THE UNIVERSALIST CONGRESS AT THE WORLD'S FAIR.

Our Universalist brethren, as well as the other denominations of the country generally, are thoroughly awake to the opportunity offered them at Chicago next summer, to put their thought and work before the country and the world in a more effective way than they will be likely to be able to do it again for a generation. All the Universalist papers are giving the matter great prominence, and the leading preachers and laymen of the denomination are throwing themselves into the movement with the earnestness which its great importance demands. We have in past numbers of the Unitarian described the general plan of the World's Congress work, which need not be repeated. It is enough to say here that that work is divided into twenty departments. There will be congresses of not only religion, but of philanthropy, social reform, ethics, education, literature, music, art, science, government, etc. The department of religion is subdivided into congresses for all the more prominent Christian denominations, each of them operating independently of the rest, but all coming under the general head of the World's Congress of Religions. Then, besides these, there will be a great international Parliament of Religions, which will aim to bring together representatives of all the important religions of the world, non-Christian as well as Christian.

It is the intention of the World's Fair management to provide for the publication of the proceedings of all these various congresses, as perhaps the most valuable and enduring memorial of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

The Universalist Congress falls into line with the various other denominational congresses. The chairman of the committee that has it in charge is Rev. Dr. A. J. Canfield, of St. Paul's Universalist Church, Chicago. Fifteen other persons, ministers and laymen of Chicago and vicinity, are associated with him on the committee.

There is also a strong committee of women, with Rev. Augusta J. Chapin of Oak Park (near Chicago) at its head. These committees, after much thought and correspondence and many joint meetings, have adopted the following elaborate program of topics,

the proceedings by the government of the United States, this Congress will go into history, and become a part of the documentary memorial of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. It will not be a Congress for discussion, as many may seem to infer, but for the presentation of papers which are supposed to embrace all important phases of our history, polity, theology, and work as a Christian Church. "Unprepared discussion or miscellaneous debate would

obviously be inconsistent with a plan of which the chief object is to procure the maturest thought of the world on all the great questions of the age in a form best adapted to universal publication." In these words President Bonney outlines the working method of the Auxiliary, and this is the reason why the Universalist Congress will be limited to papers especially prepared for the occasion, which will be handed down as the deliberate utterances of the representative men and women in our church "for the impartial judgment of that exalted public opinion which expresses the consensus" of the world's best minds.

It will be easily seen from this that the Universalist Congress of 1893 will be the most important opportunity which has ever opened before us for a presentation of our religious belief and for making the world acquainted with the aims and purposes of our Church. The speakers selected are, in the largest sense, representative men and women; and we may expect from their co-operation in the work of the Congress, not a series of local or provincial utterances, but a representative group of statements which will be worthy of the national and international character of the Congress, and do honor to our Church.

The Universalist Committee will soon issue an address to the denomination, setting forth more fully the aim and purposes of the proposed Congress, and inviting the hearty co-operation of the entire Universalist constituency of this country and the world.

Our Universalist brethren are certainly to be congratulated for the breadth of view, foresight, and energy with which they are preparing for this Chicago Congress. They are right in seeing in it an opportunity the greatest that has ever been offered them for taking their place distinctly before the world as one of the religious forces of our time, and for sending their thought to all

nations. Is it not time for the Unitarians of America to be following their example?

J. T. S.

lay sentiment in the Cincinnati Presbyterian churches. Indeed, it is apparent that the disapproval of the prosecution, from the start, by the most influential laymen, has brought about a decided change of mind in a large number of the members of the ecclesiastical court. When the case was opened, the wide-spread feeling of the lookers-on was that Prof. Smith's condemnation was predetermined.

The test votes in the early stages of the trial showed that his supporters were in a large minority. But the daily newspapers opened their columns to letters from members of the churches, the most of which were made up of protests against the prosecution; and the latent sentiments of ministers of broad sympathies began to find utterance in the court. And the result, now generally known, is that the scanty majority of four out of fifty-eight votes has settled Prof. Smith's condemnation. Meanwhile, as another indication of the local feeling, it recently fell to Prof. Smith to introduce a public lecturer before the Cincinnati Evangelical Alliance. The crowded house received Prof. Smith with rounds of applause, frequently renewed.

