the austere impulse reasserted itself in Calvinism, in Puritanism, in the Jesuits. But knowledge, joy, naturalness, went on growing; they have changed the conception of religion itself, turning it to the sense of a present as well as a future fruition.

The sense of human suffering comes in our day to full realization. The best impulse of the time throws itself against that, as formerly against sin. Just as the evil of sin was overstated and became an exaggeration and terror, so the sense of human suffering is often overstretched and becomes pessimism. But, essentially, a fresh and powerful enthusiasm assails the evils of mankind. It aims

to educate and elevate the whole being, to save

men.

It has in science a new instrument.

--

The old hope of some speedy millennium is gone. We see that the general advance must be slow. But we also see that the imperfect condition is not so terrible as it was once supposed: it does not incur hell; it does not imply total depravity; it may even serve as stepping-stone to higher things.

All the higher phases of man's nature point together. The highest thought says, "All is well;" the deepest feeling, "God is love;" the human affection realizes its immortality; the seeing eye finds universal beauty; the profoundest yearning enfolds the promise, “I shall be satisfied."

We may follow the story by another thread. A human society inspired and bound together by the highest traits, consciously ensphered in a

divine power and inspired by it, this is the ideal which has been reached toward and grown toward through all the ages.

Its primitive germ was Israel's hope of a splendid national future.

In Jesus this expanded into the Kingdom of God among men, that is, the perfect reign of goodness, love, and the human-divine relation of son and father. He looked for its realization by miracle, and when that failed said, "Thy will be done," and died, trusting all to the Father.

His followers, at first under the dream of his second coming, settled into a society bound together by common rules and ideals. The Catholic church was born and grew. Mixed with all human elements of imperfection, it advanced a long way toward the goal, then divided its sway with new energies.

In the political and social life of Europe, and especially of England, there slowly grew up a population fit for self-government in place of government by the few.

Thomas More foresaw prophetically a community which should realize the loftiest vision, and whose bond should be human and social, not theologic.

The Puritan tried to enforce the will of God, as he understood it, by authority, to build a commonwealth on Hebrew lines. He failed, in England and America, but stamped his character on both peoples.

Then came the essay of the Quaker toward a reign of peace.

Next, the Wesleyan movement, quickening the English heart and conscience, and sending the wave which did in a degree for the West of America what Puritanism and Quakerism did for the East.

Then the uprising in France, the passionate aspiration for "liberty, equality, fraternity," — at war with Christianity, instead of at one with it like English freedom, and working great and mixed results.

We see the American republic, founded by a blending of hard common sense, experience, devotion, and widening purpose, and best typified in Washington.

In Lincoln the problem of the American commonwealth — to maintain unity, yet purify itself— and the problem of a human life are both solved by the old virtues, honesty, self-rule, self-devotion.

The present movement of the world is toward a nobler social order. It is to lift the common man upward, on material good as a stepping-stone, toward the height of the saint and seer. This is the better soul of democracy, the noble element in politics, the reformation in the churches, the bond of sympathy with Christ.

Along with this goes a new personal ideal, exemplified in Emerson, accepting the present world as the symbol and instrument of a celestial destiny. Contenting himself with obedience, man becomes divine."

In the Gospel history, the figures of the woman and the child take a high place. In Jesus himself

the feminine element blent with the masculine. Mediæval religion and art found their best symbol in the figure of the mother clasping her babe. Our modern time is giving freedom to woman and recognizing her equality with man, and we are learning that the secret of the world's advance lies in the right training of children under natural law. So the sentiment which grows up in the natural relations of life is elevated by religion, then developed and perfected by freedom and by science.

For us the practical problem is the cultivation of the religious nature along with the other elements of a complete manhood. We are not obliged by intellectual process to create a religious sentiment in ourselves. We inherit that sentiment. It is like the sense of purity or of beauty,- beyond demonstration, except the demonstration of experience. We need only to supply the right conditions for its education and application.

The belief that the spiritual life was dependent on certain institutions and beliefs was the key to the ecclesiastical tyranny of the past. We have virtually escaped that tyranny. Now, in the atmosphere of freedom, we cultivate the spiritual life, and it proves deeper and fairer than ever before.

V

DAILY BREAD

WHEN Charles Lyell addressed himself to the problems of geology, he found that his predecessors in the study had accounted for all the stupendous phenomena whose story is written in the earth's crust, on the supposition of vast catastrophic disturbances in the remote past, because they held that these effects were too prodigious to have been wrought by the ordinary slow processes of nature with which we are familiar. Lyell took up the question by the near and homely end. He patiently watched the workings of heat and cold, sunshine and rain and frost, summer and winter, in the fields about his own house. He learned there what these familiar forces are capable of, in what directions they operate, and in them he found the clew to the story of the past æons. Right about his doorstep were the magicians that had done it all.

That illustrates the process of discovery in the spiritual universe. We are not to soar up into infinity to find God. The only air that will support our wings is that which encircles closely this familiar planet. Let us look for a divine significance in homely things.