First, I do not believe and have never taught that Deity dwells more in any edifice called a church than he does in our homes; nor that we can ever set apart any place, and make it by any verbal formula of consecration a divine temple; nor that genuine worship of the Eternal depends on special place or time or form of speech, or architectural structure. The universe is God's temple. In nature around us he both reveals and hides himself. He may be found on the mountain-top or by ocean's shore. The Eternal Power smiles for us in the beauty of the roadside flower and of the orchards, or may meet our thought as we gaze upward to the overarching blue sky,- that all-embracing, bending vault of the heavens, where our Aryan ancestors in Asia, centuries before the Christian era, found their highest symbol of Deity and named it "Heaven-Father." Looking, therefore, at outward nature alone, we cannot go outside of God's temple. We cannot find the smallest spot in all space, nor contemplate a single force in the whole realm of existence, but that Deity is there.

Further, and in a still deeper sense, the human soul is God's temple. The Eternal dwells and lives and moves in humanity. In human character, true, loving, beneficent, is his highest revelation. This is what one of our hymns says:

"God is in his holy temple:

In the pure and holy mind,
In the reverent heart and simple,
In the soul from sense refined."

So we shall not find Deity in any church unless we have brought him with us in our minds and hearts; that is, unless we find him through the pathway of some desire for a better perception of truth and for purer life, through sincere desire for nobler thinking, nobler loving, nobler doing. Nor, again, do I forget that this "pure and holy mind," this "reverent and simple heart," this enkindling of a solemn purpose to live more uprightly, more unselfishly, more nobly and purely, this aroused devotion to high objects of beneficence, may occur elsewhere than in a so-called house of God. It must come most surely to the earnest mother, as she sits thoughtfully by the cradle of her new-born child. It comes whenever the young man and young woman take each other in the holy vows of a true marriage. It comes in many an incident of home life where heart touches heart to the awakening of new hope and firmer resolve for the good. It comes whenever a great temptation in the conventional life of business or fashion is overcome, and the soul is rescued to live henceforth upon its own integrity. Whenever and wherever the human. soul is thus uplifted to see and to grasp for a higher good, there is worship, there is devotion, and there is God. And the soul that in any spot, by any means, thus finds him becomes his choicest temple. The grandest cathedral, the most beautiful temple, that human art ever built is not so amiable (to use the quaint Bible phrase), is not so fascinatingly lovely, so wonder-inspiring, as is the

human soul when livingly consecrated to the service of truth and goodness.

All these things I firmly believe and teach. Yet I also believe in the great usefulness of a fixed place and time for special religious services. I believe in the Church as an institution which human society still needs for its highest good. Whether the Church is ever to be outgrown, whether this need is ever to be supplied in some other way, is a question which may be asked, and which some rationalistic thinkers do ask, but which seems to me to be a question that does not loudly call for present discussion. As to the future, it will answer it own questions. For the present, as I look around me and study the wants, the aspirations, the mental and moral condition of society, I am convinced that the Church as an institution is not yet outgrown, in other words, that established religious usages and instrumentalities are serving humanity in a way which nothing else has yet been found able to supplant. Did I not believe this fully and thoroughly, I could not have faced a congregation Sunday after Sunday for more than thirty years, with the religious words on my tongue.

Of course I know that the Church, regarding it in the light of instituted religion as a whole, has tolerated and taught great errors and committed great wrongs. The saddest chapters of history, and some of the cruelest, are those that describe deeds that have been done in the name of religion.

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I know that there are great sections of the Christian Church to-day which, by their doctrines and ritual, keep the intellects of their adherents in gross darkness and delay human progress. The Church needs vast transformations to fit it to do the work now demanded of it. But those transformations are coming. I see the beginnings of them even in churches that are still far from me in respect to beliefs and forms of worship. I believe, therefore, in the Church, not as it has been in the past, not as it is in the present, but as an institution capable of reformation and growth. I believe in it as having its origin in a vital human sentiment and idea, but as having become malformed through gross errors. But the sentiment and idea are genuine, and are still an organic part of the human mind demanding expression; and, when duly enlightened, they will convert the Church and its varied instrumentalities into an institution in full harmony with rational thought and humanitarian objects. That is the hope which animates my heart as a religious believer, and that is the purpose which has impelled me to cast my lot with radical religious reformers.

And it is from this position and point of view that I feel moved to speak these words to-day in behalf of the Church as it may be liberally organized. There is a significance and value in religious institutions which a large class of liberal thinkers seem to me seriously to overlook. This class of thinkers regard religious institutions as

fatally involved with superstitions and false beliefs which must inevitably pass away; and so they are iconoclasts. They would sweep the Church out of existence or, at least, leave it to a process of natural neglect and decay as the increasing light of reason and science shall show it to have no valid basis in truth. But I claim for religious institutions ample validity on the ground of reason,— yes, on the ground of science and of a scientific philosophy of human nature; for the Church, not with its errors and superstitions, but reformed and elevated to its own ideal possibilities.

And my first reason for the continuance of the Church, as thus defined, is that it stands for the moral and spiritual interests of mankind, for the higher life of man as distinguished from those pursuits which are devoted to gain-getting and to the feeding and clothing and sheltering of the body. Now I believe that it is a historical fact that religion, notwithstanding all its corruptions and false teachings, has always in essence stood for this higher life, for an ideal beyond and better than the actual, for something more than the pleasure of the senses and the satiety of physical appetite. It has stood for a law of mental and moral restraint upon the body and its desires. It has stood for high commands of right and duty. It has held out the promise, either for this world or some other, of a better and happier life for mankind, when the évils and sins of their passing existence should be conquered and known no more. The literature of