to cut off those who have newer life than theirs, newer blossoms.

In the Christian Church there are many churches. But there is not one that bears the same relation to the civiliza tion of the world which Paul bore eighteen hundred years ago. He looked forward; they look back. He asked liberty

of thought and speech; they are afraid of both. There is not a Christian government which has not some statute forbidding freedom of thought and speech. Even on the statutebooks of Massachusetts, there slumbers a law prohibiting a man to speak lightly of any of the doctrines in this blessed Bible; and it is not twenty years since a magistrate of this State asked the grand-jury of a county to find a true bill against a learned Doctor of Divinity, who had written an article proving there was no prophecy in the Old Testament which pointed a plain finger to the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

All over Europe religion is supported by the State, by the arm of the law. The clergy wish it to be so, and they say Christianity would fail if it were not. Hence come the costly national Churches of Europe, wherein the priest sits on the cartridge-box, supported by bayonets, a drum for his sounding-board, and preaches in the name of the Prince of Peace, having cannon-balls to enforce his argument. What a contrast between the national Churches of Russia, Austria, Prussia, England, and the first Church which Paul gathered in his prison-house, where he preached with his left hand chained to a soldier's right hand, "his bodily presence weak, and his speech contemptible."

But there has been a great and rapid development of humanity since Paul first came to Italy. What a change in agriculture, mechanic art, commerce, war, in education, politics! What new science, new art, new literature, has sprung up! How the world's geography has changed, from Eratosthenes to Ritter! But the interior geography of man has altered yet more. The ancient poles are now in the modern equator. Compare the governments then and now; the wars of that period; the condition of the people. Peasant was everywhere a slave at that time. Now slavery has fled to America-she alone, of all Christendom, fosters in her bosom that.odious snake which has stung and poisoned so many a departed State. Compare the condition of Woman.

The

The change has been immense. The compass gave mankind America; gunpowder made a republic possible ;-it could not have been without that;-the printing-press made education accessible to everybody. Steam makes it easy for a nation to secure the material riches which are indispensable to civilization, and yet leave time for culture in the great mass of men. How have the humanities gone forward,-freedom, education, temperance, chastity; concern for the poor, the weak, the abandoned, the blind, the deaf, the dumb! Once the Christian Church fostered the actual humanities of the times. There was not a temperance society in the world; the Church was the temperance society. There was not a peace society; the Church was the peace society: not an education society; the Church opened her motherly arms to many a poor man's son who had talent, and gave him culture; and he walked through the cathedral door into the college, thence to the great mountain of the world, and climbed as high as he could get. Now as the Church is in the process of decay, we need special missionary societies, societies for preventing drunkenness and every vice. The function of the ancient Church has passed to other hands. She teaches only from memory of times long past. The national Churches apologize for the national sins, and defend them. In Europe the established clergy are seldom friendly to any movement for the benefit of mankind. In America it is they who are eminent supporters of every public enormity which the nation loves, willing to send their mother into slavery, pressing the Bible into the ranks of American sin.

The Christian Church early departed from the piety and morality of Jesus of Nazareth. Taken as a whole it has made some great errors, and is now suffering the penalty thereof. It has taught that God was finite, and not infinite; that man's nature was a mistake, a nature which could not be trusted; it has put fictitious miracles before real law, and forced the heretic philosopher to confess that the Church was right, though the earth did still move; it has taught that religion was chiefly to save mankind from the wrath of God in the next world, not to bless us here on earth.

The Christian Churches neglect the evils of their own time. To judge from the publications that have been sent forth by the American Churches in the last twenty years,—the tracts of the Orthodox, Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians,—what

would a stranger suppose was the great sin of America at this day? He might read them all through and scarcely conjecture that there was a drunkard in the land; he would never think there was any political corruption in the country; he would suppose we had most of all to fear from "doubt of theological doctrines; " he would not ever dream that there were as many slaves in America to-day as there are churchmembers. Why is this? Because the Churches have concluded that it is the function of religion to save the soul from the wrath of God; not to put down great sins here on earth, and make mankind better and men better off. These mistakes are the reason why the Christian Church is in this process of decay.

