"Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,
Severing rightly his from thine,
Which is human, which divine."

So it is the man who "gets religion" in a true way, gets his Manhood free and alive to co-work with God. "God cannot do without strong men." "He is a good worker, but loves to be helped." These are good proverbs. But we should say of the last, not only loves to be helped, but must be helped. What destiny is for man, man must achieve. God bestows no gifts except Existence and the Capacity for all achievements. We say must, for Humanity cannot resist its own compelling. By virtue of its native nature it will assert higher and higher possibilities. Yet, God the Pre-Determiner, is All in All. He forecasts Eternity, and the Universe is sure with means adapted to ends. This is the basis of Faith, and lets men know that they are charged with power for all the fortune that shall attend them! Every man is strong enough to enforce his convictions, said Goethe. Religion is the power of enforcement, when the conviction is of a universal good. Our objection to religious methods is, that they are too personal and mechanical; that they assert the "me" of a man in too positive a degree, and in artificial ways, when it is this "me," this myself," which Religion should put to death.

There is a Religion of fear (consenting for the moment to that use of the term,) which contents, in the present day, the great mass of mankind. We know not if it be Paganism, or what. It is not Christianity. It manifests itself in methods and forms of worship that shall propitiate the God-Judge, or God-King. It is a relation to the Divine (?) which constant personal anxiety keeps well sustained. If it speaks at any time of love, the love easily merges into fear. In this Religion the selfishood of man is most painful.

There is a Religion of love that is Christianity, which many profess, but few accept. It manifests itself at present, in methods and forms of worship, such as are believed to be pleasing and acceptable to God as Father, and to have most beneficial influence on the worshipers. But in this Religion there is also recognition of self which detracts from its power. It is love for love. It is a relation to the Divine Being, which says, "Thou God seest me; therefore, I do, or refrain, because thou first didst love me, and I love thee, and I fear through my very love to offend." Why should God's seeing make any difference? Is there no moral sentiment to pronounce "Right" or "Wrong"?

Here we touch the thought, which we would emphasize as Religion. The moral sentiment of Right, which God represents as we affirm it.

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of him, is universal in its reach, holds all as one, and lays unreleasing hold on eternity. But we affirm this moral sentiment of man as well. He, too, is related to the universal, and can ally himself to the Eternal. What then shall man be? A seeker of benefits, or a creator and worker? The world has much to say about the temporal and the eternal. By this it means a division of worlds. Politics, Art, Literature, Philosophy, Science, are of this world also morality, and are all temporal. Its Religion, as Coleridge said, is "other-worldliness." This side the grave, means temporal. The side beyond the grave, means eternal. Shall we not find a better distinction? Shall we not so interpret religion that we can let the other world rest until our fortune of life finds us there as dwellers-making this world as sacred as the next shall be; life as little to be despised here, as it shall be in any hereafter? Phillipsohn, the able Jewish writer, makes it his chief argument against Christianity, that it renders this world mean and contemptible by its dismal strain of immortalitydismal to his cultured soul, because it reveals in the great mass of mankind who are chanting it, a thought so entirely selfish. So far as Christianity can be made responsible for this "dismal strain of future life," it must go under condemnation. Jesus, however, was not a "Christian." He cut the One-world apart as regards this world. His "this world" meant surface, pretension, illusion, show, hypocrisy, sham. His "Eternal life," was quality of life, and not duration or place of existence. "Love God with mind and heart, and your neighbor as yourself." That was all he said. Tear down the partition wall and there is One World and Eternity already present. To live in this great Eternity, and, forgetting little or great private aims, (which are temporal, for they must be set aside for the common weal), to work with a whole devotion to truth as to universal ends, is that marriage of Man with God which, in all places and forever, must be for man, his Religion! Herein are all callings of life ennobled. The True, the Beautiful, the Good: devotion to these as they everywhere appear, revealing the True, Beautiful, and Good Providence, or Order, is Religion. This Religion can be subtracted from no department. It is the one Reality. It is the Life of Art, of Philosophy, of all Literature, of Politics even; so far as these have life, Religion supplies. It is the Life of all life that shall not perish!

In devoting our Magazine to RELIGION, have we drawn any excluding lines to bar our entrance into whatever field, so that we cannot well consider all questions of public interest? We think not. On the contrary, we include all departments of thought and work, which have for mankind any real worth or significance.

TH

TIME.

HREEFOLD the strides of Time, from first to last!
Loitering slow, the FUTURE creepeth-

Arrow-swift, the PRESENT Ssweepeth

And motionless forever stands the PAST.

A threefold measure dwells in space-
Restless LENGTH, with flying race;
Stretching forward, never endeth,
Ever widening, BREADTH extendeth ;
Ever groundless, DEPTH descendeth.

Types in these thou dost possess ;
Restless, onward thou must press,
Never halt nor languor know,

To the Perfect wouldst thou go;
Let thy reach with Breadth extend
Till the world it comprehend-
Dive into the Depth to see

Germ and root of all that be.

