Chapter X: Part 10

I wish now to assert the truth of certain fundamental principles; and these principles, you note, are those which constitute the peculiarity of the Unitarian people as a body of theological believers. For example, that this which is all around us and of which we are a part is a universe is demonstrated beyond question. It is one, the unity of the universe. The unity of force, the unity of substance or matter, the unity of law, the unity of life, the unity of humanity, the unity of the fundamental principles of ethics, the unity of the religious life and aspiration of the world, these, I say, are demonstrated. And do you not see that demonstrating these carries along with it the unquestioned, the absolute demonstration of the unity of the power that is in the universe and manifests itself through it? The unity of God? The Lord our God is one! And this is no question of speculation, it is demonstrated truth. Now, as to any speculative or metaphysical division of God's nature into three parts or personalities, there is not, and there cannot be, in the nature of things, one slightest particle of proof. The unity is demonstrated: anything else is incapable of demonstration.

Next, the Unitarian contention I say Unitarian, not because we originated it by any means, but simply because we first and chiefly among religious bodies have accepted it as to the origin and nature of man as science has unfolded it to us, thus precluding the possibility of the truth of any doctrine of any fall. This is not speculation, it is not whim. It is not something picked up by the way, that a man chooses because he likes it, and because he does not like something else. This is demonstrated truth, as clearly and fully demonstrated as is the law of gravity or the fact that water will freeze at a certain temperature. Then the question of the Bible. The Unitarian position in regard to the origin, the method of composition, the authenticity and the authority of Biblical books, is a commonplace of scholarship. There is no rational question in regard to it any more. Next, the question of the origin and nature of Jesus the Christ. The naturalness of his birth, the naturalness of his death, his pure humanity, are made clearer and surer by every new step which investigation takes; and there is nothing in the nature of proof that is conceivable in regard to any other theory. If any one chooses to accept it, well; but nobody claims, or can claim, to prove it, to settle it, to demonstrate it as true. It becomes an article of faith, a question of voluntary belief; but there is no possibility of holding it in any other way. So as to the nature of salvation. It is a matter of character; a man is saved when he is right. And that he cannot be saved in any other way is demonstrable and demonstrated truth.

Now, these are the main principles which constitute the beliefs of Unitarians; and in any court of reason they are able to make good their claim against any corner. And, if there be no other motive at work except the one clear-eyed, simple desire to find the truth, there can be no two opinions concerning any of them.

Why, then, are not all thoughtful, educated people Unitarians? Well may the listener ask, in wonder, if the statements I have just been making are true. Now I propose to offer some suggestions, showing what are some of the influences at work which determine belief, and which have very little to do with the question as to whether the beliefs are capable of establishing themselves as true or not.

In the first place, let us raise the question as to what is generally meant by education. We assume that all educated people ought to agree on all great questions; and they ought, note now what I am saying, they ought, if they are really and truly educated, and if with a clear and single eye they are seeking simply the truth. But, in order to understand the situation, we need to note a good many other things that enter into this matter of determining the religious path in which people will walk. Now what do we mean by education? Popularly, if a man has been to school, particularly if he is a college graduate, if he can read a little Latin and speak French, and knows something of music, if he has graduated anywhere, he is spoken of as educated. But is that a correct use of language? Are we sure that a man is educated merely because he knows a lot of things or has been through a particular course of study? What does a human education mean? Does it not mean the unfolding, the development of our faculties in such a way that in the intellectual sphere we can come into contact with and possession of the reality of things, the truth? Intellectually, is there any other object of education than to fit a man to find the truth? And yet let me give you a case. Here is a man, I take it as an illustration simply, not because I have anything particular against the Catholic Church any more than against any other body of believers, who has been through a Catholic college, has made himself master of Catholic doctrine, become familiar with theological and ecclesiastical literature; suppose he knows all the languages, or a dozen of them, having them at his fingers' ends. Do you not see that as a truth-seeker in a free world he may not be educated at all? He may be educated, as we say, or trained is the better word, into acceptance of a certain system of traditional thought, that can give no good reason for itself; for his prejudices, his loves and hates may be called into play. He may be trained into the earnest conviction that it is his highest duty to be loyal to a particular set of ideas.

Take the way I was educated. I grew up reading the denominational reviews, and the denominational newspapers. I was taught that it was dangerous and wicked to doubt. I must not think freely: that was the one thing I was not permitted to do. I went to a theological school, and had drilled into me year after year that such beliefs, about God and man and Jesus and the Bible and the future world, were unquestionably true, and that I must not look at anything that would throw a doubt upon them. And I was sent out into the world graduated, not as a truth-seeker, but to fight for my system, as a West Point graduate is taught that he must fight for his country without asking any questions.

