which has been traditionally handed down. It is a faith whose contents are liberal, whose thoughts of God and man and life and destiny are broad and deep and high.

Notice, in this connection, that here, as in the art of reading books, non multa, sed multum is the rule, not many things, but much. There are men, for instance, who believe a hundred things about God and those who believe thirtythree or thirty-nine (so many and no more) who do not believe in him so much as some others whose articles of belief are only two or three. The quality of the belief is much. And this also is to be remembered: that the credulous, the greedy mind is not confined to those who are most open-mouthed to swallow the traditional belief. The passing time is very much like that which corresponded to the first centuries of Christianity and the last centuries of the Roman paganism. As we look back upon that time, we see that the most credulous people were not those who clung to the old faith and ordinance: they were those who abandoned themselves to one or another of the many forms of new belief which, simultaneously with Christianity, were pressing on the Roman mind. And in our own time the most credulous are certainly not always those who swallow the traditional doctrines of religion as readily as if these were strawberries and cream: they are those their name is legion-who are so hungry for the things which they have needlessly foregone that they snatch at anything which comes to them noisily advertised as the bread which cometh down from heaven. They are those who have gone the whole length of negation, only to tumble over finally into an abyss of bottomless credulity. Even among those who have not tumbled over, but are very near the edge, you will often find a more absolute credulity than in the traditionalists to whom they are most violently opposed. We are obliged, sometimes, to entertain a doubt whether this boasted age of science will not, from the standpoint of the future, seem pre-eminently superstitious.

A liberal faith is neither the credulity of the traditionalist nor the credulity of crude, irrational negation and mere cob

web speculation. And no more is it that slackness of indifference which so frequently imagines itself worthy of the name, and representative of the thing. Of this slackness of indifference we have a great abundance in our time. It has domesticated itself in the conventional churches. The young person seeking admission to their communion is assured that it really makes very little difference what he believes. There are the creeds and articles, to be sure, but they are historical documents: they are preserved to indicate what was formerly believed, and they are subscribed to or recited with the tacit or explicit understanding that they are subject to individual diminution or addition or interpretation. This slackness of indifference is the veriest Proteus and has many forms. One is the ecclesiastical, which I have already named. Another is the scientific, which resolves religion into a mere sentiment, declaring that it has no intellectual contents; and there are found students and teachers of religion who have sunk so low that they meekly and thankfully accept the crust that is thus thrown to them by those who sit at groaning tables in the great hall of science. The philosophical form of this Proteus is much the same. Its doctrine is, that just as we may digest our food and live a healthy life without any knowledge of physiology, so we may digest our sentiments and duties and live a healthy, moral, and religious life without ethical or theological reflection. The antithesis of reason and faith is not more definite with those who, in the traditional manner, regard faith as a supplementary faculty whereby men can attain truth without reason, or in spite of reason, than it often is with our philosophers; nor more contemptuous of reason than are these. They present this funny paradox: by the use of reason they would convince us that reason is of no account.

The slackness of indifference takes on another and more popular form. "What difference does it make," we hear, "what a man believes? Theology is not religion." And the corollary of this proposition is sometimes one thing and sometimes another,-sometimes abstention from all public

recognition of religion, but oftener adhesion to the particular church which is most convenient or most fashionable or most socially engaging, though it may be the most orthodox in the community. The churches of the traditional theology are largely re-enforced by men and women who are aiding and abetting what they cannot possibly believe, and encouraging the preacher in a course destructive of his moral character and his self-respect. If sometimes more consistent and conscientious people protest with these for countenancing and supporting things which they do not believe, the answer is that they believe them as much as anybody. It is not true, and it would not absolve them if it were. Two wrongs, or two hundred, cannot make a right.

