gestions! Another year of trees that wrap themselves for their winter sleep in such robes of color as no monarch ever wore, and whose spring awakening is a wonder that shames all the fabled miracles of the world! Another year of fruits and flowers! Another year of rain-music, of snow-beauty, of the grandeur of wind-driven clouds, and the glory of storms! Another year of the sunshine that brings light after darkness and warmth after cold, and so whispers that the life and the light are supreme, and carry the old world in their arms! What a stage it is on which to be worthy actors! And then, if we will, it is another year of thought, of reading, of study! Another year for tracing the growth of humanity, for seeing which way tend the forces that make for higher, freer, and happier life, so enabling us to help on the deliverance of hand and brain and heart! Another year of friendship and of love! Another year, whose very flight we may welcome, since it brings us ever nearer to the next higher stage of an endless career! Another year of sweet labor, of well-earned rest, of service of our fellow-men, of a life more and more consciously lived with God!

Another year, then; but what for? That question you and I must ask and answer, by choosing and pursuing some definite lifepurpose, before it is at all certain as to whether another year is worth while. They tell us that among civilized nations the average length of life is some years longer than it used to be. That is good news, chiefly because it means that fewer are killed in public wars and private feuds, and that people have learned a little better how to see and regard sanitary laws. But who cares for mere length of life? It is not length, but breadth and thickness that make the worth of life. And not mere breadth and thickness, but it is the quality that makes up the breadth and thickness. Who cares merely to breathe twelve months more? Who cares merely to eat for twelve months longer? Who cares to live another year for the sake of pulling his boots off at night and pulling them on again in the morning? And yet there are thousands of persons whose lives would be a good deal more useful than they are if that was all they did.

I wish to point out two or three definite aims that we all may set properly before us

as objects for personal attainment during the coming year.

1. Happiness. Shall we be happy? I do not know. But one thing I do know; and that is that we cannot help desiring and seeking it. We instinctively turn away from that which hurts, and seek that which is agreeable. And one other thing I know; and that is that, if we are not happy, it is because of disorder either in ourselves or in our surroundings. God's perfect order is, of necessity, both music and joy. And still another thing I know; and that is that by following the lines I have already pointed out we shall be more likely to find happiness than along any other road. If we stake our happiness on mere personal and private ends, we have one chance of success. If we stake it on God's plans for the welfare of the world, we have a thousand.

And, then, the higher and the more varied the faculties that are called into play, the higher and more varied the happiness of their use and the joy in their success.

I think, also, that we must seek for happiness in our work, and day by day, as we go along. Do not make life a crushing burden and a weariness now, and only hope for a time of release and pleasure by and by. That kind of by and by rarely comes.

2. Another object of search should be growth. Whatever is alive tends to become more and more. We should not be content to have a year end and find us shrunken to smaller proportions or only as we were at its beginning. Reach out for sunshine, dew, and air, and feel the thrill of expansion in every upward-reaching faculty.

This is not and cannot be selfish in any true life. For, as faculties grow by use and exercise, by as much as we think and feel and act nobly, by so much do we grow in all that makes noble. The more, then, that we devote this coming year to all high things, the more shall we find that, through the service of others, we are adding to the stature of our own being.

3. We should seek the one thing that makes life worth living,- to serve the time in which we live.

We cannot even be useless in a world like this: we must either help or hurt. I suppose it is true that the most of us do a little of both. But we can try, at least, to make

the helping the majority influence. By the very fact that we live, we take out of and are fed on the world's common store. We demand something of its bread, of its clothing, of its thought, of its love, of its care; and, if we do not contribute at least as much as we consume, we are parasites, leaving the world poorer than we found it.

And if we really wish to excel, to get ahead, to be great, this is the only way. Who are the men and women that the world, by common consent, pays honor to and crowns as its noble ones? They are the ones who, in any department of life, have been helpers. And, though a particular age may be dazzled by the brilliant display of evil or selfish qualities, the next age is sure to discover the fraud, and indignantly tear the crown from the brow of hin whose life was a curse to the world instead of a blessing.

Yes, it is right to wish to get ahead; but the only real excellence belongs to him who excels in the quantity and quality of the service he renders to his fellow-men.

And, then, another year is not for another year only, but for all the ages. This life may not be a probation, in the old sense; but it is preparation, as each day is a preparation for the next. Last year has already largely determined what this one shall be. Not that it is fate; but what we did with last year will make this one harder or easier for all high endeavor. And I fully believe that out of these passing years we are building a structure that is to outlast not only the wreck of these bodies, but the wreck of worlds. And, since our welfare and happiness turn ultimately on what we are, we are determining the nature of our unmeasured future.