Do you not see that this, which goes under the name of education, instead of fitting a man to find the truth, may distinctly and definitely unfit him, make it harder for him to find any truth except that which is contained in the system which has been drilled into him from his childhood up and year after year? Education, in order to fit a man to be a truth-seeker, must be something different from this merely teaching a man a certain system, a certain set of ideas, and drilling him into the belief that he must defend these ideas against all corners.

A good many people, then, who are called educated, are not educated at all. I have had this question asked me repeatedly: If your position is true, here is a college graduate, and here is another; and here is a minister of such a denomination, or a priest of the Catholic Church; why do they not accept your ideas? Do you not see, however, that this so-called education may stand squarely in the way?

Now, in the second place, I want to dwell a little on the difficulty of people's getting rid of a theory which possesses their minds, and substituting for it another theory. And I wish you to note that it is not a religious difficulty nor a theological difficulty nor a Baptist difficulty nor a Presbyterian difficulty: it is a human difficulty. There is no body of people on the face of the earth that is large enough to contain all the world's bigotry. It overflows all fences and gets into all enclosures. Discussing the subject a little while ago, by correspondence with a prominent scientific man in New England, I got from him the illustrations which I hold in my hand, tending to set forth how difficult it is for scientific men themselves to get rid of a theory which they have been working for and trying to prove, and substitute for it another theory. I imagine that there may be a physiological basis for the difficulty. I suggest it, at any rate. We say that the mind tends to run in grooves of thought. That means, I suppose, that there is something in the molecular movements of the brain that comes to correspond to a well-trodden pathway. It is easy to walk that path, and it is not easy to get out of it. Let it rain on the top of a hill; and, if you watch the water, you will see that it seeks little grooves that have been worn there by the falling of past rains, and that the little streams obey the scientific law and follow the lines of least resistance. There comes a big shower, a heavy downfall; and perhaps it will wash away the surface and change the beds of these old watercourses, create new ones. So, then, when there comes a deluge of new truth, it washes away the ruts along which people have been accustomed to think; and they are able to reconstruct their theories. Now let me give you some of these scientific illustrations. First, that heat is a mode of motion was proved by Sir Humphry Davy and Count Rumford before 1820. In 1842 Joule, of Manchester, England, proved the quantitative relation between mechanical energy and heat. In 1863 note the dates Tyndall gave a course of lectures on heat as a mode of motion, and was even then sneered at by some scientific men for his temerity. Tait, of Glasgow, was particularly obstreperous. To-day nobody questions it; and we go back to Sir Humphry Davy and Count Rumford for our proofs, too. It was proved scientifically proved then; but it took the world all these years, even the scientific world, to get rid of its prejudices in favor of some other theory, and see the force of the proof.

Now, in the second place, it was held originally that light was a series of corpuscles that flew off from a heated surface; but Thomas Young, about the year 1804, demonstrated the present accepted theory of light. But it was fought for years. Only after a long time did the scientific world give up its prejudice in favor of the theory that was propounded by Newton. But to-day we go back to Young, and see that he demonstrated it beyond question.

In the third place, take another fact. Between 1830 and 1845 Faraday worked out a theory of electrical and magnetic phenomena. It was proved to be correct. Maxwell, a famous chemist in London, looked over the matter, and persuaded himself that Faraday was right; but nobody paid much attention to either of them; until after a while the scientific world, through the work of its younger men, those least wedded to the old-time beliefs, conceded that it must be true.

The Nebular Theory was proved and worked out by Kant more than a hundred and thirty years ago. In 1799 Laplace worked it out again; but it was a long time before it was accepted. And now we go back to Kant and Laplace for our demonstration.

Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published in 1859. But it was attacked by scientists as well as theologians on every hand. Huxley even looked at it with a good deal of hesitancy before he accepted it. To-day, however, everybody goes back to the "Origin of Species," and finds the whole thing there, demonstration and all.

Lyell published a book on the antiquity of man in 1863. It was twenty- five years before all the scientific men of the world were ready to give up the idea that man had been on the earth more than six or eight thousand years.

So we find that it is not theologians only; it is scientists, too, that find it difficult to accept new ideas. I know scientific men among my personal friends who are simply incapable of being hospitable to an idea that would compel them to reconstruct a theory that they have already accepted. Why are not all educated men Unitarians? Why do not scientific men accept demonstrated truth when it is first demonstrated as truth? It puts them to too much trouble. It touches their pride. They do not like to feel that they have thrown away half their lives following an hypothesis that is not capable of being substantiated.

