transferred to reside in another state or another object. It is transformed but still conserved. The diverse forces, physical and chemical, are but so many manifestations of one and the same energy. Heat, light, sound, electricity, are only so many modes, not of some material substance, but of the motions of one energy. This is the doctrine of the correlation of forces. Beyond question it strongly supports the idealistic interpretation of the universe The physicist will tell you plainly that he knows nothing that may be called matter; he knows but qualities or conditions, and these are but the manifestations of force.

If you ask him, when he has made his final analysis of matter, what the molecule is, he will tell you, so far as he is concerned with it and so far as he knows about it, it is a center of force. He knows nothing whatsoever about any reality called matter. It may exist, it may not; neither the physicist nor the chemist ever came into direct contact with it; neither will affirm that he knows it. But, on the other hand, that there is an "Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed," their philosophy tends to prove. This is not materialism.

To another field I now invite attention, -a field of more universal human interest, for it is that of the historic past, the ancient records of humanity. How wonderful have been the discoveries here! and they belong exclusively to the last hundred years. The most renowned cities of the ancient world, cities whose very locations had been lost to human knowledge, were unearthed with all their treasures of art and literature; and the knowledge thus gained necessitated the rewriting of much history and the revision of much speculation. The documents discovered in the ruins of buried capitals, in the tombs of kings and the temples of gods, have revealed the antiquity of civilization in the world, as the human remains unearthed by natural scientists have revealed the enormous antiquity of man's inhabitancy here.

And these documents have vastly increased our knowledge of the universal modes of thought and of life which everywhere and always belong to man as man. Our knowledge of humanity has been no less extended in the last hundred years than our knowledge of nature.

The antiquity of the civilization that flourished once in the valley of the Nile and left the Pyramids as monuments of its greatness and the Sphinx as a symbol of its mysterious origin and significance, is measured by thousands of years, and is still antedated, by yet other thousands of years, by the civilization that built the cities and founded the libraries of the Tigris and the Euphrates. We are not startled any longer by the discovery of codes of law, land deeds, hymns to the gods, prayers, inscriptions upon tombs, heroic legends, and myths of creation and of great natural occurrences, that date two and three thousand years before Christ. Nor are we disturbed by being told that in the clay-tablets of Hasurbanipal's library are to be read many of the narratives which we were accustomed to regard as the exclusive possession of inspired writers, and our faith takes no shock from the discovery that some of the laws which we supposed to have been handed out of the cloud on Sinai to Moses 1500 years B. C. were in reality contained in the code of Hammurabi 1,000 years earlier.

One truth from this research has been made especially impressive; namely, the universality and the prepotency of the religious sentiment. The oldest books are all sacred books-Bibles. The whole life of the people was religious, and the worship, including the ceremonies that grew out of the paying of homage to the higher Powers, was the most conspicuous business of man in his earlier stages of civilization. Temples and altars were his most imposing structures. Liturgies and levitical codes, hymns and prayers, and narratives of the marvelous doings of God and exhortations to reverence and obedience made up the greater portion of the

Max Müller's labors in this field are especially distinguished. His work of translating and editing the Sacred Books of the East is truly a monumental achievement, the like of which no former generation ever conceived, much less undertook. It seems to me that the tendencies of speculative thought as influenced by the results of such study are truly indicated by this same scholar's conclusions set forth in his lectures and essays. His writings were one of the great educative influences of the nineteenth century and his views have told upon all our thinking. The Hibbert Lecture foundation is one of the signs of the sounder spirit of investigation characteristic of our times. The score of volumes comprising the lectures of eminent scholars and setting forth the history and nature of the several most prominent religions of the world, or dealing with particular aspects of the general concepts of religion, these volumes constitute a library that is as characteristic of our era as the scientific works of Darwin and Huxley or the sermons of Dean Stanley and Phillips Brooks. They testify to a broader spirit, a more open mind. The science of religion has coöperated with the other sciences to impress upon the common mind the conception of a universal cause and an all-inclusive providence. There has been revealed a wider application of the unity of nature and the invariableness of law. In the midst of circumstantial and accidental diversities a general essential agreement in the religious

We have been made tolerant of the doctrine that every religion has served a divine purpose in the education of the race, that, despite impurities and deficiencies, every religion has contained a measure of truth, a temporary virtue, for discipline, comfort and enlightenment, a a genuine though imperfect revelation of the eternal and God-like. On the other hand, by comparative study, we are enabled to perceive the errors, the defects, and the misconceptions, the moral shortcomings and the spiritual inadequacies, of all the religions of mankind before the appearance of that one perfect religion which was summed up in the two great Commandments of Love and the GoldenRule, and whose essential message to mankind is the Sermon on the Mount.

One trait of the century, and its manifestation in literature, I have yet to notice. This is the growth of the humanitarian spirit. The spread of democracy, the prosperity of missionary work in heathen lands, the literature of common life, social settlements, the large philanthropies of the wealthythese things all betoken a more universal human sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men than ever before was witnessed upon the earth. Schemes of social and political reform, utopian experiments upon transcendental theories, visions of a new industrial and economic democracy, the founding of all sorts of socialistic communities in the effort to realize in some way the conception of universal human brother,-these social phenomena are quite as characteristic of the century as those great mechanical inventions which have been commonly regarded as preeminent distinctions. The religion of humanity, represented in England by a small but respectable body of thinkers, is a significant birth of the era. But if we looked not back of this small

mocracy upon which the political Democracy was founded. (I. Sam., 8:1-5.)