All this seems most hopeful to those of us who had supposed that the Presbyterian body in the United States was hopelessly committed to the unscholarly tradition of the verbal inspiration of the Bible, and was willing to go down to posterity as a champion of "invincible ignorance." There is no good reason for believing that the average Presbyte

HERESY.

Prof. Henry Preserved Smith of Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, has been condemned by the local presbytery for the offence of teaching that the Bible contains errors, and has been suspended from preaching in any Presbyterian pulpit till he recants his beliefs upon this point. Meanwhile it is unofficially announced that the Lane Seminary trustees, by a decided majority vote, have declined to remove him from his professor's chair. As this board of trustees consists largely, I am not sure but wholly, of Presbyterian laymen, its dissent from the estimate of the presbytery as to the seriousness of Prof. Smith's offence may be taken as an illustration of the prevailing

methods of modern criticism of the Scriptures, or that he intelligently approves the judgments concerning the composition of parts of the Old Testament,-like the first six books or Isaiah or the Psalms,—to which theological instructors like Profs. Briggs and Smith have given their indorsement. But the layman who is a man of the world, who reads periodical literature with its frank discussion of the most venerable problems of faith, is apt to acquire a common-sense view of what is essential and what non-essential in religious belief. And the common sense of the case of Prof. Smith is that one whose reputation for serious-mindedness, uprightness, and amiability is high among all who know him, ought not to be cast out of the Church with

whose main ideas he professes to be in hearty accord.

We Unitarians have a special interest in Prof. Smith, since he is a lineal descendant and bears the favorite name handed down through several generations of one of our ministers of the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts, who went out from the Trinitarian Congregationalists with the opprobrium of heresy. But by the standards of the majority of Unitarians of to-day the heresy of the present Preserved Smith is too mild to render him subject to the suspicion of sympathizing with us in our principal ideas. His heresy is simply that of all genuine scholars to whom facts which compel the assent of enlightened reason are more sacred than the most venerable traditions. In the present controversy the tradition of verbal inspiration does not deserve the epithet venerable, for its acceptance by the Protestant Church is comparatively modern; and its maintenance has been chiefly for the edification of the simple-minded believers, and rarely among cultivated teachers as a fundamental dogma of faith.

The position is quite defensible that the Bible contains inspired teaching which upholds the main principles of Calvinism, while yet it has contradictions among its historical assertions and mistaken opinions in its ideas of physical science. This is the view of Prof. Smith and his sympathizers.

Nevertheless, the instinct of the advocates of the infallibility of the Bible is sound that the application of the methods of literary or scientific criticism to an infallible oracle means the destruction of its authority as a basis of dogma, and consequently the overturning of the Presbyterian scheme of salvation. But the faiths of the world do

not stop their legitimate development out of consideration for anybody's timid instincts. GEORGE A. THAYER.

Cincinnati, Dec. 20.

RELIGION MORE AND LARGER THAN ETHICS.

The ethical exhaustion of religion I cannot by any means allow. I believe that "ethics thought out is religious thought, ethics felt out is religious feeling, ethics lived out is religious life"; but, so thought out, felt out, lived out, it is not the only

religious thought, feeling, and life that are possible for us. Ethics is part and parcel of religion only by historical adoption, and the tendency of "all thoughts, all passions, all delights," in the last analysis, to lose themselves in God. If we were of those who insist on the limitation of terms to their original significance, we should insist on the absolute difference and separation of ethics and religion, for the reason that, in their original characters, they were different and separate. The first religion was not ethical, the first ethics was not religious. These streams of thought and feeling were like two rivers, -say the Mississippi and Missouri, -rising in different upland tracts, but at last uniting in one rejoicing flood.

Religion, as it now is in the world, is a flood of many waters. Into it ethics has poured its vast Missouri, man's sense of his relation to the universe and its controlling powers its Mississippi, and man's engagement with the idea of a future life its immense Ohio. Religion, as it is at present constituted in the world, is composed, with emphases which vary with its different sects and schisms, of these three elements, men's thoughts and feelings about God, about immortality, and about the moral law, and of their action determined by such thought and feeling.