Then, in the third place, there are men, and educated men as the world goes, who deliberately decline to study new truth; and they are men in the scientific field and in the religious field. They purposely refuse to look at anything which would tend to disturb their present accepted belief. In my boyhood I used to hear Dr. John O. Fiske, a famous preacher in Maine. He told a friend of mine, in his old age, that he simply refused to read any book that would tend to disturb his beliefs. Professor William G. T. Shedd, one of the most distinguished theologians of this country, a leading Presbyterian divine, published so I am not slandering him by saying it a statement that he did not consider any book written since the seventeenth century worth his reading. And yet we have a new world since the seventeenth century, a new revelation of God and of man. To follow the teaching of the seventeenth century would be to go wrong in almost every conceivable direction. What is the use of paying any attention to the theological or religious opinions of a man who avows an attitude like that?

Faraday, to come now to a scientific illustration, so that you will not think I am too hard on theologians, Faraday belonged to one of the most orthodox sects in England; and he used to say deliberately that he kept his religion and his science apart. He says, "When I go into my closet, I lock the door of my laboratory; and, when I go into my laboratory, I lock the door of my closet." He did very wisely to keep them apart; for, if they had got together, there would certainly have been an explosion.

Another scientific illustration is Agassiz. Agassiz unconsciously wrought out and developed some of the most wondrous and beautiful proofs of evolution that the world has ever known; and yet he fought evolution to the last day of his life, simply because he had accepted the other theory. And he got it into his head that there was something about evolution that tended to injure religion and degrade man, not a rational objection, not a scientific objection, but a feeling, a prejudice.

There is another class of people that I must refer to. Institutions and organizations come into being, created, in the first place, as the embodiment and expression of new and grand truths; and after a Arile their momentum becomes such that the persons who are connected with them cannot control their movements, and these persons become victims of the organizations and institutions to which they belong. So, when a new truth appears, the old organization rolls on like a Juggernaut car, and crushes the life, so far as it is possible, out of everything in its way. Take, for example, and note what a power it is and what an unconscious bribe it is to those who belong to it, the great Anglican Church. A man's ambitions, if he has learning, power, ability, tell him that there is the Archbishopric of Canterbury ahead of him as a possibility. His hopes, the chances of promotion and power, are with the institution. And, then, it is such a tremendous social influence. It is no wonder, then, that men who are not over-strong, who have not the stuff in them out of which heroes are made, should cling to the institution and remain loyal to it, even while they are false to the truth that used to animate it and for which alone any institution ought to exist.

Let me give you another illustration. Edward Temple, late Bishop of London, and who is now the Archbishop of Canterbury, had a priest of the established Church come to him and make a confession of holding certain beliefs which he knew were heretical. The archbishop said to him frankly: As Edward Temple, I believe them, I am in sympathy with your views. As the head of the English Church, I must be opposed to them; and the opinions which you hold cannot be tolerated. That is what the influence of a great organization may come to.

Let me give you another concrete illustration. Here is our American Bible Society, which publishes and circulates millions of Bibles all over the world. It is obliged, as at present organized, to print and distribute the King James version of the Bible; but there is not a scholar or a minister connected with the organization anywhere who does not know at least, since the revision at any rate that in many important respects the King James version is not an accurate translation of the original, even if that is conceded to be infallible. So that this organization stands to-day in the position of being obliged to circulate all over the world for God's truth any number of teachings that are simply blunders of the translator, of the copyist, or interpolated passages that have come down from the past.

So men in every direction become persuaded that they must be loyal to the organization. I know cases where a minister in conversation with a friend has said: So long as I remain a member of this Church, I have got a great institution back of me, and I can accomplish so much socially and in every way on account of it. I know I do not believe half of the creed, but any number of other ministers are in the same box. And so they stay true to the organization, while truth to the truth is sacrificed.

