In the ethical development the prime truths are personality and its accompanying responsibility. Immortality is a more or less closely related truth. Where these begin we do not know. We cannot place their beginning higher than the human. Men are endowed with liberty, and are subject to the righteous law; and immortality is too deeply written in the spirit for it to be denied. We do not know the evidence as requiring the denial of these at a lower stage than the human. And we know not but immortality may be established in developments less than a responsible person. But wherever the Universally Conserving Energy first fixes immortality and personality, the salvation of all men yet invites attention. He who believes in the Infinite Divine One, and holds all men immortal, holds them all to be saved. After finding God, one cannot end in dualism.

He who holds all men subjects of salvation during the life in this body, and immortal, must hold them all to be saved. The future years will hold as an axiom that in a universe of righteous law no immortal can be lost. The conserving energy by which one is immortal is so far his salvation. And in yet holier force of argument ethical requirement requires the saving of its subject. No man is so depraved that he is not the object of the exertions of God and Christ and men up to the day of his death;—and then what? Religion is most kind; religion is most unkind. May not the ground of its kindness make its kindness more kind? Death falls. Will the Infinite God, the risen Christ, and the "spirits of just men made perfect," never more exert any saving love and power? Not so was it with the saints of the 1Zoroastrian, 2 Maccabean, Sibylline, faith. They labored for the lost Let this modern man of hard heart hear these prayers of old, and many ancient voices. The Grecian poet sings of evil and good so co-ordinated that "everlasting reason shall bear sway." 5 Epictetus looks for "a delightful reunion with 1 Dr. Edward Beecher's Doc. Scrip. Retribution, p. 30.

ones.

2 Ibid., p. 30.

3 Ibid., p. 84. Dr. Richard Eddy's Universalism in America, I. 4.

4 Dr. J. W. Hanson's Cloud of Witnesses, p. 23.

5 Ibid., p. 23.

6

8

one's primitive elements." To Socrates death is a blessed sleep or happy transition. Plato beholds "this system's final adorning and improving." The Khorda-Avesta's faith is of the purification of all wicked men. 9 Buddha's tranquil nirvana has so much exultation as this, that "all that lives and breathes shall and must become Buddha." Out of primeval India sounds the 10 Vaidic song of the Divine Unity; and the 11 Pythagoreans echo it again. The Hebrew's thought is capable of a vast fullness.-12 "The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me"; and 18" is good to all"; 14 "yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love," and 15" as one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you." 16 Paul's, 17 John's, 18 Matthew's, God, universal, loving, perfect; 19 Origen's never-failing Love which, with the rest, binds the Prince of Evil by the power of Love; 20 Theodore of Mopsuestia's "principles of development and establishment in stable virtue"; the 21 Christ, living, suffering, dying, living and 22 preaching still;-in the presence of all these the modern man must stand. Let not 23 Prince Radbod's and 24 Mr. Mill's honest heart be for Christianity's shame, but for its pride. Christianity, among men, must fill these royal heathen measures; and its own measures. Even now the axiom shines in open day, all immortals must be saved.

And he who is borne forward on the divine stream, whose life is touched by the larger love and hope that well up in philosophic thought, poetic inspiration, and reverent faith, will hardly find his brother falling by the way, a ceasing life. After all the sin, the terrible depravity, and the dark consequence, the innocent and dull life-darkest of all provi16 Ro. xi. 36; Eph. iv. 6; 1 Cor. xv. 28. 171 John iv. 8.

"The Apology.

"Dr. Hanson's Cloud of Witnesses, p. 22.

* Ibid., p. 20. Doc. Scrip. Ret. p. 32. Hardwick's Christ and other Masters,

10 Ibid., ps. 185–186.

11 Cloud of Witnesses, p. 20

12 Ps. cxxxviii. 8.

18 Ps. cxlv. 9.

14 Jer. xxxi. 3.

15 Isa. lxvi. 13.

NEW SERIES. VOL. XXV.

18 Matt. v. 48.

p. 159.

19 Doc. Scrip. Ret. p. 329.

20 Ibid., p. 221.

21 The Gospels: N. T. at large.

22 1 Peter iii. 19, iv. 6.

23 Cloud of Witnesses, p. 27.

24 Cloud of Witnesses, p. 175.

27

dences, the human form without the human reason, by the side of which the singing bird and the faithful dog almost seem high up in being's scale-after it all faith reaches through it all to the solidarity of the human, and to the Eternal, and cries, "Thou, O Father, dost lift up all Thy human into Thy divine." How is it save that the innocent consequence of sin comes in the disciplining of a race, "not but for another's gain," not a dying sacrifice? shall not he too yet wear the "spirit's crown"? 25 Dryly enough was it said, "It must be everybody or nobody."

