action and truth in general. The very universality of Christianity precludes its being a religion. Christianity, Dr Mulford contends, is not a religion but a revelation. The condition of revelation is that it reveal. Christianity, if universal, if revelation, must be the continuously unfolding, never ceasing discovery of the meaning of life. Revelation is the ascertaining of life. It cannot be more than this; it must be all of this. Christianity then cannot stand or fall with any special theory or mode of action with which men at a given time may choose to identify it. Christianity in its reality knows no such exclusive or sectarian attitude. If it be made to stand or fall with any special theory, historical or ethical, if it be identified with some special act, ecclesiastic or ceremonial, it has denied its basis and its destiny The one claim that Christianity makes is that God is truth; that as truth He is love and reveals Himself fully to man, keeping back nothing of himself; that man is so one with the truth thus revealed that it is not so much revealed to him as in him; he is its incarnation, that by the appropriation of truth, by identification with it, man is free; free negatively, free from sin, free positively, free to live his own life, free to express himself, free to play without let or limitation upon the instrument given him-the environment of natural wants and forces. As revelation, Christianity must reveal. The only tests by which it can be tried are the tests of fact is there truth constantly ascertained and appropriated by man? Does a life loyal to the truth bring freedom? It is obvious that in other religions there is no great inconsistency in the claim of certain men to be the special representatives of religion, insisting that there are certain specific ideas to be held, certain special acts to be performed, as religions. No other religion has ever generalized its basis and its motive, apprehending the universality of truth, and its consequent self-revealing power to everyone. But in Christianity the attempt to fix religious truth once for all, to hold it within certain rigid limits, to say this and just this is Christianity, is self-contradictory The revelation of truth must continue as long as life has new meanings to unfold, new action to propose. An organization may loudly proclaim its loyalty to Christianity and to Christ, but if, in asserting its loyalty, it assumes a certain guardianship of Christian truth, a certain prerogative in laying down what is this truth, a certain exclusiveness in the administration of religious conduct, if in short the organization attempts to preach a fixity in a moving world and to claim a monopoly in a common world-all this is a sign that the real Christianity is now working outside of and beyond the organization, that the revelation is going on in wider and freer channels. The historic organization called the church has just learned one lesson of this sort. There was a time when the church assumed the finality of its ideas upon the relations of God and the world, and of the relations of nature and man. For centuries the visible church assumed that it was the guardian and administrator of truth in these matters. It not only strove against the dawning and rising science as false, but it called this science impious and anti-Christian, till science almost learned to call herself by the name so positively and continuously fixed upon her. But it turned out then as ever-truth exists not in word, but in power As in the parable of the two sons, the one who boasted of his readiness to serve in the vineyard went not, while the younger son who said he would not go, went out into the vineyard of nature and by obedience to : the truth revealed the deeper truth of unity of law, the presence of one continuous living force, the conspiring and vital unity of all the world. The revelation was made in what we term science. The revelation could not be interrupted on account of the faithlessness of the church, it pushed out in the new channel. Again, I repeat, revelation must reveal. It is not simply a question of the reality declared, it is also a question of comprehension by him to whom the reality is declared. A Hindoo religion, a Greek religion, might place its religious truths in mysteries which were not comprehended. A religion of revelation must uncover and discover; it must bring home its truth to the consciousness of the individual. Revelation undertakes, in a word, not only to state that the truth of things is such and such, it undertakes to give the individual organs for the truth, organs by which he can get hold of, can see and feel, the truth. To overlook this side of revelation is to keep the word but deny the fact. Of late, the theologians, as well as the philosophers, have been turning their guns upon agnosticism, the doctrine that God, and the fundamental realities of life, are hid from man's knowledge. What is true for one must be true for another, and if agnosticism is false, false also is the doctrine that revelation is the process by which an external God declares to man certain fixed statements about himself and the methods of His working God is essentially and only the self-revealing, and the revelation is complete only as men come to realize Him. So much for the first part of my subject. Christianity is revelation, and revelation means effective discovery, the actual ascertaining or guaranteeing to man of the truth of his life and the reality of the Universe. It is at this point that the significance of democracy appears. The kingdom of God, as Christ said, is within us, or among us. The revelation is, and can be, only in intelligence. It is strange to hear men call themselves Christian teachers, and at the same time condemn the use of reason and of thought in relation to Christian truth Christianity as revelation is not only to, it is in man's thought and reason. Beyond all other means of appropriating truth, beyond all other organs of apprehension, is man's own action Man interprets the Universe in which he lives in terms of his own action at the given time. Had Jesus Christ made an absolute, detailed and explicit statement upon all the facts of life, that statement would not have had meaning--it would not have been revelation-until men began to realize in their own action the truth he declared until they themselves began to live it. In final analysis, man's own action, his own life movement, is the only organ he has for receiving and appropriating truth. Man's action is found in his social relationships-the way in which he connects with his fellows. It is man's social organization, the state in which he is expressing himself, which always has and always must set the form and sound the keynote to the understanding of Christianity Jesus himself taught that the individual is free in his life because the individual is the organ of the absolute Truth of the Universe. I see no reason for believing that Jesus meant this in any but its most general sense; I do not see any reason for supposing that he meant that the individual is free simply in some one special direction or department; I do not see any reason for supposing that his teaching of truth's accessibility to man is to be taken in any unnatural or limited way the world to which these ideas were taught did not find itself Yet free, and did not find the road to truth so straight and open. Slaveries of all sort abounded; the individual found himself enslaved to nature and to his fellows. He found ignorance instead of knowledge; darkness instead of light. These facts fixed the method of interpretation for that time. It was impossible that the teachings of Jesus should be understood in their direct, natural sense when the whole existing world of action seemed to contradict them. It was inevitable that these teachings should be deflected and distorted through their medium of interpretation-the existing conditions of action. The significance of democracy as revelation is that it enables us to get truths in a natural, every-day and practical sense which otherwise could be grasped only in a somewhat unnatural or sentimental sense. I assume that democracy is a spiritual fact and not a mere piece of governmental machinery If there is no God, no law, no truth in the universe, or if this God is an absentee God, not actually working, then no social organization has any spiritual meaning. If God is, as Christ taught, at the root of life, incarnate in man, then democracy has a spiritual meaning which it behooves us not to pass by Democracy is freedom. If truth is at the bottom of things, freedom means giving this truth a chance to show itself, a chance to well up from the depths. Democracy, as freedom, means the loosening of bonds; the wearing away of restrictions, the breaking down of barriers, of middle walls, of partitions. Through this doing away with restrictions, whatever truth, whatever reality there is in man's life is freed to express itself Democracy is, as freedom, the freeing of truth. Truth makes free, but it has been the work of history to free truth-to break down the walls of isolation and of class interest which held it in and under The idea that man can enact "law" in |