The first great disaster which followed this dual departure from democratic principles was the first Jewish civil war. In this conflict 450,000 were in the field, 250,000 lives were sacrificed, and one whole tribe-the Benjaminites-was so nearly exterminated that 600 soldiers who escaped to the mountains, and 400 women saved from the wreck of JabeshGilead were all that were left of one of the most powerful states of the commonwealth. (Judges, 19-21.)

Josephus, introducing this account of this civic tragedy, which ranks along with our late Civil War as one of the most terrible of all time, says:

"They suffered their aristocracy to be corrupted and did not ordain themselves a senate or magistrates, as their laws formerly required, but were very much given to cultivating their fields in order to get wealth; which great indolence of theirs brought a terrible sedition upon them, and they proceeded so far as to fight one against another."-Josephus,

5-2:7.

The same historian, in giving account of the first subjection of the Jews to the Assyrians, which occurred prior to the Monarchy, says:

"For when they had once fallen from the regularity of their political government, they indulged themselves further in living according to their own pleasure, till they were full of the evil doings common among the Canaanites. God, therefore, was angry with them, and they lost their happy state, which they had obtained by innumerable labors, by their luxury."-Josephus, 5–3:2.

Three things are evident from the two foregoing quotations; viz., that a corrupt aristocracy had arisen; that economic inequality had become dominant, as no nation ever suffered from the luxury of its masses; and that idolatry, hinted at as evil-doings," was usually, if not always,

a result following violation of political and economic law, and never more than a secondary cause of national disaster in the life of this people.

All national calamities down to and including the establishment of the Monarchy, were the result of similar abandonment of the Mosaic system of government.

Under the reign of the first king the economic features of the Mosaic system seem to have been almost entirely abandoned, and the people were divided into two classes. Saul, with his headquarters at Gibeah, represented the official and propertied class, while David, with his headquarters in the Cave of Adullam, became the leader of "every one that was in distress, and every one that was discontented." (I. Sam., 22:1-2.)

So numerous in time did the latter class

become, that in the civil war that followed it put David on the throne.

During the reign of David the chief occupation of the able-bodied men of the always the case, gave the ruling-class common people was war. This, as is astical power took advantage of this congreat economic advantage. The ecclesi

dition to collect tribute to the extent of almost five billions of dollars preparatory to the building of the temple, which was erected in the reign of Solomon. This with the royal extravagance of Solomon, which amazed the world with its dazzling this series, laid the foundation for the revolt splendor, as indicated in a former article of of the ten tribes from Rehoboam, his son.

That the cause of this fatal disruption of the Jewish empire at the zenith of its imperial grandeur was purely economic, is plain from the reply of Rehoboam to the delegation of the tribes that asked

him to reduce their economic burdens:

"My father made your yoke heavy, and chastised you with whips, but I will chasI will add to your yoke: My father also tise you with scorpions."-I. Kings, 12:14.

As violation of economic law was responsible for the division of the empire into two kingdoms, which made all the

tribes an easy prey to foes internal and external, the disasters that followed the division would be justly chargeable to this cause if there were no evidence of direct connection between such violation and the series of national calamities which form a descending scale of civic perditions, as in Dante's Inferno, "hell under hell"; but the connection is immediate and direct, and for convenience will be given for each kingdom separately.

The violation of the principle of equality in land tenure is assigned by the prophets as one of the direct causes of the downfall of the kingdom of Judah:

"Woe unto them that join house to house, and lay field to field, till there be no place; that they may dwell alone in

the midst of the earth."-Isa., 5:8.

The effect of this condition of land monopoly upon the courts is given in the preceding verse:

“He looked for judgment, and, behold, oppression; for righteousness, but, behold, a cry."

This effect is further shown by Micah, who was a contemporary of Isaiah, in his description of mortgage foreclosures:

"And they covet fields and take them by violence, and houses, and take them away; so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage. Therefore, saith the Lord, Behold against this family do I devise an evil from which ye shall not remove your necks."-Micah,

2:2.

This was its effect upon the church.

"Prophesy ye not, say they to them that prophesy; they shall not prophesy to them that they shall not take shame."-Micah, 2:6.

The land monopolists would not hear any denunciations of landlordism. They supported the church and the priests, but this is what the church and the priests, and even some of the prophets became under this régime:

"Every one is given to covetousness, and from the prophet even unto the priest, every one dealeth falsely."-Jer., 6:13–14.

"His watchmen are blind; they are all ignorant; they are all dumb dogs; they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving slumber.

"Yea, they are greedy dogs, which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand, they look to their own way, every one for his gain from his quarter.”—Isa., 56:10–11.

The theme of the prophets in these passages is landlordism, and in close connection therewith they give the inevitable result of land monopoly:

with the ancients of His people, and the "The Lord will enter into judgment princes thereof, for ye have eaten up the vineyard, the spoil of the poor is in your houses."-Isa., 3:14-15.

"Therefore, shall Zion for your sake be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps; and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest."-Micah, 3:12.

This was the effect of this landlordism the home and the social life: upon "The women of my people have cast ye out of their pleasant houses."-Micah, 2:9.

To make a modern application,-out into the sweatshops, to break down their health; out into the department stores, to sell their virtue to make up for wages earned, but withheld, in selling goods for

millionaires; out into the street to live on their shame; out, finally, into the potter's field, with no gravestone to mark the place, that their buried shame may the

sooner be forgotten.

This verse continues:

taken away my glory forever." "And from their children have they

The glory of an education; twelve thousand children of the poor in Chicago with no place to learn to read. The glory of religious training; one hundred thousand