One other influence that keeps so many of these old ideas alive or prolongs their existence beyond the natural term is right in here. Any number of men, educated, strong, prominent men, give their countenance and influence to the support of old-time religious organizations because they believe that somehow or other they are serviceable as a police force in the world, they keep people quiet, they help preserve social order. I have had people over and over again say that they believed it would be a great calamity to disturb the Roman Catholic Church, because it keeps so many people quiet. Do you know, friends, I regard this as the worst infidelity that I know of on the face of the earth. It is doubt of God, his ability to lead and manage his world without cheating it. It is doubt of truth, as to whether it is safe for anybody except very wise people, like a few of us! It is doubt of humanity, its capacity to find the truth, and believe in it and live on it. Do you believe that God has made this universe so that it is healthier for the masses to live on a lie than it is for them to live on the truth? Is that your confidence in God? Is that the kind of God you worship? It is not the kind I worship. There is no danger of the ignorant masses of the world getting wise too fast, judging by the experience of the past up to the present time. There is only one thing that is safe; and that is truth. Do you know what the trouble was at the time of the French Revolution? It was not that the people began to reason and think, and lost their faith, as so frequently said by superficial historians: it was that they waked up at last to the idea that the aristocracy and the priesthood had not only been fleecing them financially and keeping them down socially, but had been fooling them religiously, until at last they broke away, having no confidence left in God or priest or educated people or nobility or anything. No wonder they made havoc. If you want to make a river dangerous, dam it up, keep the waters back, until by and by the pressure from the hills and the mountains becomes so great that it can be restricted no longer; and it not only breaks through the dam, but bursts all barriers, floods the country, sweeps away homes, farms, cattle, human beings, towns, cities, leaving ruin in its path. Let rivers flow as God meant them to; and they will be safe.

So let the world learn,-- learn gradually, and adapt itself to new truth as it learns, and there will be an even and orderly march of human progress. The danger is in our setting ourselves up as being wiser than God, wiser than the universe, and doling out to the multitude the little fragments of truth that we think are fitted for their digestion. The impertinence of it, and the impiety of it!

I must not stop to deal with other reasons which lie in my mind this morning. You can think along other channels for yourselves. I have simply wished to suggest that, in the kind of world we are living in, you may not be sure, at any particular age in history, that a set of ideas is going to be accepted by the multitude merely because they are true; and, because they are not accepted at once, you are not, therefore, to come to the conclusion that they are not true. There never has been a time in the history of the world when the truth was not in the minority. Go back to the time of Jesus: do you not remember how the people asked whether any of the scribes or the Pharisees believed on him? They were ready to accept him if they could go with the crowd; but it never occurred to them to raise the question as to whether it was their duty to go with him while he was alone, as to whether two or three might not represent some higher conception of God, some forward step on the part of humanity. Consider for just a moment, let it be in literature, in art, in government, in ethics, anywhere, find out where the crowd is, and you will find where the truth is not. Disraeli made a very profound remark when he said that a popular opinion was always the opinion which was about to pass away. By the time a notion gets accepted by the crowd, the deeper students are seeing some higher and finer truth towards which they are reaching.

The pioneers are always in the minority. The vanguard of an army is never so large as the main body that comes along behind after the way has been laid out for it.

"Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust."

That is Lowell's suggestion, in that famous poem of his. If we care for truth, we shall not wait until it becomes popular. The truth in any direction to-day, if we had the judgment of the world, would be voted down. Christianity would be voted down among the religions; Protestantism would be voted down in Christianity; and the highest and finest thinkers in the Protestant churches would be voted down by the majority of the members.

Do not be disturbed, then, or troubled, because you have not the crowd and the shouting accompanying you on your onward march; and remember that there must be something of heroism in this consecration to truth. I wish to quote to you, as bearing on this truth, a wonderfully fine word which I have just come across in a recent number of the Cosmopolitan Magazine, the word of the Hon. Thomas B. Reed, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. He says, "One with God may be a majority; but crucifixion and the fagot may antedate the counting of the votes." But, if it means crucifixion and the fagot, and we claim to be followers of the Nazarene and worthy of him, even for that we shall not shrink. It is our business simply to raise the question, and try to answer it or ourselves, Which way must I go to follow the truth? And that way I must tread, whether it means life or death, whatever the consequences; for the truth-seeker is the only God-seeker.

WHERE IS THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH?

As you are aware, there are certain churches that have taken the name of Evangelical, thereby, of course, putting forth the claim that in some special or peculiar way they have the gospel in keeping. For "Evangel" is the word translated "gospel," "Evangelist" is a "preacher of the gospel," "Evangelical" is the appropriate name for the church whose ministers preach the gospel. And the word "gospel," as you know, translated, means good news. It is the proclamation of hope, of something that the world has been groping in darkness for, a message that should lift the burden off the human heart, make men stronger to endure, fill them with cheer in the midst of life's difficulties and dangers, and give them a trust with which to walk out into the darkness that lies at the end.