Religion is degraded when it is made a mush of sentiment, and denied all intellectual significance. Theology, that once queened it over all the arts and science, does not propose to abdicate her throne. Here is a science that can hold up its head among the best. Some one has said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we know by instinct, but it is an instinct to seek those reasons. Good! and if theology is the finding of reasons bad or good for many things that are spontaneous in our spiritual nature, the finding of these reasons is as spontaneous for humanity in general as for men to breathe or sleep. Nor do I know anything more honorable to humanity than the finding of the same reasons, the seeking of them if they have not and cannot be truly found. It would be a miserable race of men that could live in such a world as this and not try to fathom its mystery, not try to name aright the power that surges through it in a tide whose waves are ages of immeasurable time. Over and over again, now by the philosopher and anon by the scientist, we are reminded of the limits of religious thought, and of the presumption of endeavoring to tear away the veil of the Unknowable. But the only way of finding out what is unknowable is by pushing ever forward the limits of the known. For Socrates, the presumptuous thing was to seek to penetrate that region which is now commensurate with the whole

field of natural science. Think of the loss if men had been obedient to his word! Yet was he a very great philosopher. Wherefore, even though some very great philosophers of our own time would interdict us from that sphere of the divine activity which theology endeavors to explore, let us go on regardless of their prohibition. Seeing that we cannot know anything without knowing something of Him who is all in all, the very science that arrays itself against theology is nothing if not theological. The Unknown is a mighty sea that surges round about the known with ceaseless ebb and flow. How much of it is unknowable mankind will know a great deal better fifty or a hundred thousand years hence than it does now. In the mean time the presumption is in fixing any limit to the intellectual force which already has achieved so much.

Do we not congratulate ourselves unduly on a state of things whose characteristic note is the inability to distinguish things that differ, an easy-going assurance that one system of theology is about as good as another? This sort of thing is what a great many people mean by liberality. But where does the liberality come in if there is no particular difference? A man without much effort or without doing himself any particular credit may be liberal enough to tolerate his natural face in a glass, or his theological opinions reflected in another man's. But what we want is the liberality that can be tolerant of the most radical difference from one's own opinions. There was better stuff for making manly men in the old dogmatism and bigotry than in the liberality which can tolerate every possible difference of opinion because it has not a conviction of its own. We have had our World's Parliament of Religions, and very beautiful it was in many ways. It brought out the unity in diversity, but it also. brought out the diversity in unity, and I am not sure that this was not the more important lesson. There are those who have a vision of the different religions, stripped every one of its peculiar qualities, and of a world-wide unity of religion compounded of the simple common elements that

would remain. It will come, perhaps, when men and women wear only the most necessary clothing and eat only the most necessary food. Let us hope it will not come before. For how much better than any uniformity like that of the primeval fiery cloud is a diversity like that of the firmament we know, thick set with stars, one star differing from another star in glory, the different religions clothing the nakedness of their common substance of belief with the many colored draperies of their several and diverse historical traditions! And how much better in each particular community the clearcut conviction, and the manly difference of manly men, than the good-natured indifference of sheer mental laziness, or the unqualified homogeneity that would invite no splendid rivalries of athletic minds, no generous mutual toleration on the part of men whose doctrines are as inconvertible as ice and fire!

True liberality is every way desirable, and it never shows more beautiful than when associated with a theology that is severe and hard. As between such liberality and liberal opinion, as we designate opinion that is free from the bondage of traditional authority, there is no question which has the greater moral beauty. The liberal opinion, as such, may not have any it may have come to a man as naturally as the air he breathes; or it may be the result of a moral heroism that can hardly be surpassed. We have no more burnings for heresy, and you may think we have no more persecution; but here in Brooklyn there are men and women suffering for their liberal opinion's sake pangs not less horrible than those of wheel and stake. Those were self-limiting they made an end of both the sufferer and suffering; but these go on year after year, the averted looks, the bitter accusations, the old-time sympathy and affection cruelly withheld. I speak of what I know and testify to that which I have seen. But even here the moral beauty is not in the liberal belief, but in the openness of mind and the indomitable will to seek the truth, let who will favor or forbear. Happy are they who have both liberal opinion and that liberality which can be