the social sphere any more than in the so called "physical" sphere simply shows with how little seriousness, how little faith, men have taken to themselves the conception of God incarnate in humanity Man can but discover law by uncov ering it. He can uncover it only by freeing life, by freeing expression, so that the truth may appear with more conscious and more compelling force.

The spiritual unification of humanity, the realization of the brotherhood of man, all that Christ called the Kingdom of God is but the further expression of this freedom of truth The truth is not fully freed when it gets into some individual's consciousness, for him to delectate himself with. It is freed only when it moves in and through this favored individual to his fellows; when the truth which comes to consciousness in one, extends and distributes itself to all so that it becomes the Common-wealth, the Republic, the public affair The walls broken down by the freedom which is democracy, are all the walls preventing the complete movement of truth. It is in the community of truth thus established that the brotherhood, which is democracy, has its being. The supposition that the ties which bind men together, that the forces which unify society, can be other than the very laws of God, cau be other than the outworking of God in life, is a part of that same practical unbelief in the presence of God in the world which I have already mentioned. Here then we have democracy! on its negative side, the breaking down of the barriers which hold truth from finding expression, on its positive side, the securing of conditions which give truth its movement, its complete distribution or service. It is no accident that the growing organization of democracy coincides with the rise of science, including the machinery of telegraph and locomotive for dis

tributing truth. There is but one fact-the more complete movement of man to his unity with his fellows through realizing the truth of life.

Democracy thus appears as the means by which the revelation of truth is carried on. It is in democracy, the community of ideas and interest through community of action, that the incarnation of God in man (man, that is to say, as organ of universal truth) becomes a living, present thing, having its ordinary and natural sense. This truth is brought down to life, its segregation removed; it is made a common truth enacted in all departments of action, not in one isolated sphere called religious.

Is the isolated truth about to welcome its completion in the common truth? Is the partial revelation ready to die as partial in order to live in the fuller? This is the practical question which faces us. Can we surrender-not simply the bad per se-but the possessed good in order to lay hold of a larger good? Shall we welcome the revelation of truth now going on in democracy as a wider realization of the truth formerly asserted in more or less limited channels and with a more or less unnatural meaning? As democracy comes to consciousness itself, becomes aware of its own spiritual basis and content, this question will confront us more and more. We are here in the University to think, that is to say, to get hold of the best tools of action. It is our duty not to float with the currents of opinion, but to ask and answer this question for ourselves in order that we may give some answer when others begin to ask it. Will the older formulation, inherited from days when the organization of society was not democratic, when truth was just getting its freedom aud its unity through freedom,—will this formulation strive and con

tend against the larger revelation because it comes from what seems to be outside its own walls, or will it welcome it joyously and loyally, as the fuller expression of its own idea and purpose?

It is your business and mine to answer this question for ourselves. If we answer it for ourselves we shall answer it for more, many more than ourselves; for it is in our hands and in the hands of such as we are, to get this question decided beyond a peradventure. There is no better time than the present for the solution; there is no better place for it than the University of Michigan-an institution based upon inquiry into truth and upon democracy Can anyone ask for better or more inspiring work? Surely to fuse into one the social and the religious motive, to break down the barriers of Pharesaism and self-assertion which isolate religious thought and conduct from the common life of man, to realize the state as one Commonwealth of truth- surely this is a cause worth battling for

Remember Lot's wife, who looked back, and who, looking

back, was fixed into a motionless pillar

CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEWSPAPER.

PROF. FRED N. SCOTT.

Delivered March 13, 1892.

"The Lord is God of the living only, the dead have another God." I take these words from a curious prose fragment by the poet Coleridge, entitled "The Wanderings of Cain." The first murderer and his little son are represented in their journeyings by night as coming upon the ghost of Abel.

The Shape that was like Abel raised himself up and spake to the child: 'I know where the cold waters are, but I may not drink, wherefore didst thou then take away my pitcher?' But Cain said: Didst thou not find favor in the sight of the Lord thy God?' The Shape answered, The Lord is God of the living only, the dead have another God.' Then the child Enos lifted up his eyes and prayed; but Cain rejoiced secretly in his heart. 'Wretched shall they be all the days of their mortal life,' exclaimed the Shape, who sacrifice worthy and acceptable sacrifices to the God of the dead, but after death their toil ceaseth. Woe is me, for I was well beloved by the God of the living, and cruel wert thou, O my brother, who didst snatch me away from his power and dominion '''

The Lord is God of the living only, the dead have another God." These words of Abel, or words startlingly similar in their import, may be heard to-day in the mouths of no small number of men who call themselves Christians. There is one God of the dead-a God of the Palestine of two or three thous

and years ago. all the days of

Offer acceptable sacrifice to him and be wretched your life, in order that after death you may cease from toil. There is another God, a rather commonplace and homely deity, who has to do with Congress and the Standard Oil company and street-car lines and telephones and dissecting-rooms, whose power is of a lower and less glorious character Make sacrifice to this God and your chances for the future are somewhat doubtful.

Such is the implication of no small part of the religious talk one hears and the religious literature one reads. Ancient things, simply because of their age, are accounted as worthy of peculiar reverence. It is as though one God were thought to be interested in persons and institutions of the past, another and a somewhat inferior God in those of the present. Say what you please, the God who provided for the transportation. of the Hebrews across the Sinaitic peninsula is, in the minds of the majority of men, a more god-like being than the one who watches your arrow-like flight from here to the Pacific coast in a Pullman palace car.

This species of polytheism, if I may call it so, is responsible, as it seems to me, for serious misinterpretations of the facts of modern life. I am anxious that in what I have to say this morning it may not yitiate my conclusions. I shall endeavor, therefore, in treating my topic, to speak from a purely monotheistic point of view. I shall try not to make any distinction between the God who spake amid thunders from Mt. Sinai, and the God who speaks from the clatter of the newspaper press, between the God who shook Calvary with an earthquake, and the God who supplies Detroit with natural gas, between the God of the uncommon and the clean, and the God of the common and the unclean.