all the great religions testifies to this sense of a higher life. All the great prophets of all faiths have sought to kindle and strengthen these aspirations for higher than physical satisfactions. And to-day there is no question among people whose testimony is worth consideration that there is this higher life; that is, a life not given over to uncontrolled physical license or to the amassing of material wealth, but a life following the high leadings of mind and conscience and heart to felicities that are of a mental and spiritual order. This will be admitted even by those who hold a materialistic philosophy. It will be asserted by aggressive iconoclasts in religion like Ingersoll. There is a lower life, devoted to the physical senses and pleasures and to material ambitions; and there is a higher life of mind and heart and conscience. Now I say that religion represents and has always in a sense represented, even under its false creeds and strange practices, this upper and aspiring side of human life. It has taught that man may live by immortal principles and for a deathless destiny. And the Church, taken at its average at the present day, expresses for human society at large, though but in poor, pitiful, and stumbling fashion, this upward look and aspiration, this belief in and reverence for the higher law of life. And, if the Church in the average has this signification now, even encumbered as it is with false doctrines and with traditional usages which have lost their meaning for the present age, how much more effectively might it

express and serve this purpose, were it emancipated from its blind thraldom to outgrown creeds and traditions, and brought up abreast with the growing light and truth and humane endeavors of this new time!

And no one, surely, can deny that a powerful influence on this upper and better side of life is needed in this age. It is especially an age given to material hopes, enterprises, and pursuits, an age of commerce and mechanical ambition and wealthgetting, an age when man is struggling with the material world to master its forces and drain to himself, for his own acquisition and enjoyment, its riches. All this is well, if kept controlled for serving the higher acquisitions of mind and heart and soul. But, as yet, this higher control does not to any mastering extent disclose itself. It is an age of Mammon-worship and of the power of Mammon. The amassed and quickly accumulated riches show themselves too often in pandering to the lower and animal life, in increased comforts and luxuries for the body, in multiplying every sort of means of self-indulgence, in pampering physical appetite and every form of desire for physical pleasure, in ostentatious parade of dress and equipage and costly festivities, and, alas, in the more positive vices of gambling and other dissipations that attach themselves to vulgar wealth and fringe. the borders even of reputable society in all our large cities and at the fashionable places of pleas

ure resort.

There are persons of wealth who have

learned how to use their wealth for noble objects. But these appear to be the exceptions. The majority seem not yet to have learned that high art. These know no way to show their wealth except on their persons or their houses or their horses, and in devising a round of festive excitements for every season to fill up the year. And this spirit has infected nearly all classes of society. Families of smaller means ape, in narrower way, these false methods of the rich, and actually stint themselves in respect to some of the higher satisfactions of life which are within their reach in order that they may put on the appearance of vulgar fashion. Thus moral earnestness in all grades of society is very much at a discount, and shines with a beauty all the greater in the cases where we do behold it. The old-fashioned virtues of simplicity and selfdenial in respect to the material pleasures of life, for the sake of a high aim which the mind or the conscience has set, are becoming too rare; and young people are bred too much under the idea that they must be having "a good time," their conception of "a good time" being generally some form of pleasurable excitement for the senses, or else they are not getting their share of life's satisfactions. Thus, all through society, the aims of people are set upon the lower, material objects of life, and the actual standard of conduct is selfindulgence rather than self-consecration. The power of Mammon, too, with its selfish greed, is fatally corrupting our politics, so that it is often

said that an honest poor man, though well fitted for the duties, cannot afford to enter political life, or is not allowed to enter it by the political rings. And business has developed a code of conduct of its own, on the plea that it cannot live by the ordinary moral code of honesty and sincerity.

Now, against this prevailing lowness and practical materialism of human life, this pampering indulgence of the flesh, these strong forces of selfish greed and cunning and sensual pleasure, the Church stands proclaiming for humanity higher hopes and nobler satisfactions, or should so stand. Though it does its work very imperfectly, it is to be honored for the attempt to do it. It is its function to recall to people the fact that there is a part loftier themes

of human nature which is capable of than the rise and fall of stocks or the fluctuations of trade or social festivities or a neighborhood's gossip. It is its high office to summon people to a place where one moral law is to be declared for all sorts and conditions of mankind,- for the rich and the poor, for politics and trade, for the home and the street. It should hold up before bewildered and stumbling consciences the attractiveness of the virtues of purity, temperance, self-control, sincerity, mutual justice and beneficence between man and man. Above all, it may point out the value of those priceless and immortal possessions which, whatever may be the outward lot, even though it be one of deprivation, hardship, and sorrow, are the inalienable property of the pure heart and the

upright mind. In a word, the Church stands, when it fulfils its mission, for the life of the spirit and for the joys that are the fruit thereof, as against the life given over to the sway of material passions and objects. Matthew Arnold summed up his characterization of Ralph Waldo Emerson by classing him as one to whom after generations would resort as "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit." So would I claim the continuance of the Church, rationally organized and open to advancing truth, because it is, and may be vastly more than it now is, the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit.

But I go farther than this. I have another and still deeper reason for my belief that religious institutions will in some shape continue for supplying a need of human nature. This reason is that they express, as nothing else does, man's sense of his relation to that Supreme Power in the universe which science calls the Eternal Energy in all things, which religion has called, in simplest phrase, the Most High, but which is really beyond and above all our definitions and names. We in our English tongue say "God"; yet the word only. hints at an Infinite Reality which outrides all our powers of thought. But, because this Supreme Power is more inconceivable and more fraught with mystery than some of the old creeds represented, it is none the less a real power, and one with which we daily have to do. If any think to construct human life without this factor, however much they