A certain section, I say, of the Christian Church has appropriated this name; and by common consent it has been conceded to it. And as usage makes language, and the dictionaries only record the results of popular usage, why, of course, we must confess that this use of words is right. Right in that sense, I say. But I wish to go back of this popular usage this morning, and raise the question as to whether these churches that claim the title are the ones to whom it peculiarly or exclusively belongs. I wish to put forward the claim that we, though the idea is entirely against popular thought, are really the ones who are preaching the gospel of God, and that the liberals of the world come nearer today to proclaiming the actual original gospel of Jesus the Christ than do any other body of Christians in the world. I wish to do this, not in any spirit of antagonism, but simply by way of clear definition, and that we may understand where we are, and may unfalteringly and trustingly and loyally and hopefully go on to do the highest work that was ever committed to human hands.

At the outset, though it will necessitate my saying certain things which I have said to you before, I must outline briefly that body of doctrine which goes by the name of "Evangelical." I will not go back two or three hundred years to include in it such dogmas as Foreordination, Election, the Damnation of non-Elect or non-Baptized Infants, though these doctrines still remain in the creeds. I will take what must be considered the simpler and fairer course of confining myself to setting forth those beliefs which are generally accepted, and which are made a part of the creed of the so-called "Evangelical Alliance" that is, an organization including representatives of all the great so-called Evangelical Churches. These beliefs, in brief, are that God created the world perfect in the first place, but that in a very short time it was invaded by the evil powers, and mankind rebelled against the Creator, and became the subjects of the devil as the god of this world. Then man, by thus rebelling against God, lost his intellectual power to discern truth, became mentally unable to discover spiritual truth, to find the divine way in which he ought to walk; and that he became morally incapable, so that, even when the truth was presented to him, he felt an aversion towards it, and was disinclined to accept it. The next point is this being the condition of things that God began to reveal himself to the world, first, by angel messengers, by prophets, by inspired men, and that then at last, through certain chosen mediums, he wrote a book telling men the truth about their condition, about his feeling towards them, about what they ought to do, and the destiny involved in the kind of life they should live here. After the world had been in existence about four thousand years, according to this teaching, and very little headway had been made even among the chosen people, the few that had been selected from the great outside and wandering nations, God himself comes down to earth, by means of a woman specially prepared to be his mother he is born without a human father. He lives, he suffers, he dies. This, after one theory or another, I need not go into them, to make it possible for God to forgive, and to enable him to save those who should accept the terms which he should offer.

Then, after his withdrawal from the earth, his Church is organized under the special guidance of the Holy Spirit. Its mission is to proclaim the gospel among all nations. That proclamation has gone on; but after two thousand years not a third of the world has heard the gospel, not a third of the people who walk the planet knows anything about the book that has been written. But they still stumble along in darkness, worshipping anything except the one only and true God. So that this effort up to the present time would strike us, if we judged it as a human device, as being a sad and lamentable failure.

The upshot of this, according to the Evangelical creed, is that the great majority of the world is to be permanently lost. Only a few, those who are converted or those becoming members of the true Church, connected with it sacramentally or in some way, only the few are to be saved, and the great majority outcast forever.

This, in substance, makes up what has been called the gospel; and those who claim that they are preaching the gospel are preaching these things as true. I am well aware and I would not have anybody suppose that I overlooked it that this creed is undergoing very striking and marked changes, and that a great many of those things which some of us look upon as more objectionable are being left out of sight, and not preached, as they used to be, though they still remain in the creeds.

I am aware, for example, that what it is to be orthodox or evangelical has been reduced to very low terms as compared with those which I have just set forth; that is to say, reduced to very low terms in certain quarters. For instance, Dr. Lyman Abbott, of Brooklyn, tells us that we need not believe in the infallibility of the Bible any more; that we need not believe in the old-time Trinity; that we need not believe that Jesus was essentially different from a man; we need not believe in the virgin birth, unless we find it easy to accept it. But the two things which he tells us we must believe in order to be orthodox, or evangelical, are that in some way, though he does not define how, the Bible contains a special message from God to the world, and that in some way Jesus particularly and specially represents God, and that he reveals him to men, so that, when he speaks, he speaks with authority, as representing divine truth. Everlasting Damnation eliminated, Foreordination not referred to, the Trinity transformed, Infallibility no longer insisted on, the humanity of Jesus granted, to be orthodox, according to Dr. Abbott, has become a comparatively simple thing.

In my conversations with clergymen of other churches during the past winter I have discovered that there, too, among certain men, the conditions of being orthodox are a great deal simpler than they were a hundred years ago. An Episcopalian tells me it is only necessary to accept the Nicene and the Apostles' Creeds, and that even then one is at liberty to interpret them as he pleases; that this is what constitutes Orthodoxy and makes one evangelical.