JOHN W. CHADWICK.

UNITARIANISM ONE FROM ATLANTIC TO PACIFIC.

In response to a general desire for some brief statement of denominational purpo e and aim, the Pacific Unitarian Conference, at its recent annual meeting held in Oakland, Cal., adopted the following admirable "Statement of Principles":

Inasmuch as many people on the Pacific Coast wish to know what Unitarianism stands for, we make the following statement of its present purposes and aims:

Our fellowship is based on a common purpose to promote righteousness and truth in ourselves and the world.

We reject or accept none because of any intellectual belief.

We have no creed in the usual sense; that is, no articles of doctrine which bind our churches and fix the condition of fellowship.

Individually, we have doctrinal beliefs, and, for the most part, hold such beliefs in

common; but, above all such dogma, we emphasize the paramount importance of freedom, virtue, and spirituality. Specific statements of opinion abound among us. The following one we offer as representative:

"1. To us the supreme thing in religion is to love the good and live the good.

"2. We hold reason and conscience to be final authorities in matters of religious be

lief.

"3. We honor the Bible and all inspiring scripture, old and new.

"4. We revere Jesus and all holy souls that have taught freedom, truth, and righteousness, as prophets of religion.

"5. We affirm the innate worth and growing nobility of man.

6. We trust the unfolding universe as beautiful, beneficent, unchanging order: to know this order is truth, to obey it right and liberty and stronger life.

"7. We maintain that good and evil inevitably carry their own recompense, no good thing being failure, and no evil thing success; that heaven and hell are states of being; that no evil can befall the good man in either life or death; that all things work together for good.

"S. We believe that we ought to join hands, and work to make the good things better and the worst things good, counting nothing good for self that is not good for all.

"9. We are persuaded that this self-forgetting, loyal life awakes in man the sense of union, here and now, with things eternal, the sense of deathlessness, -and that this sense is to us an earnest of life to come.

"10. We worship One-in-all, -that Life whence suns and stars derive their orbits

and the soul of man its Ought; that Light

which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, giving us power to become sons of God; that Love with whom our souls commune. This one we name the Eternal God, -our Father."

It is interesting to notice that this statement of principles is essentially the same as that adopted in Chicago last May as the new basis of the Western Conference.

Of course, both conferences carefully guarded against the possibility of their statements being interpreted as creeds, and therefore as restrictive to thought or to fellowship. The statements are thrown out simply as banners, so to speak, to let the world know in a large and general way what Unitarianism is and the kind of religion the two conferences are organized to promote. It is pleasant to think that these are essentially the banners now of Unitarianism from the Atlantic to the Pacific,

and, indeed, the world over. We believe they are the banners which, as time goes on, and as men learn to carry intelligence into religion, will everywhere among men advance more and more to victory.

The Pacific Unitarian, the bright and vigorous monthly which has just been established to be the organ of our thought and work on the Pacific Coast, flings out at its masthead what is in reality the same ban

ner.

On its first page, immediately below its name, the new monthly inscribes these words, "God our Father: man our brother." Explaining their meaning, it says: "In these six words is expressed the idea not alone of Christianity, but of religion. Jesus reduced the ten commandments to two, and said that in love to God and love to fellowman were included all the law and the prophets. Is there, then, any other essential belief than that God is our Father and that man is our brother? Does not all else flow from this as a part of it? If we believe that God is, and that he is our Father, surely we must know that he 'doeth all things well,' and we can trust him and love him; and, if we believe that man is truly our brother, does it not carry with it glad obligations to serve him? Does his belief seem too simple? Does any man say, Is that all of religion? Let no one think it is easy or unimportant because it can be so simply stated. It cleaves the world. It is the final test. Love of God!-love of the

good, aspiration for the highest, nobility of life, purity of heart, trust, joy,-behold seed and fruit! Love of man!-justice, sympathy, brotherly kindness, patient forbearance, faith,-behold the fountain and stream!"

Let Unitarians everywhere live and labor with heart and soul for the promotion of such a religion, and they may be sure that their cause will have a great future.