"'Tis felt in sunshine greening the soft sod,

In children's smiling as in mother's tears;

And, for strange comfort, through the aching years

Men's hungry souls have named that great heart God."

Strange comfort, indeed, unless, however named, the great Heart is a heart of tenderness, a heart of love! For it is true, as Browning sang,

"A loving worm within his clod

Were better than a loveless God."

But, if the great Heart of the universe be not a loving Heart, whence came the love, the tenderness, the pity, the compassion, that have made wonderful and beautiful the lives of countless men and women in all ages and all lands? The stream cannot rise higher than its source. Even if God were the creator, the artificer, it would be inconceivable that he should make a creature better than himself. But, when once he is apprehended as the organic source of universal life, it is still more inconceivable that a being better than himself should come forth out of him. Nothing is evolved that is not first involved. If that be not axiomatic truth, then are not things. that are equal to the same thing equal to each other. Then are there no axiomatic truths. But, if this be an axiom, then is that Heart which we call God rightly so called, if God is good, if God is love. Then is all human love forevermore identical and consubstantial with his own. Does any say: "Why, then, you only have the human love; and it is no special help to know that that is also God's. There is no more love for us than there was before"? Nay,

but here also God is not only in and through, but he is over all, blessed forever. The human love we know which came forth from his heart is hint and prophecy and surety that in that heart there is a boundless deep of love which must express itself in myriad ways to us unknown, so that even in those things which are most terrible to think of and most hard to bear there well may be the touch of his pity, the sweetness of his affection, the swell and the submergence of his divine compassion; and, though many waters have gone over us, we can still hold our course, and cry,—

"Though my bark sink, 'tis to another sea."

And, seeing that these things are so, let us be confident that at no time before, in all its varied history, has our Unitarian doctrine of one God the Father taken up into itself such a wealth of meaning as it does in these last days. We do not pretend that the doctrine is for us exactly what it was for the fathers by whom we were begotten to a lively hope for man here and hereafter, and to a mighty faith in God. We do not pretend that all the change has been in the direction of a brighter and more joyous faith. Doubtless there has been loss as well as gain. Certainly, if we take up all the meaning of science into our theology, our God is made of somewhat sterner stuff than he to whom the fathers lifted up their grateful hearts. Our theology cannot be at once spiritual and cosmic, and not recognize that God is in the earthquake and the wind and fire as well as in the still, small voice of

conscience and the breathings of all pure affection and all perfect trust. However great the change, it leaves impregnable the oneness of the Almighty; it has brought to that oneness incalculable confirmation, furnishing it with a thousand splendid illustrations; it has, by its extension of the universe in time and space, assured to us a practical infinitude where we had but an empty name; by the revelation of invariable law it has given to us a fresh impulse of unconquerable trust; it has made God manifest. to us in every aspect of the fair and teeming world, incarnate in all men and women; unknown in his most secret essence, as we are ourselves; well known in the order and the beauty of the world; a Father still in his organic evolution of the world; a Father still in that our thoughts are his thoughts, our ways his ways, our love forever his, all that our hearts contain a drop of his immeasurable sea. Even so, Father; for so it has seemed good in thy sight!

IV.

THE BIBLE.

THE subject, What Unitarians have thought and now think about the Bible, is one very closely bound up with their history. The first Christian Unitarians were Jews, and their Bible was a very different one from ours. For one thing, it had no New Testament. Much of this was still unwritten at the end of the first century of our era. The second century was advanced to its third quarter before the last book was written, the 'Second Epistle of Peter.' That, however, did not mean that our New Testament was at once recognized as such. Two centuries more went by before a canonical list was made out and accepted as a new collection of Scriptures, deserving of equal reverence with the Old Testament. Before that, as Jacob and Esau wrestled in their mother's womb, there were many gospels and epistles and apocalypses contending for the mastery in the womb of the young Church. In a rough way, no doubt, we have the preservation of the fittest, though some better things were thrust aside, some poorer things retained. For a long time after the present list was made up some of the churches went on reading the excluded books. Evidently, in the earlier stages of this process the oral

transmission of the words of Jesus and his apostles was more highly valued than new writings, and discouraged the production of these. The New Testament writers had no idea that they were adding to the sum of Scripture. Paul's letters were as occasional as the exigencies of his apostolate, and not all of them have been preserved. The first collection of these was probably the first attempt at a new canon,

namely, a new authorized list; and that came from Marcion, who was accounted a heretic in his day. He, like the other Christian Gnostics, valued the Old Testament little, attributing it to some power inimical to God. But the Old Testament was the Bible, and the only Bible, of the earliest Christians. In the time of Jesus a third enlargement of it was well under way. There was much opposition to several of the books, that to 'Ecclesiastes' and 'The Song of Songs' being the last to give way, after the former had got an orthodox postscript, and the latter had received an allegorical interpretation. This conclusion was reached about a century after the death of Jesus. Still other books were not admitted for one reason and another. But the Christians were more generous, and made up a list of these at the same time that they made up the New Testament list as we have it. They are the books of the Apocrypha, to which Roman Catholics have accorded an equal honor with the rest of the Bible. So have the later Unitarians, but so have not the evangelical Protestants. The Episcopalian position with regard to them has, in accordance with its usual temper, been somewhere "betwixt and between." It should also