But this process of eliminating the hard doctrines has not gone on in any authoritative way on the part of the Church itself. There has been no proclamation of any such liberty allowed; and I am not aware that the most of these men have made any public statement in their own churches of these positions. It may be known through personal conversations that they hold these views; and, if they are rendering good service, they may not be disturbed by the church authorities in their positions.

So much, then, for a statement as to what constitutes the Evangelical Church, as to what must be the message of the minister who is to preach "the gospel of Christ."

Now I wish to call your attention for a moment to another way of looking at these doctrines. I am not to question their truth. I simply wish to ask you to note as to whether, considering them true, we should be inclined to speak of them as good news. Are they a gospel? Can we with gladness proclaim them to men? For example, suppose God, after creating the world, loses control of it, an evil power comes in, his enemy, takes possession of his fair earth, alienates from him the hearts of the only two of his children who are in existence here, and who are to be the parents of a countless race. Suppose that is true. Is it something we would like to believe? Is it good news? Can we call it an integral part of a gospel?

Suppose, again, that God writes a book, an infallible book, and gives it to whom? To a few people, to the little company of Jews who lived on that little narrow strip of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. He does not give it to anybody else. He has given, indeed, according to this theory, the Old Testament and the New to Christendom since that day. But think a moment.

According to what we know to be true now, man was on this planet for two or three hundred thousand years before God revealed himself at all; and the race went stumbling on and falling in darkness, no light, no hand stretched out to help, no voice speaking out of the silent heavens, the world, apparently, absolutely forgotten, so far as God's truth was concerned. Suppose that, after two or three hundred thousand years, God did give an infallible book to the world. As I had occasion to say a moment ago, comparatively a very small part of his children have heard anything about it. And, then, what is very striking, the proofs of its having come from him are so weak that most of the wisest, the best, the noblest of the world, cannot accept any such claim on its behalf. Is this, if it be true, good news? Would we speak of it as a gospel, something of which to be glad, something to proclaim to mankind as a cheer, a message from on high?

Once more, suppose, after the world had been in existence for two or three hundred thousand years, God comes down, incarnates himself, wears a human body, and does what he can to save men. If it is true, in the economy of the divine government, that human souls could be saved in no other way, is that good news? Would we think of it as a gospel to proclaim to mankind, that God himself must suffer, must be outcast, be spit upon, be reviled, be put to death, and that only so could he forgive one of his wandering children, and bring him back to himself?

Then, once more, suppose all this to be true, and suppose that, as the outcome of it all, the countless millions of men and women and children that have walked the earth during the last three hundred thousand years, until the Jews received their first light from heaven, suppose that they have been lost: that is a part of this gospel. Suppose that since that time all the nations outside of Christendom have been lost: that is a part of this gospel. Suppose that not only this be true, but that all people in Christendom who have not been members of churches have been lost. Suppose even, as I used to hear it preached when I was a boy, that large numbers of those who were church members were not really children of God, and would be lost. Suppose this most horrible doctrine be true. Is it good news? Could we proclaim it with any heart of courage as a part of the gospel of God?

It seems to me, then, that I am bringing no railing accusation when I say that those Churches that claim to be Evangelical are not proclaiming a gospel to the world. But, though this be literally true, they may claim that they are delivering the message of Jesus the Christ, and that, from their point of view, this is relatively a piece of good news, good news, at any rate, to the few who are going to be saved. So I ask you now to turn, while I examine with you for a few moments the essence of the gospel which Jesus proclaimed. Note its terms. Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel;" that is, this proclamation of good news, the coming of God's kingdom. Was this the essential thing in the gospel of Christ?

Let me ask you now to look with me for a few moments. You are perfectly well aware of the fact that the Jews cherished a belief in the coming of a Messiah and the establishment of God's kingdom here on earth and among men. You are not so well aware, perhaps, unless you have made a study of it, that a belief like this has not been confined to the Jews. In many other nations a similar expectation has been cherished. We find it, for example, among some of the tribes of our North American Indians. It is world-wide, in other words, in its range. It is no peculiarity of the Jews. But let us confine ourselves a moment to their particular hope. It is a perfectly natural belief. It required no revelation in order for it to grow up. They believed that the God of the world, of the universe, was their God; that they were his chosen people. Do you not see what a necessary corollary would be a belief in their ultimate prosperity and triumph? God would certainly bless and give the kingdom to that people which he had specially selected for his own. And so, as the coming of the kingdom was postponed, they believed that it was because they had not complied with the divine conditions, they had not kept the law or they had not been good, they had not obeyed him. Somehow, they had done wrong; and that was the reason the kingdom so long delayed.

