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have a large acceptance. Religion will not change in its essentials; but it must stand in new relations and derive its sustenance from new, if not larger, conceptions of the Great Source of all, and of His laws. Consider the mental and spiritual attitude of the modern man. There is no subject so high, or so sacred, that he does not grapple with it and seek to achieve fresh conclusions. The whole theological scenery, if we may use the figure, has been transformed. To him God is not a dread sovereign, who of His own good pleasure appoints this one to bliss and that one to woe. do not even express the whole truth when you call Him the Heavenly Father who cares for all His children. In his thought God is equally the eternal energy, the serene wisdom, which has created and forever sustains a divine order which carries forward all, and helps all, and hinders none. He cannot say man is a spiritual wreck, that can be restored only by miraculous intervention. That is not the way the present looks to him. That is not the way he reads the story of the past. Man is an incomplete and erring creature; but he is on the road up from greater incompleteness and a deeper moral blindness. Earth and heaven, time and eternity, are but terms which express the unending opportunity of the human soul; the conditions under which it learns to know by pleasure, by pain, the wise and the good, and to cleave to them. Jesus was not here to save men from the results of their sins. Not for that did he live his wondrous life or speak his wondrous words. He sought to fill them with that abundant spiritual life which casts out death; to save them from sin itself by surrounding them, and as it were saturating their souls, with a spiritual atmosphere in which sinful desires die. To the reverent mind heaven here, heaven there, is

primarily purity of heart, holiness of life, love embracing all our kind; and hell is corrupt appetite, is false purpose, is an unloving heart.

Thus in every direction there has been an enormous change in man's views upon sacred subjects. Very few whose opinions and feelings are not more or less affected by this trend of thought. And to a large extent these views have come to stay; and every year is to widen the sphere of their influence. If religion cannot live side by side with them, and get nourishment out of them, then it will lose its place as guide and inspirer of life and conduct. Assuredly it is the duty of some one to make it clear to sincere questioners, that faith in God and purest service of Him, discipleship of Jesus and genuine following of him—that is, real religion- are perfectly consistent with a glad acceptance of all the facts of criticism and science. Of whom is it more clearly the duty than of those who are free to receive truth, who rejoice to receive truth, come from what quarter it may? The usefulness of the Unitarian movement in the future must be largely measured by its ability to transmute opinions into faith, convictions into devout sentiments, rationality into spiritual religion, and fresh light about our relations to God and his universe into nobler performance of duty.

Seventy-five years have rolled away since the early Unitarians reluctantly left the old fold and went forth to fulfil their mission in a world which was loath to receive them. It is fitting that, met in the very building in which it may be said that American Unitarianism had its birth throes, we should give a fleeting half-hour, not simply to its outward annals, but to its inward experience and its life work. It is well that we should

look within and ask for what has it stood, what has it attempted to do, and with what spirit and purpose it contemplates the intellectual and spiritual world, where everything seems to be in flux and nothing permanent save that great law of divine order and growth which is carrying us all forward to larger knowledge and higher life. There is nothing saddening in this retrospect. We have not accomplished all the sanguine dreamed. We have not become in outward proportions one of the great sects; but we have made a healthy growth, and have gathered in many souls who could have found elsewhere neither refuge nor home. Better yet, we have sailed out boldly on the broad ocean of truth and have not made shipwreck. To-day we stand face to face with the progress of the age, read all the critics can say, hear all the message proud science has to speak, and know that real religion has lost nothing; that God is still God, only more steadfast in His ways than men had thought; that man is man, but with more of God's image in him than the creeds have acknowledged; that Jesus is still master of souls, because he is the same quickening and inspiring influence that he was when he walked Jerusalem's streets or stood by Galilee's shore.

We look outside our own borders and take fresh courage. Surely the teachers of religion are broader and more tolerant than they were of old. Mind and soul are entering into that freedom which our fathers won for the body politic a century ago. Yes: the spiritual house is rapidly rebuilding and on a more generous plan. Honest men may not see it. Narrow men may close their eyes against the sight. All the same, the noble walls are steadily rising; and the gates are made broad, and in a better future will be open night and day;

so that every one who desires to know God's will and do it, to love God's children and serve them, to be a disciple of Jesus by partaking of his spirit, may enter in and find none to molest. We look forward to another seventy-five years, which few of us shall see in the flesh. What increase of knowledge, what elevation of faith, what enlargement of charity, what ennobling of daily life, the prophetic eye rejoices in vision to behold!

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THE POWER OF JESUS' LIFE.

JANUARY 7, 1894.

Believe me for the very works' sake. - JOHN xiv. 11.

YEAR ago I read Mommsen's History of Ancient Rome. His allusions to the period of its early kings greatly impressed me. Of that period we have absolutely no authentic history. So far as the story is handed down in writing, it is hopelessly legendary and mythical. Are we then destitute of all trustworthy information? By no means. We learn, he says, what we know, not from historical tradition, but by means of inference from the institutions known to have existed soon after. The structure of society, the laws of the state, the religious customs, the family relation, art, architecture, all these, which we find fully formed and in action when first trustworthy annals came to be, do testify of a civilization and development governing and unfolding ere trustworthy annals were. We believe and know much of those far distant times, not on account of the record, but for the sake of the works, which abide. It is like the transformations of our planet. No account of these has been handed down. None could be. But in every tilted layer of rock, in every petrifaction of tree or animal, the geologist reads the sure story. What is true of Roman history might be true of any other history. It is supposable that in some remote future all annals of our own country prior to the adop