public ministration of religion has not everywhere and always this lofty character, does not everywhere and always mean this preference for the higher and the highest things. It means, and not infrequently, that the home-staying, church-neglecting people are persuaded that religion is something which they can get along without, and that, too, very comfortably and decently, without loss of any real good. And here, exactly here, is the challenge of their method and observance which those who are heartily persuaded of the reality and importance of religion and its common recognition are bound to give attention to at the present time, and that right earnestly. It is a very serious challenge. If religion is not the greatest thing in the world, but a mere superfluity or absurdity or impertinence, we want to know it. We do not want to be watering a stick in the desert when there are so many things that have in them a principle of life and growth, and well deserve all the abundance of our wells and springs. We do not want to be wasting precious time and money on a plant that has in it no real vitality, no perfectly sincere relation to the needs of human life. We want to quit ourselves like men; and we are not doing so if we cannot give a reason for the faith that is in us, and feel that we are making a good honest contribution to the spiritual commonwealth of man. As for myself, there are some other things that I could do to good purpose and with much enjoyment; and I should like to be about them if I have been following an ignis fatuus these thirty years.

But, though it may seem presumptuous to differ from so many of the wise and excellent who are persuaded of the unreality of religion or of the uselessness of its public recognition, I do not find myself inclined no, not in the least degree to be of their assembly. For one thing, I cannot look at the succession of the ages, and see what a tremendous part religion has been playing on the busy scene, without being convinced that here is something essential to the completeness of humanity, something so deeply implicated in its structure that it can no more be taken out of it with

out destructive consequences than the bones can be taken out of a man's body or his muscles be unstrung of every quivering nerve. No other force or institution has played such a stupendous part in human history, has reared such splendid fanes, dominated such mighty nations and events, inspired such hopes and fears.

Pam perfectly aware of the deductions that must be made from this account by the impartial critic. "O Liberty," cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes have been committed in thy name!" Yes, certainly, but not a tithe of those that have been committed in the name of religion. What superstitions and idolatries and persecutions have been multiplied along her course! How often she has blocked the path of civilization and checked the growth of science and thrust back the births of intellect into the womb of time! From none of these things must we avert our eyes. We could not if we would, they are so thrust upon us. But, if they were exhaustive of the measure of religion, could we be less convinced than we are now of the fundamental reality of that in which such things inhere? We might feel obliged to think it something abominable, infernal, devilish, and consequently to revise our theories of human nature, and conclude that Augustine and Calvin and Edwards said no worse of it than what is true. But they are not exhaustive of the measure of religion, these cursed and abominable things. They are the spots upon the sun. They are the least dust of the balance as compared with the inspirations of goodness, reverence, comfort, peace, heroism, sacrifice, trust, long-suffering, patience, that have been as much a part of it as warmth is of the sunlight and fragrance of the rose. And, when we think of what religion has been in its total manifestation, in its terror and its beauty, in its loveliness and joy, in its strength to build, its energy to sway, its might to set up and cast down, then might we not as rationally believe that the art of government, the State, or the passion for beauty, or the love of men and women for each other, was something superficial, something that might have its day

and cease to be, as to believe these things of religion? It may be subjected to incalculable transformations in the future as it has been in the past, but they will not destroy its identity nor bring upon its perpetuity the shadow of a doubt.

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But there is another way of looking at the matter and a much higher one than this with which we are now done. It is to consider religion not in its historic course, but in its ideal significance. What is religion so considered? It is man's sense of the power and mystery of universal life, and his endeavor to convert this sense into a binding law of life. It has not always been this; for this has a moral element, the endeavor to convert the sense of universal power and mystery into a binding law of life,- and there was not such moral element in the beginnings of religion. Religion and morality were originally two separate streams, one rising in the contact of man's spirit with the mystery of nature and the mystery of his own life, and the other in the contacts between man and man; but long since the two streams coalesced, and now you might as well endeavor to separate them as to separate the waters of the Hudson and the Mohawk below their junction with each other. Here and there you find an individual like Benvenuto Cellini or the last pious defaulter whose religion seems to have no moral character, and here and there you find a splendid ethical development with no conscious lifting of the heart to God; but, in the wide average of history and of our semi-civilization, the religious and the moral elements are inextricably interwoven.

Separated in theory they often are by moralists and theologians. So are the bones and muscles on the dissecting table or in anatomical treatises; but in the living organism they are mutually supporting and sustaining, and cannot be torn asunder without the destruction of that unity in which they both inhere. There are those who, because they were originally separate, would keep them separate still; but they have coalesced as naturally as two rivers winding to the sea, and it would be as absurd to seek to isolate them

now as to seek to isolate the Hudson's or the Mohawk's streaming flood. At the first swelling of the waters they would reunite ; and separate religion and morality as you will in theory or practice, given some inundation of the one or of the other, and they would rush together with a joy and welcome as when long-parted lovers reunite.

Whatever religion has been, this is what it is,- man's sense of his relation to the power and mystery of universal life, and his endeavor to convert that sense into a binding law of life. You might as well say that the "Valkyrie" or the "Defender," par nobile sororum, ought to be a raft or dug-out because the original water-craft was a raft or dug-out as to say that religion ought to be exclusively man's sense of nature's power and mystery because it was so once.

"Pleads for itself the fact

As unrepentant Nature leaves her every act."

Here is the "Valkyrie" or the "Defender,"- a fair miracle of flowing lines and bellying sails and glorious motion,— and here is religion as it has come to be in the course of half a million years of human toil and stress, contact of the human spirit with the outer and the inner mystery, contact of man with man in the oppositions and the sympathies of social life.

"The highest is the measure of the man,
And not the Kaffir, Hottentot, Malay,

And such horn-handed breakers of the glebe,
But Homer, Plato, Verulam."

The highest is the measure of the water-craft, the government, the social state, the domestic relation, the religion. Nor in the reasoning of this present time is there a grosser fallacy than the attempt, which is so common, to interpret this thing or that in the terms of its original endowment, and to tie it down to the significance of that.

Somehow, by God's grace and man's, the raft or dug-out has become the ocean steamer and the yacht. Somehow, by

God's grace and man's, religion has become the twofold. energy of a divine and human inspiration, the twofold response of human nature to the All-embracer, the All-enfolder, and to the obligations of a social life. And, seeing that these things are so, how is it possible for any one to be a man, in all the fulness of his intellectual powers, and not make the religious confession and take the religious attitude? It must be that the man who thinks seriously and feels profoundly is the true, the ideal man; and how is it possible for a man to think seriously and feel profoundly concerning the power and mystery of universal life, and that need men have of one another which we call morality, without having that sense of the former and that conviction of the latter which, in their interplay and mutual support, make up the fulness of religion? Of course, it is entirely possible for a man to live from hand to mouth, for bread alone,- the mere material commodity, and so long as he has a superabundance of physical comforts and freedom from all pecuniary anxiety snap his fingers at the greatness of the mystery of his environment and the necessity for "the fellow-heirs of this small island life to plough and sow and reap like brothers." But to say this is very much like saying that a man may, if he chooses, forego the privilege of his manhood, and be a selfish epicure or sensual brute.

"Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen
Resolut zu leben."

Resolved to live in beauty, goodness, wholeness,— that is the mark of our high calling, that is what it means to be a real, true, ideal man; and there are those who come nearer to this mark on $300 a year than some who count their millions by the double score.

There are those among us at the present time who would assent to half of what I have just now affirmed, and dissent from the other half. They would say "Yes" to the moral part, and "No" to the universal. In English law, it has been often said, the man and wife are one; and that one is