Remember another thing. We have come, in this modern time, to place the kingdom away off in another world after the close of this life. The Jews had no such belief about it. They expected it to come right here on this poor little planet of ours; and they expected that a kingdom was to be set up which was not only to place them at the head of humanity, but through them was to bless all mankind. Different thinkers among them held different views, but this in substance was the belief; and they were constantly looking for signs of this imminent revolution which was to make the kingdoms of this world the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ, that is, his Anointed One.

John the Baptist preached that this kingdom was coming. But he was imprisoned and beheaded, having come into conflict with the civil authority. Jesus, then, having come from Nazareth, where he had studied and thought and brooded over the divine will, takes up this broken work of John, and begins a proclamation of the gospel; and the one thing which constituted that gospel was: The kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe; accept this statement. And note that "repent" on the lips of Jesus did not mean what we have been accustomed to associate with it. The New Testament word translated "repent" means change your purpose, change your method of life. You have not been in accord with the truth, you have not been obedient to God; turn about, come into accord with the divine law, become obedient to the divine message.

Jesus taught no kingdom in any other world. He believed that the kingdom was to be here. For, even after he had disappeared from the sight of men, and this reflects in the clearest possible way the burden of his message, his disciples expected, not that they were to be transferred to some other planet or into an invisible world to find the kingdom, but that Jesus was to come back, to return in the clouds of heaven, and establish the kingdom here.

The kingdom, then, that Jesus preached was a kingdom of righteousness here on this earth, among just the kind of people that we are. And, note, he said, This kingdom of God does not come by observation. You are not to say, Lo here, Lo there, look for wonders. He says, The kingdom of God is within you, or among you. It is translated both ways; and, I suppose, nobody knows which way it ought to be. I believe both. The kingdom of God that Jesus preached is essentially in us. It is also, after it is in a few of us, among us, right here already, so far as it extends, and reaching out its limits and growing as rapidly as men discern it and become obedient to its laws.

Now I have been asked a great many times how I can be sure, or practically sure, as to what sayings in the Gospels are really those of Jesus and what are traditional in their authority, what are doubtfully his. I cannot go into a long explanation this morning; but I want to suggest one line of thought. And I do this because I wish it to be the basis of a statement that Jesus has not made any of these things that are to-day labelled "Evangelical" any essential part of his gospel at all. Jesus, for example, does not preach any Garden of Eden or any Fall of Man. Jesus says nothing about any infallible book. Jesus says not a word about any Trinity. He nowhere makes any claim to be God. His doctrine concerning the future is doubtful. But one thing which I wish to insist upon is perfectly clear: the conditions of citizenship in the kingdom of God are the simplest conceivable. He says, Not those that say, Lord, Lord, not those that multiply their services and ceremonies, but those that do the will of my Father shall enter the kingdom. The only condition that Jesus ever established for membership in the kingdom of heaven is simple human goodness, never anything else.

I am perfectly well aware that somebody may quote to me, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; and he that believeth not shall be damned." But the reply to that would be, The acknowledged statement to-day on the part of all competent scholars is that Jesus never uttered those words. They are left out of the Revised Version of the New Testament: they are no authentic part of the story of his life or his teaching.

How can we find his words? In the first place there are the great central, luminous truths which Jesus uttered, the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of men, goodness as the condition of acceptance on the part of God. And, on the theory that he did not contradict himself, we are at liberty to waive one side those statements which grew up under the influence of later tradition, popish or ecclesiastical, and which plainly contradict these. But the main point I have in mind is one which scholars have wrought out under the name of the Triple Tradition. It takes for its central thought, "In the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established." We know that the Gospels grew up through a long process of accretion after a good many years. They were not written or planned by any one person; and, so far as we know, they may not have been written by anybody whose name is traditionally connected with them to-day. If, however, we find that three of the four witnesses agree in reporting that he said or did a certain thing, we feel surer about it than when only one witness reports it. And if two report, why, even then we feel a little more certain than we do when the report is from only one. And yet, of course, the three may have omitted that which only one has recorded, and which is true. But scholars have wrought out along this line what is called the Triple Tradition; that is, they have constructed a complete story of the life and the teaching and the death of Jesus out of the words which are common to three of the gospel writers. All of them tell this same story; and this story of the Triple Tradition has no miraculous conception, it has no resurrection of the body, no ascension into heaven. The miracles are reduced to the very lowest terms, becoming almost natural and easy to be accounted for. In this story Jesus teaches none of the things of which I have been speaking.

