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people must breathe if they breathe at all. And to breathe it is to acquire a certain movement of the blood and brain, which makes all who feel it of one mind and heart to a very great extent. I am sure that we are tending to a more inclusive unity of intellectual perception and belief, and I expect the time will come when there will be a wonderful agreement among all the churches as to all the important things; but, when it comes, I hope and trust that we shall not have one all-including Church, but pretty much the churches that we have now, each loyal to its own traditions of nobility and saintliness, devotion to principle, enthusiasm for truth and righteousness, but willing and glad to have its priests and prophets free to come and go, hearing in their own tongue in which they were born the speech of many lands. Even now, of such Christian and religious unity we have no mean development. It has grown fast of late, and it will grow and grow until its tide of generous sympathies shall catch up and sweep along the most unwilling minds and the most selfish hearts.

There are great unifying forces working in our time. Science is one, and literature is another. When a hundred thousand people read the same great book with glowing heart, they are worshipping together quite as beautifully, their religious unity is quite as perfect, as if they should all come together, and recite the Apostles' or the Nicene Creed in unison. And literature, for all its aberrations, is making for the one thing that was more characteristic of Jesus than any other, sympathy with human misery, a passionate desire to lift up the hands that hang down and confirm the feeble knees. It is making equally for intellectual sincerity and for the subordination of the letter which killeth to the spirit that maketh alive. Another unifying force is common work. "The communion of saints!" Did it ever occur to you that the meaning of "communion," the root signification of the word, 66 is common work"? And such communion is one of the most unifying things under the big sky. The Abolitionists never called themselves "the Anti-slavery

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Church." But what a true Church of God they were! similating to themselves their own from all the churches, and welding them into a unity compact as the primeval granite against the onset of the slave power, North and South. Our partisan politics are divisive in these days. Like Martin Luther for his theses, here we stand for protection or commercial freedom; and, so help us God, we can no otherwise. And we are no worse for that so long as we allow to every man the right to think as he must think, which we claim for ourselves. And, so far as I can make out, there are just as good men and just as intelligent and thoughtful men for free silver or bimetallism as for the one metal, and that gold.* But there are other things concerning which all honest, earnest, and right-minded men must think alike,the reform of our municipal administration, the purging of our civil service, municipal, state, and national, from those elements of personal and party greed which demoralize it and disgrace it, and make it a by-word and a hissing among men. Here are two kinds of work, closely allied no doubt, in which good men of every church and sect can join with mutual sympathy and trust, and the Romanist cannot say to the Protestant, "I have no need of thee," nor the Unitarian to the Presbyterian, "I have no need of thee"; for they all need each other, and the good causes need them all for their prosperity. There are other causes that I have not named in which also good men of every communion and opinion can unite, the promotion of temperance, and the organization of charity, so that it shall not pauperize three or four for every one it helps. But I am keeping you too long. I trust that I have said enough to make it plain that, if there is much in the planning and scheming for Christian unity that does not appeal to us as sound and good, and that is sure to come to nothing, there are within our reach the possibilities of a Christian and religious unity that is very real and true, and large and fair, and excellent and grand. Nay, more: it is not wholly in the future tense. Its kingdom is at hand. * But not so many of them, I sincerely hope and believe.

The forces of civilization and sympathy, of literature and science, of common social work for generous and lofty ends, have already built it up into a form and comeliness which are not by any means to be despised,

"A temple neither pagod, mosque, nor church,
But loftier, simpler, always open-doored

To every breath from heaven; and Truth and Peace
And Love and Justice come and dwell therein."

And why not we with them?

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PEACE AND WAR.

PEACE on earth, good will to men! How can we but be glad that such a sentiment, worthy of being sung by angel choirs, was rescued from oblivion and set in the forefront of the gospel history! A sentiment so pure and high might well be the salvation of any legend in which it is imbedded. And who shall say that it has not been the sentiment that has preserved the legend rather than the legend that has preserved the sentiment? But, whether it has been so or not, the sentiment has been preserved; and, though it did not prove prophetic of any sudden change in the habits of communities or individuals, and though not even yet does the world's international life embody its ideal force and beauty, I dare believe that by the music of this angel song the hearts of men have been allured to gentler ways than they would else have known, that there would have been still less peace on the earth, and still less good will to men, if the Christian world for nineteen centuries had not been confronted and rebuked by this ideal, however unattained as yet, however unattainable for centuries to come.

Peace on the earth! Does it look much like it in the newspapers, magazines, and official papers of the day, in the war budgets of the different nations? Does it look much like it in Armenia, where the antipathies of race and of religion have engendered feuds of an infernal bitterness and barbarity, whose daily incidents are as indiscriminate slaughters as have ever marked man's inhumanity to man? Does it look much like it when all the European powers are menacing the Turk, and could, if they would, compose "the sick man "" to an everlasting sleep by a mere fiat of their collective will, but, should they do it, would probably proceed at once to tear

each other in pieces over his emaciated corpse? Does it look like it in France, with one laughing eye on her newstolen Madagascar, and the other, ever sleepless, on her German frontier, biding her time to stab her hated conqueror in the back or fling her gauntlet in his face? Does it look like it in the Far East, where the collapse of China in her conflict with Japan has made a carcass of her for the vulture eyes of Russia and the other powers? Does it look like it in Germany, where the young emperor, a miserable anachronism, a feudal overlord in modern clothes, is always clamoring for more money, for more soldiers, when already his gigantic military system is an intolerable vampire, sucking away the strength of Germany's young manhood, the vitals of her industrial prosperity? Does it look much like it in England, doubling her naval armament and the appropriations for her army in a hardly less degree? Does it look much like it in America, where the voice of an irresponsible and reckless press is still for war, with whom or for what it matters precious little, so that there be war, where legislators who do not deliberate are industriously occupied in promoting international feuds, where the Congressional chaplain, with a sharp eye to windward where consulships and such things await a change of administration, in the name of one who has been called the Prince of Peace, prays thus with the wardogs: "May we be quick to resent anything like an insult to our nation! . . . So may thy kingdom come, and thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Peace on earth! Does it look much like it when the President of the United States sends to our Congress a message which contemplates the awful possibility of war between the United States and Great Britain, and representatives and senators tread upon each other in their wild haste to stampede the House and Senate and the country into a rush of blind and stupid acquiescence?

Fifty years ago the peace societies were flourishing. They do not flourish now. Then Charles Sumner gave the great oration of his manly youth, "The True Grandeur of

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