In wickedness there is a certain dignity. It is proof at once of the high and the low, the high in constitution, the low in fidelity. Man richly endowed is capable of how great a fall. Upon the dread gift of freedom he piles his guilt. Compare the bleared eye with a clear sky, a gem, a brute's eye, and what is sinful man that the saving forces are mindful of him! man with a hard heart, hard face, cruel words, cruel deeds, and irreverent in the face of heaven. The fall, the sin, are great. Sin is no affair of matter; sin is of the spirit. The measures of guilt are profound over against the measures of the spirit's virtues. Aye, against the Holy One have we sinned. O men, do ye stand high up in being's

scale? very low are ye lying. But there is hope. These go away into the punishment of the spiritual realm. God be thanked for his spiritual realm and its punishment. O contrite and broken heart, hope comes with thee. O conscience that can make us weep, O Word of God sharper than any two-edged sword, come, and leave us not in our iniquity. How purity shines above, how sweet and strong is holiness. O Thou Eternal Spirit, Thou wilt not leave thy faithless ones desolate. Thy resources of the Spirit, though sharp the pain, can cleanse us still. The solicitations of thy love can gain the stubborn will, and on each child Thou canst put the crown of righteousness. At the gate of paradise are the cherubim and the flashing flaming sword; yet Thou art "the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the

25 Cloud of Witnesses, p. 202.

last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are they that wash their robes that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city."

The child of duty is the child of Eternity. Duty shall not outrun destiny. Duty is no fickle and transient thing to let go of a man when he dies. The aim of justice is not suffering. Justice co-ordinates duty and destiny.

And if with faith in the Eternal Providence you wish a word from us about the marvellous, we say that to us any marvel that is true is, as all law and events, of the Eternal Wisdom; and we deny no marvel that may spring from the Divine. Where law appears we take it, but that for us does not remove any transcendent quality.

Universalism cannot of course obliterate the distinctions of truth. Holding "the final holiness and happiess of all mankind," one may feel it incumbent upon him to be a Trinitarian Universalist, a Substitutional Atonement Universalist, a Hierarchical Universalist, a Heathen Universalist. To the writer of this, this and that Universalism is of a type short of the True Universal. He is a Unitarian and Humanitarian Universalist. Like every man of faith, he expects the world to be at least in the main as he is. He believes his faith to be Christian Universalism; in other phrase to be Universal Christianity. Universalism he defines briefly as the sense of the Divine everywhere. He holds his faith in a generous spirit, else he were untrue to the faith itself. He holds himself open to receive the added lights. He does not imagine that he has exhausted the truth. Let him say that the truth is his aim; yet that he is so grounded in his Universalism that he is very sure that the truth is such that one can have no higher aim than the truth, and of it need not be ashamed.

If he is a sectarian, lay it not to his charge. He has no desire to be unfaithful to his faith. He would confess it at the Christian altar. He would labor for it. He believes that without this most sacred confession and labor he has fallen far short of Christian duty and of Christian blessing. He makes no exclusive claim that his church alone proclaims the Divine

principles, or any one of them. His sectarianism is only in his Universalism, which lifts one up out of sectarianism, and allies him with the Divine which works everywhere.

And let his parting word be the prayer that they who be lieve in the Universal call to holiness may so bear the fruit of their faith in zealous lives and open confession as to gain the approbation of our Father in heaven, and of his Christ, and hold place in his ministry to reclaim the erring, and gain the fealty of every earnest heart. The Eternal Life, with the Christ, and all the force of conscious duty and holy aspiration in it, we would crave for our own, and offer ourselves and our church wholly in the service of it and God.

S. W. Sutton,

ARTICLE XXV.

Sacred Song as an Element of Worship.

No just or complete record of religious progress can be made in the world without recognizing music as an important factor. In a special sense has sacred music, as rendered through the human voice, been a vital element of worship in all ages. So closely related are the two functions of the human voice, expressed in speech and song, that one author1 thinks "these must have been almost coeval in their origin; for, as the deductions of reason assure us that the social necessities of the race must have early given rise to spoken language, so a universal experience unites with remotest tradition in ascribing to every human being a religious impulse which finds its most adequate expression in song. The least civilized tribes have always celebrated their festivals of worship with rude rythmic chants, while the cultivated nations of all time have cherished music as the etherial medium of poetry, and a potent agent in the culture of the soul."

1 Prof. R. R. Raymond.