That the life of this man was not on the whole what we would call happy, may be true, but after his definition it was blessed. "There is," he writes, "in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness and instead thereof find blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same higher that sages and martyrs, the poet and the priest, in all times have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the god-like that is in man, and how in the godlike only has he strength and freedom? Which God-inspired doctrine art thou honored to be taught; O heavens! and broken with manifold merciful afflictions, even till thou become contrite and learn it! O, thank thy destiny for these; thankfully bear what yet remain; thou hadst need of them; the self in thee needed to be annihilated. By benignant fever-paroxysms is life rooting out the deep-seated chronic disease, and triumphs over death. On the roaring billows of time thou art not ingulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of eternity. Love not pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all con radiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works it is well with him."

"Love not pleasure; love God" was to his soul fundamental, and if an upright, pure, sincere and faithful life means anything it means that Thomas Carlyle, with all his faults, had found and built upon the truth. Such a temple as the Holy Spirit did not overlook, but made His abode therein so that the shine of His presence gives a glow to the thought consecrated to the service of righteousness. Differ with him we may as to the methods best adapted to secure the desired end, but agree with him we must that the great realities of life are all centred in the need there is that men should heed the Everlasting Yea and love God. What need is there to say more. Space would fail me to give here any adequate summary this great man's work. He lived to reach the summit of his ambition, to know that his message so long inarticulate had not only had utterance, but recognition; to hear himself hailed as leader, and to be called on as a prophet to give a right interpretation of the signs of the times. Without faltering in

of

his high loyalty to truth, he accepted the vast responsibilities her service imposed, and to the last of his long life had more care that she should be honored than that he should be praised. Small minds intent on spots will magnify his faults, which he in no wise sought to conceal, but to the magnanimous the farreaching rays of his intelligent and truth-loving soul will so illume and glorify the paths of men that in its light all else shall be forgotten save his ability to teach men how to live.

On the 5th of February, 1881, in London, lamented by thousands who had obtained strength and hope from his message, there passed on to life's higher ways the soul, who in Ecclefechan on the 4th of December, 1795, came to gladden an obscure household.

From what hiding places God sends forth his messages to men, using "the weak things of the world to confound the mighty," and calling men everywhere to the knowledge and freedom of the truth. Vain and foolish men may refuse the word which comes through other than the established and accredited channels. He is wise who dares to listen to the still, small voice within, and he is true hero and leader who having with attentive ear heard the heavenly message will not be silent though all things conspire against him, but sends the truth ringing through the ages to find wherever it can the William E. Gibbs.

workers of its will.

ARTICLE XIII.

Abstract Religion and the Personal Christ.

THE highest revelation of God to mankind must, in the nature of the case, be through a human personality. It is indeed true, as the Psalmist declares, that the heavens declare His glory, thus giving us a revelation of the Supreme Being through His works, which we know as natural theology. It is equally true that Providence, or the ways of God, give evi

dence of His guiding hand. "Its law and progress and unity lie in the one purpose of a self-revealing God." But inasmuch as humanity is the noblest of all earthly creations, it may be made the most effective medium for a manifestation of the Supreme Being. The spirit of God will most naturally find the spirit of man, made in His image. They will answer to each other, as face answereth to face in a glass. "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God." 2 We are therefore justified in believing that a human personality may be made a clearer medium of divine communication than is to be found in nature or Providence, When properly understood the three are not contradictory in their testimony, but the utterance of divine truth becomes clearer and stronger as we ascend from nature, through history, into the undoubted realms of the Spirit. The highest notes of truth, love, faith, have always been struck upon the key-board of personality. "Ideas that sway the world," we have been told, "are born of heroic souls and uttered by individual lips. Great thoughts that have been the axles of society, on which nations have poised and swung around, first sprang from single hearts. No army delivered the old Hebrews from bondage, but one man, Moses, did. No senate raised Israel to its height of unmatched national grandeur, but one kingly man, David, did. No school of divines first gave us the English Bible, but John Wickliffe did. No royal court discovered America, but Christopher Columbus did. No circle of social science interpreted the laws of the universe, but Galileo did. No Parliament saved English liberties, but Oliver Cromwell did." 3 It may be called a law of the divine procedure that grand commanding personalties shall be as indeed in the nature of the case they must be the channels through which truth and righteousness are sent forth throughout the moral and spiritual spheres. It is this established order of communication that the Supreme Being has brought into requisition in 1 "Old Faiths in New Lights" page 58.