Remember, when you go off from this present stage of existence, it is you, not yours, that will go. You will pass into the realm of spirit, of realities, where you will be estimated by, not what you have got, not even by what you have done, but what you

Another year, then,-what for? It is a block of marble; and you are the sculptor. What will you make of it?

White possibility! Before thee now,

With chisel and with mallet in my hand, A musing artist, hesitant I stand, And wonder with what shape I'll thee endow,

A grand Athene with majestic brow,

A raging Fury with her flaming brand, Diana leading on her huntress band, Or sea-nymph sporting round some rippling prow?

Or shall I carve out Aphrodite fair,

Who melteth with her eye the hearts of men?

No: better yet, I'll make a Victory Whose upward look shall rouse men from despair,

Discouraged souls thrill with new hope

THE YEARS AS TEACHERS OF WISDOM.

If in the present one year is equal to a whole decade of such years as dragged along in former centuries, then should wisdom and goodness come to the modern mind with the same tenfold rapidity. If the speed of travel is quickened, and of interchange of thought is aided by the lightnings, and if in sympathy with such inventions and discoveries as mark our era the very footstep of man is quickened, then should wisdom be found quickening its pace, and more rapidly than ever should days speak and the multitude of years teach wisdom. It would be a public and an individual misfortune should this age carry man's body rapidly and carry his words rapidly, and then leave the moral sense to plod along as it did in India and China three thousand years ago. It is a common remark that the activity and the inventions and the wide-spread education of this generation have made life full to overflowing and a score of years equal to an old century. This being true, we should all hasten to great moral results. All philosophy teaches us that the spiritual is higher than the material. Religion and ethics, and even the arts, discriminate in favor of the spiritual, and declare it to be the reason of the universe,-its sublime explanation. This is the prime import of such definitions

The testimony to the place which Jesus and Christianity hold in the building up of pure theism is valuable and instructive.

Consideration of the problems and ideals before this church in India naturally leads us to ask how Christianity stands related to them, and upon this general topic we have several papers. Mr. Salter's contention that creeds should be landmarks and nothing else, historical monuments of the thought of the Church, but never obligatory or binding, is undoubtedly right and well worth making, especially at the present time; but the most striking thought, directly in line, too, with Mozoomdar's, is that, if Christianity is to have a future, it must go back to Jesus. "If the churches should come into contact with the real Jesus, it would be their regeneration. They might worship him less they would follow him more.... Back to Jesus, then, I say, back to his great ideal of a social order that shall be pure and just." It was only natural to expect that in the next article Prof. Egbert Smyth would show us that the Progressive Orthodoxy is actually moving in the direction indicated; but the reader is doomed to disappointment. Mr. Salter's plea is for Jesus the human doer: Prof. Smyth lays the emphasis upon Christ a divine being. So long as "Progressive Orthodoxy" "finds its task within the limits of the problem" concerning the personality of Jesus, neither the Church nor the world can look to it with hope. A far more adequate representation of the New Orthodoxy is to be found in the reports of the council that recently ordained five young men to missionary work in Maine along humanitarian lines. Yet the Orthodoxy of Prof. Smyth has progressed, if it is not progressive; for Prof. Allen shows that the heresy for which Servetus was burned with the consent and approval of the Protestant reformers was hardly less orthodox than the so-called Andover theology. That the Roman Catholic Church, whose supreme claim is to be still Christ in the world, is getting on as fast as natural conditions will allow, in response to the spirit of the present age, is claimed by Mr. Santayana, who writes of "The Present Position of the Roman Catholic Church." There is a good deal to be said in favor of the mother Church because of its doctrine of present inspiration and guidance,

and it may be that some time the Church will be recognized as speaking with an authority born out of its sympathy with human needs and hopes. The crowning blunder of Protestantism lay in its denial of the most significant tenet of the Roman Church; that, namely, of progressive revelation. But quite the most interesting contribution is the account of "The Church in Germany" by John Graham Brooks. His recital of the work attempted, and actually accomplished, by the Church in Germany in the direction of practical philanthropy, puts us in America to the blush. Mr. Salter would have us go back to Jesus as a leader in moral reforms. In Germany the Church is proving itself what the Roman Catholic Church claims to be the present body of the Christ- by doing his work. A more rebuking article has never been printed in the New World, but its rebuke is one with its inspiration. For whether all atoms have two faces, one physical, the other psychical, as the Monistic theory avows, which Prof. Bixby combats, such facts as Mr. Brooks lays before us have power to smite and heal at the same time. Besides these articles, Col. (may we not be permitted some time to call him Rev. again?) T. W. Higginson has an address upon "The World outside of Science," written in the facile, graceful style which distinguishes all his work; and Albert Réville discusses critically the accounts of "The Birth and Infancy of Jesus," giving nothing that is new to students of the subject, but hinting at an hypothesis not novel, but commonly ignored, that Jesus was born not in Bethlehem of Judea, nor yet in Nazareth, but in Bethlehem of Zebulon, only a few miles from Nazareth. This suggestion has very much to recommend it, particularly as it offers a startling point of fact for the rise, under the influence of Messianic theories, of the tradition of the Bethlehem birth.