I say, then, that along the lines of the very best critical scholarship, coming as near to the teaching of Jesus as we possibly can to-day, we are warranted in saying that this which has usurped the name of the gospel of Christ is not only not good news, but it is not the news which Jesus brought and preached. As has been said a good many times, it is a gospel about Christ instead of being the gospel of Christ.

I am ready now to make the claim that we liberals of the modern world are the ones who come nearer to preaching the gospel of Christ than any other part of the so-called Christian Church. For what is it that we preach? We preach that the kingdom of God is at hand. We preach that there is not a spot on the face of the earth where we are not at the foot of a ladder like that which Jacob saw in his dream, and which leads up to the very throne of the Almighty. Jesus taught that the kingdom of God might begin anywhere and at any time in any human heart. Note what Matthew Arnold has called the secret and the method of Jesus. He says, The secret of Jesus is that he who selfishly seeks his life shall lose it: he who throws it away for good and God finds it. Do we need to go very deeply into human life to discover the profound truth of that saying? Seek all over the world for good and happiness, and forget to look within, and you do not find it. The kingdom of heaven is within. It is in the spirit, the temper of the heart, the disposition, the life. And the secret of it is in cultivating love and truth and tenderness and care, those things which bring us into intimate connection with which we mean when we say, Be unselfish, and that in doing this we find our own souls. For the man who gives out of himself love and tenderness and care, of necessity cultivates the qualities of love and tenderness and care; and those are the ones which are the essence of all soul-building. And he who looks outside for the greatest things of life misses them; while he who looks within, and cultivates the spirit, finds God and happiness and truth.

This gospel, then, that the kingdom of God is at hand, is always ready to come, is the gospel which we proclaim. And now I wish to extend that idea a little. The form in which Jesus held his dream of human good has changed in the process of the centuries. We no longer expect a miraculous revelation of a kingdom coming out of the heavens to abide on earth. The form of it is changed; but the essence of it we hold still, the same perfect condition of men here on earth and in the future which Jesus held and proclaimed.

Now let me hint to you a few of the elements that make up this hope for man which we liberals proclaim everywhere as the gospel, the good news of the coming kingdom of God.

In the first place, we proclaim the possibility of human conquest over this earth. What do I mean by that? I mean that man is able and he is showing that ability ultimately to control the forces of this planet, and make them his servants. Within the last seventy-five years this increasing conquest has changed the face of the planet. We now use water power not only, but steam, electricity, magnetism. All these secret forces that thrill from planet to planet and sun to sun we use as our household and factory drudges, our every-day servants. And it needs only a little imagination, looking along the lines of past progress, to see the day when man shall stand king of the earth. He shall make all these forces serve him. I believe that we have only just begun this conquest. Already the wonders about us eclipse the wonders of novelist and dreamer; and yet we have only begun to develop them. What follows from this? When we have completed the conquest of the earth, when we have discovered God's laws of matter and force and are able to keep them, it means the abolition of all unnecessary pain, unnecessary pain, I say; for all that pain which is not beneficent, which is not inherent in the nature of things, is remedial. And we preach the gospel, the coming of God's kingdom when pain shall be abolished, and shall pass away.

Another step: We preach the gospel of the abolition of disease. We have already, in the few civilized centres of the world, made the old epidemics simply impossible. They are easily controlled. Nearly every one of those that rise to threaten Europe and America to-day come from the religious, ignorant, wild fanaticism of Asia, beyond the range of our civilized control. The conditions of disease are discoverable; and the day will come when, barring accidents here and there, well-born people may calmly expect to live out their natural term of years. We preach this gospel, then, of the kingdom of God in which disease shall no more exist.

We preach a gospel that promises a time when war shall be no more. At present wars are now and then inevitable; but they are brutal, they are unspeakably horrible. And how any one who uses the sympathetic imagination can rejoice, not over the victory, but over the destruction of life and property which the victory entails, I cannot understand. We have reached a time when civilized man no longer thinks he must right his wrong with his fists or a club or a knife or a pistol. On the part of individuals we call this a reversion to barbarism. The time will come, and we are advancing towards it, when it will be considered just as much a reversion to barbarism on the part of families, states, nations, and when we shall substitute hearts and brains for bruises and bullets in the settlement of the world's misunderstandings. We preach, then, a gospel of the coming of the kingdom in which there shall be no more war. And then life under the fair heavens will be sweet.

There shall be no more hunger in that kingdom. To-day see what confronts us, bread riots in Spain and in Italy, thousands of people hungry for food. And yet, if we would give ourselves to the development of the resources of this planet instead of to their destruction, this fair earth could support a hundred times its present population in plenty and in peace. There shall be no more famine in that kingdom the gospel of which we preach.