Ever onward must thy soul;

'Tis the progress gains the goal; Ever widen more its bound;

In the full the clear is found,

And the truth dwells under ground. Schiller.

THE HOLINESS OF HELPFULNESS.*

BY REV. ROBERT COLLYER.

"NOT SLOTHFUL IN BUSINESS, FERVENT IN SPIRIT, SERVING THE LORD."

GEORGE STEPHENSON was getting ready to go to Methodist meeting. He was a young man just at that period in life when young men go to Methodist meeting more and more until they are brought directly under the influence of the master spirit of the place, and become in a sense religious men. There is not much doubt in my mind, as I read this young man's life up to this time, that he is in a fair way to that preferment. He has that thread of natural piety and goodness in his nature that is almost sure to draw him into a more intimate relation with the forms and industries of the recognized religious life about him, if nothing prevent. I said he was just ready to go to the meeting, when a neighbor came to tell him that he was wanted. He was then running an engine at a coal-pit. There was another pit between this and his home, which he passed every day, that had been flooded with water, so that the men were beaten out. The Company got a steam-pump to clear the pit, and kept it at work for twelve months, with no success at all. The water was, when they had been pumping twelve months, as deep as when they first began to pump, and the wives and children were starving for bread. This young Stephenson had a most active energy and fervent spirit toward whatever went by steam. The great ambition of his boyhood was to run an engine, and when he rose to that position, as he did very soon for it is a cheering fact, that while a man may long for a hundred things and not get one, a boy hardly ever fails to accomplish his purpose, if he has a genuine hunger to be, or to do some particular thing, - when this boy rose to the position he wanted, he treated his engine as if he loved her. Whenever there was holiday and the works were stopped, instead of going out with the rest, he studied her until she became as familiar to him as his own right hand. He was not slothful in business, and he was fervent in spirit. Intimate with the charge that was laid upon him, he soon began to perceive why those women and children were starving. The difference between what the pump was, and what it ought to be, was the difference between a tall, slender, narrow-chested man, and a short, sturdy, broad-chested man engaged in digging earth or scooping out water. Every pump owner in the country-side had tried to mend this pump and failed,— because, I suppose, pump-mending and engine-running with them was a business and not a passion. This young man with the fervent spirit said one day, as he went past the pit, "I can clear that pit in a week ;" and they laughed him to scorn. But they could not laugh the water to scorn ; and so at last they sent for him to come and try his hand. He went there instead of going to the

*A Discourse delivered before the Western Unitarian Conference at Cincinnati, June 17th, 1865.

Church. He went into the pit on a Sunday morning, and worked all that day, and until the next Sunday, and nearly cleared out all the water in a week, and sent the men down to earn their children bread. From that time the young man comes into notice. He works through all sorts of opposition, and never rests until he has got his engine to run fifty miles an hour. He is, more than any other man, entitled to be called the father of the Railroad system. He kept the diligent hand and fervent heart right on to the end of his life. He was a good husband, a good father, a good friend and a good citizen. But it is a curious fact that, from that time, when he was prevented from going to meeting on that Saturday night, he never seems to have gone, or to have thought of going again, to the end of his life. He did not turn religious, as we say, even when he had nothing else to do, but lived a kindly, sunny, or shadowy, faithful life right on to the end, and then died quietly, and made no sign; never said he feared he had done wrong in turning from that Church to that coal-pit, and trying to mend the pump Sunday, instead of keeping the Sabbath day holy by doing nothing. Indeed, it never seems to have occurred to him to think the matter over in any way whatever; his heart was too full, and his hand was too busy about engines, to find room for the idea; to find time, as we should say, to save his soul. And so it brings up a question that to me has a good deal of interest, namely: While this man was so busy and so fervent in the way I have noted, did he also serve the Lord? or, from the moment he turned aside from the meeting and began to lose that sense and liking for meetings and their peculiar services, did he cease to serve the Lord altogether, and remaining only diligent in business and fervent in spirit, go out of this world into murk darkness and despair?

Now I am well aware what the common answer to such a question would be, “Well, we must leave him in the hands of God; we cannot answer the question, because we have no data." Now, that is not true. If he had been an idle good-for-nothing, or scampish sharper, an abandoned libertine, or an unprincipled butcher, a political vulture; if he had beaten his wife, trained up his child in the way he should go- to states-prison; if he had been a common nuisance for sixty-nine years and a half, never going into a Church except to make a disturbance, never keeping the Sabbath except in sensual sleep; and six months before his death, or six weeks, or six days, had repented of his sin, had led a good and pure life, adopted religious ideas like those commonly held, and said clearly that he believed God had pardoned his sin, and would take him to heaven, we should feel the utmost confidence of that man's safety from that date. But we do not feel sure for this other man. It is a great mystery, and we must leave him in the hands of God. But if you push us to the fair conclusion of our own standard of religious belief, and the books we adopt, we feel compelled to say that he has gone to hell.

Now, friends, this looks to me like a tremendous piece of injustice on the very face of it. I think if a man could be brought face to face with the question as I have stated it, and as it really stands in the common theologi