When the plan of a Quarterly Review was first broached, there were many who felt that, with the rival magazines already in the field, the new venture would prove unsuccessful. But the New World has already made it apparent that there was an uncovered country all its own, and the treasures already brought are sufficient guarantee of greater yet to come. To all who are interested in contemporary thought

on ethics and theology, particularly as it is related to the work of the modern Church, the New World is simply indispensable. W. W. FENN.

A TWENTIETH CENTURY CREED. We believe in God, the Father Almighty, source, substance, and sustainer of all that is, immanent in his creation, yet also transcendent, who is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, while he responds now and always to the prayers of all peoples. We believe in Jesus the Christ as a man so endowed, guided, and approved of God as rightly to be called, in figurative speech, the Son of God, as typifying our humanity, while being really also, as he ever called himself, the Son of Man.

We believe in Man as being always in truth, however undeveloped or degraded, the Son of God, of one substance with Deity, begotten, not made, a child, and not a creature. We believe every child of the Father to have within him all that possibility which dwelt in Christ Jesus, being himself called to incarnate "all the fulness of God," and bidden to hope at last to attain thereto, and so to have his life, in eternity, if not in time, thus hid with Christ in God. We believe in the Holy Spirit, man's sole reliance for guidance, safety, or salvation, not as a separate person, entity, reality, or consciousness, existent apart from man or God, but as the recognizing sympathetic inter-communication in love between God and the human soul, the direct converse or communion of man's consciousness with Deity. We believe that grace in God and faith, or devout affection, in man, continually reflect this sweet and potent influence to and fro, the Holy Spirit thus proceeding, as was taught of old, both from the Father and the Son, while yet all originates in God.

We believe the doctrine of the Trinity now to conceal, rather than to set forth and elucidate as it was meant to do, this allimportant truth as to the Holy Spirit. We also believe the doctrine of miracles, as commonly taught, to be deceptive and evil, as resting on a dualistic philosophy, which ignores or denies the immanence of God; but we believe all the great teachings of the ancient creeds to be worthy of reverence, as brave and true attempts to set forth and

preserve man's best conceptions of the transcendent mysteries of our life.

We believe the sole source of authority, whether looking to creed or conduct, to be the Holy Spirit, the voice of the living God speaking to-day, as ever, to the devout and

obedient love of his children. We believe conscience to be one manifestation of the Holy Spirit. We believe man's reason to be continually in converse with God. We believe in science as man's ever-revised

reading of the revelation God is making in nature. And we receive the scripture of the Old and New Testaments, not as man's sole authority, and not as excluding any others that have been or that may be made, but as a relatively true and unspeakably precious record of human experiences and divine revelations while earnest men, led of the Spirit, walked reverently with God.

So believing in the living God, and striving thus to walk in the Spirit, we hold all sacraments and all ecclesiastic organizations, usages, or officers to have only that authority which intelligent men from time to time entrust to them, or with which the Holy Spirit may momentarily and evidently endow or invest them.

We thus rely on the living Word of the living God to which we continually look and listen. We believe all the religions of the world to be more or less imperfect products of our rising humanity's semi-conscious co-operation with God. We believe in the Church of Christ as an ever-growing community or fellowship, not limited to any or to all the sects called Christians. We welcome to our church and fellowship all needy souls, and especially those persons who will strive so to walk in the Spirit that the perfect faith and the self-renouncing love typified in the Cross of Christ may bring them more and more to hold themselves with all their powers and possessions to be but loyal stewards of God and loving servants of their fellow-men. Amen.

CHICAGO LETTER.

H. C. B.

As the time of the World's Fair draws nearer, with its accompanying exhibit on the intellectual side of the Auxiliary, the offices at both Rand & McNally's building and the Home Insurance present scenes of increasing activity and interest. The vari