spirit of meekness and love! We need not go far to find some meagre copy of this laying-out of the gospel in state, even in our Protestant communions. God save us from substituting . forms for the spirit of practical Christianity! But, spite of all the abuses of rites, ceremonies, and vestments, a public religion must have a body and form. And, with most Unitarians, I believe in the Church as well as in the Christ,- believe in institutional Christianity,- believe tenderly and truly in

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the Scriptural ordinances of baptism and the Lord's Supper, believe in the blessedness of the Lord's Day, in the need of public worship and the Christian ministry, the use of all "means of grace," in the efficacy of prayer, the importance of daily familiarity with the Scriptures, the necessity of a submission of the will to God, and a consecration of the heart and soul to his service. Moreover, practically, I believe that Jesus Christ furnishes in the discipleship which he invites, and in the teaching, inspiration, and comfort which the reverence for and love of him imparts—the actual way or method by which the personal fruits of his religion are alone systematically to be produced.

And, when enough of the world have embraced these views of Christianity not to compel their few disciples to stand in an attitude of armed protest against popular errors; when Unitarian views of Christ and the Church have become widely enough spread to be atmospheric, or drawn in with the mother's milk, and to enter into the very blood and sinew of a whole generation, what a glorious Church shall we not behold! Then only will the inherent beauty and power of primitive Christianity step forth, clothed in all that two thousand years have gathered of truth and beauty and utility. No longer will the religion of Christ and the religion of nature be antagonized and contrasted; no longer will the Church and the world be natural enemies; no longer life on earth, and immortality beyond the grave, be played off against each other. Reason will open her full-orbed eyes only to raise them in reverence to Christ, and in worship to God. Conscience will echo every word of the Master's lips, when simply and sincerely reported. Science will hasten to lay every discovery she makes in God's universe on the hospitable shrine of a fearless Christian faith. Philosophy will come to fill her lamp with the holy oil of the gospel cruise, or put it, newly trimmed and burning, down upon the altar, without one fear that the light of the world will forbid the mixing of its beams with his own effulgent rays. Art, forsaking saloons and theatres, will give her best triumphs to religion; and religion, no longer prim and sour, sanctimonious and narrow, will know how to value beauty and

grace, and to bind again to her generous bosom the ornaments she flung away, only because her followers loved them better than herself.

It is a false, mystic, scholastic, superstitious theology — behind the age, behind the lights of political, scientific, and economic experience — which supports a wasteful and inoperative Christianity. We must adjust. our theology to our general and necessary ideas,-ideas which we have not sought, but which seek us, as the dawn seeks the sleeper. The light is breaking in full splendor all round the horizon. Will the Church alone close her curtains on its beams? Then she, who alone has power to interpret all other lights with her own central sun, will be deserted by the practical workers of the world, who will give themselves up to a busy worldliness and a ruinous materialism; while successful energy and intelligence will use science and art to crush down, and turn to the uses of a special class, the labor of the rest. They are doing it now. The Christianity that is doggedly conservative, and sticks by her antiquities, is inhuman; is at war with progress; is the enemy of hope for the masses, whom she stupefies, that they may sleep on her altars while she rifles their substance. We have seen those churches that are the greatest sticklers for order and stability obstructing the progress of the nation, the emancipation of the slave, the equal rights of race and class, the claim of the Government to maintain itself. Will the people of the United States long maintain, as their religion, creeds and usages which contradict all their instincts and experiences? Are we never to adjust our faith to our reason, our lives to our convictions, our religion to our hopes and endeavors as human beings, citizens, parents, and men of affairs?

Then shall the Church put on her beautiful garments, when Christ's disciples have clothed themselves in the practical graces of those who see, not so much a spiritual magician, a doubled-natured Saviour standing between them in their imputed sins or native depravity, and a God of wrath and a blazing hell, as a blessed model, inspirer, leader, helper, comforter, binding up human wounds, pitying and washing away

now.

human sins, opening the sealed fountains of goodness in the heart, and giving God in his inward light and love to the souls that know not and believe not he is in them here and Christ came in the flesh, and lived here on the solid earth. His work is still here on the earth, in which he left his blood. Oh, how you want him in your business, in your workshops, in your tenement houses; want him to help you govern your children, and defend them from the wiles and sins about them; want him to help you bear and conquer your hard conditions of life! Do you think Jesus Christ as a practical Saviour, Jesus Christ the Shepherd and Bishop of souls, Jesus Christ your elder brother and friend, not distant as a God, not unapproachable as a throned spirit, but Jesus Christ, the man Christ Jesus, the hater of oppression, the friend of the poor sinner, and the lover and worker of miracles of healing and mercy,- do you think he could be believed on in this simple, practical way, and not work an immediate and mighty revolution in this very city? Do you think we should have half a million of people here, crowded in wretched cellars, attics, and reeking tenements, with lust and drunkenness and sin and crime, poverty, ignorance, and folly, breaking their hearts, and brutalizing their habits, and extinguishing their souls? Would not Christians go to work, with such views, in practical ways to alleviate, and make impossible, such a state of things?

Let a simple, rational faith—such a faith as Channing and Parker taught and adorned - become for one generation the religion of this country, and it would sweep away the barriers of human progress, wash out the Augean stables of popular sin, emancipate the minds and faculties of millions, and stamp the image of Jesus Christ, the Divine Man, in living lines on millions who now worship him as God, without even thinking to do the things that he said, or to show forth the spirit he was of.