2 Romans 8:16.

3 We are unable to fix the author of the above quotation, but the same idea is well brought out in a sermon by Rev. J. Coleman Adams in the Unitarian, June, 1888.

making known his will to the children of men. He has made the medium of his manifestation to be patriarchs, prophets, and apostles, crowning the series of exhibitions or evolutions with the revelation, in due time, of his well-beloved and only begotten Son, upon whom he poured out his spirit without measure. Thus by pre-eminence he is the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a ransom for all to be testified in due time.

A revelation thus given through a central personality must also be more forcible, commanding and authoritative than any abstract statement of truth, however important. Certainly no mere form of words can so set forth the glory of the divine nature, and manifest the presence and power of God, as we find them declared in his word actually made flesh, and dwelling among men, in which we see his glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. 4 We need, therefore, for the highest purposes of religion, the law and love of God as displayed in the personal Christ.

The Proverbs of Solomon are of highest use, and ought to be studied for their wisdom, their broad interpretation of life, and their ethical value. They are specially strong in the warnings they sound against indulgence of the passions, lust, greed, anger, pride, envy, drunkenness. They protest against every form of social unrighteousness. They touch tenderly on the family, and press its duties. They smite folly of all sorts, and many of them are rods for a fool's back. They insist on truth and simplicity and justice and moderation, on humility and patience and charity. Everywhere they identify wisdom with goodness, and folly with evil, and their universal characteristic is common sense. They are reverential, and many of them reach a long way toward the Sermon on the Mount, and some touch the deepest springs of the human heart. In practical wisdom and as daily guides of conduct, they surpass any other utterances of truth that can be compared with them. If heeded and obeyed they would bring the individual, the family, the community, the nation, into a state

4 John 1:14.

of ideal perfection. Why, then, have they so little power? These Proverbs were spoken to a nation that swept past them to destruction, and to-day they are admired as epigrams rather than heeded as laws of conduct. The main reason is that they are impersonal, and have no living energy to drive them home; they simply state truth and prescribe conduct. But you will never have a great truth in the world until a great person utters it, and vindicates it in his life. Solomon was not a fit vindicator of his teachings. He was great, but it needed a greater to give vitality, force, and constancy to moral principles. 5

I am aware that there are some persons who claim to have in their systems a religion with all the principles of Christianity, but to hold them independently of the personal Christ of the New Testament. They profess to gather these same principles which are in the Gospel from nature, reason, human intuitions, and to hold them as an independent system of religious truths, after the manner of the various systems of philosophy held by ancient sages. I recall the fact that one of this school of naturalists, the Rev. David A. Wasson, who succeeded to the pulpit of Rev. Theodore Parker, in Boston, preached on the occasion of his installation a discourse entitled "The Radical Creed," in which he gave all the prominent points of religious belief concerning God, man, immortality, forgiveness, salvation, even the atonement,-nine or ten articles of faith, three times as many as the Confession of Faith of the Universalist Church, and yet claimed to hold all these points of doctrine independently of any historic centre or organic connection with the past. He had evolved them, as abstract principles, out of his inner consciousness.

Now supposing it were possible to hold the cardinal principles of Christianity in this way, supported only by nature, reason, intuition, would that be, in its tone, comprehensiveness, and effect, the religion of Jesus Christ? Undoubtedly Mr. Wasson received his religious truths very largely, although perhaps

5 Munger's "Appeal to Life," p. 53. See the whole discourse, " Truth through and by Life."