as it is, he has involved it in obscurities and doubts that make it every day more difficult for the intelligent and sincere to accept the proffered revelation as his supernatural gift.

But our increasing knowledge of the times succeeding those of Jesus has not done more to bring the supernaturalist doctrine of Christianity into disrespect than our increasing knowledge of the times immediately preceding his too brief career. Channing maintained with absolute sincerity that "Christianity was not the growth of any of the circumstances, principles, or feelings of the age in which it appeared," that "one of the great distinctions of the gospel is that it did not grow. . . . We detect no signs of it," he says, "and no efforts to realize it before the time of Jesus." It would be hard to find in all the history of thought anything less true to our present knowledge and belief than these expressions. It is true that our general belief in evolution has begotten us to a lively faith in the development of Christianity from preceding elements of belief and life; but, as the philosopher said, "If there were no God, we should have to invent one," so he might say, "If we had no general theory of evolution, we should have to invent one to formulate the results of studious investigation into the relations of Jesus and his thought to the immediately preceding and remoter times." To-day we have no greater Unitarian scholar than Professor Toy, who was but yesterday a member of the Baptist Church in good and regular standing; and we have his declaration that Jesus taught no new doctrine, and that "there was

no reason why his followers should not remain Jews in their religious belief." The spring does not foretell the summer with a clearer prophecy than that foretelling Jesus and his religion in the period corresponding to the gap between the Old Testament and New,- a period represented in our Bibles heretofore by two or three blank leaves for the inscription of our family births, deaths, and marriages. He took up into himself not only the passion of the Prophets and the holy beauty of the Psalms, but the ethical nobility of the rabbis, and the mysterious hopes and aspirations that were filling the bosom of Judea with a profound and tragical unrest. Spiritual genius, like intellectual, is often a high priest after the manner of Melchizedek, without father, without mother; but, if this phenomenon demanded a supernaturalist explanation, Shakspere and Lincoln would demand it just as much as Joseph's peasant

son.

Another body of opinion which in Channing's time was without form or comeliness, and was given over to the eager care of those called infidels, has since grown strong and fair, and has acquired an honorable name,- The Science of Comparative Religion. For Socinus there was no religion outside of Christianity. Channing's position was very different from that. He taught at last that Christ's character was "excellent and glorious rather for what it had in common with other good beings than for what it had in singularity. But it is never safe to go to Dr. Channing for the average Unitarian opinion of his time: he was always in advance

of that. Dr. Gannett heard the sermon from which I have quoted, and went home, and wrote it down in his journal as "suited to do more harm than good." But gradually it came to be allowed that the other great religions were at least poor relations of Christianity. They were no longer distinguished from it as false from true, and there was soon a large and wide appreciation of their ethical and spiritual contents. Generally, you will find that those who led the way in this appreciation were the "suspects," the radicals, the men and women on the outer verge of the denomination,- Lydia Maria Child with her 'Progress of Religious Ideas,' and Samuel Johnson with the lectures which became at length his great octavos upon India, China, and Persia. I am glad to think that those lectures were read to this society; for Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, ever the best of friends, were especially of one mind and heart in this matter of the "sympathy of religions." T. W. Higginson, to whom we owe this happy designation, was a third with them some forty years. ago. In the next decade came James Freeman Clarke's Ten Great Religions,' a book too anxious to make out that Christianity is a pleroma, containing everything that is good in all the other faiths, which, nevertheless, has done more than any other of our time to break down the old invidious distinctions between them and Christianity. During the last thirty years the Science of Comparative Religion has created a splendid body of literature, re-enforcing the noble confidence of our Unitarian pioneers with every needed argument and illustra

tion. It was no accident that the great Parliament of Religions recently held in Chicago was so largely Unitarian in its inception, in the predominance of Unitarian thought, and in the multitude of familiar faces in the sympathetic throng. It was the natural expression of a confidence in religion and humanity as much greater things than Christianity, which has grown with our growth and strengthened with our strength for half a century. And this confidence would of itself, ere this, have been fatal to the supernatural theory of Christianity, could it have had no great allies. For in the other great religions Christianity has seen its supernaturalist pretensions as in a glass, and seen that they have no beauty that it should desire them any more. The same processes of thought and feeling which have produced these pretensions in Christianity have been elsewhere at work, and to everywhere accept them or reject them has been found to be the only rational thing. Christianity has become for us one of the great religions of the world, one of the great historic manifestations of the religious sentiment which is of universal scope; and we are less anxious to establish its superiority to its companions than to find in them some confirmation of the best in it, and some rebuke and shame for what is feeble in our thought and faithless in our lives.

Time was when some among us were intent on purging the denomination of those persons who could not, they imagined, "without usurpation, assume the honorable style of a Christian." But lat terly our Unitarian conservatives have been more

intent on showing those who cannot read their Christian title clear how easily it can be done. "Are we still Christians?" is a question that has agitated many earnest minds and many noble hearts. It is a question that brings us back to the point from which we set out, the different meanings that the words "Christian" and "Christianity" have taken on from first to last. We are not Christians

by the sacramental standard of Rome or the dogmatic standard of Geneva. But, then, no more was Jesus, whom they called the Christ, a Christian by these standards. Nothing could be much further from his way in religion than their way. If nearness to his way decides, we dare believe that we are a hundred times more near to him than they. We are not Christians, if, in order to be Christians, we must accept Christianity as a supernatural religion, and the New Testament as its supernatural report. But doubtless we are Christians in the statistician's

liberal sense. We are inhabitants of Christendom, inheritors and sharers of a Christian civilization, which for good and ill has, and has had, incalculable influence upon our lives. To call ourselves Christians in this sense is but to acknowledge a historic origin and obligation. But we have another reason, as deep as this is broad, for so calling ourselves, for daring to believe that we may so call ourselves without presumption or absurdity; namely, that we find ourselves in vital sympathy with everything that is most fundamental in the character and teachings of Jesus,- his love of God and man, his elevation of morality above ritual or creed, his demand for