It does not appear that Jesus of Nazareth separated his thought from the new Science of the age, and said, "Do not think;" or that he separated his religion from the new Morality of the age, and said, "Never reform a vice, oh! ye children of the Kingdom!" He laid his axe at the root of the sinful tree and sought to hew it down. With him the problem was to separate religious ideas and life from organizations that would not admit of a new growth; to put his new wine into new bottles. With Luther there was the same problem. He endeavoured to make new ecclesiastical raiment for mankind, tired of attempts to mend and wear the old and ill-fitting clothes of the Church which became only worse for the botching. In the present time there is the same problem : to gather from the past, from the Bible, from the Catholic and Protestant Churches, from Jew and Gentile, Buddhist, Brahman, and Mahometan, every old truth which they have got embalmed in their precious treasuries; and then to reach out and upwards towards God, and get every new truth that we can, and join all these together into a whole of theological truth-then to deepen the consciousness of God in our own soul, and make the Absolute Religion the daily life of men.

Let the word Philosophy stand for the whole sum of human knowledge, and be divided into five great departments, or sciences, namely: Mathematics, treating of quantity and the relations thereof; Physics, including a knowledge of the statical, dynamical, and vital forces of matter,-mechanics, chemistry, and physiology in its various departments, as it relates to the structure and action of the material world as a whole, or to any of its several parts, mineral, vegetable, or

animal; History, embracing the actions of man in all his internal complexity of nature and in all his external complications of movement, individual or collective; Psychology, which includes all that belongs to human consciousness, instinctive, reflective, and volitive-intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious; and Theology, which treats of God and His relations to matter and man.

The progressive welfare of man demands a free development in all these five departments of activity. All these sciences are equally the productions of the human spirit and equally amenable to the mind of man, which collects, classifies, and studies both facts of observation and of conscious

ness.

To make a special application of this doctrine-the religious welfare of man requires, as its condition, freedom to study the facts of observation and consciousness, and to form such a scheme of Mathematics and Physics, of History, Psychology, and Theology, as will correspond to his general spiritual development and his special religious development. If a man, a nation, or mankind, lacks this freedom and accepts such a scheme of these sciences as does not fit his spiritual or religious condition, then there is a contradiction in his consciousness; and there is no peace until he has cast out the discordant element and so established unity.

At the present day in Protestant Christendom, philosophers study the first four disciplines with entire freedom. No mathematician feels bound to stop where Archimedes, Newton, or La Place finished his career; no naturalist checks his steeds at the goal set up by Von Buch, or Hippocrates; the historians and metaphysicians voyage beyond the Hercules' Pillars of Thucydides and Aristotle, not fearing to sail the seas with God. It is universally admitted by the students of truth that all these sciences are progressive, amenable to perpetual revision; and that in all of them the human mind is the final umpire. The inquirer looks for the facts, their law, their meaning, and their use. There is no artificial norm established beforehand to which the mathematician, naturalist, historian, or metaphysician must make all things agree. There is no Procrustes' bed in any of these four sciences whereon to torture ideas.

In Catholic countries the case is often different; the Roman Church hinders the progress of each of these sciences

-even the Mathematics so far as that treats of the relation of quantities, as the Earth and Sun for example-by prohibiting freedom of thought and speech; this Church has established its own artificial norm, the standard measure of all science.

In Protestant countries, it is commonly thought, or at least alleged, that Theology is an exception to the general rule which controls the other sciences; that it is not progressive, not amenable to perpetual revision; therein the human mind is not the final umpire; that it is a divine science, the facts not derived from human observation and consciousness, but miraculously communicated to man. Accordingly, the men who control the Popular Theology and occupy most of the pulpits of these countries, accept an old system of opinions which does not correspond to the general consciousness of enlightened men at this day. This obsolete Theology is set up either as religion itself, or else as the indispensable condition of religion. Thus the religious, the moral, and indeed the general spiritual development of mankind, is much retarded. Nay, the theologians often claim eminent domain over the other sciences, insisting that the naturalist, the historian, and the metaphysician shall conform to their artificial standard, and interpret facts of observation and of consciousness so as to correspond with their whimsical dreams; so that now the greatest obstacle which lies in the way of human progress is the Popular Theology.

In the time of Jesus and Paul the spiritual progress of mankind was hindered by the theological conclusions and ritual forms of previous generations. What was the result of hard thinking and manifold effort on the father's part was accepted by the sons as a foregone conclusion, as a Finality in religion. So the sons inherited their father's thought, but not his thinking, and made his religious form the substitute for religious life on their own part. If we sum up the theologies and rituals of ante-Christian antiquity in two words, we may say that at the time of Jesus and Paul Heathenism and Hebraism hindered the spiritual development of mankind. The wheels of the human chariot, deep in a rut, had reached the spot where the road ended; the wheels must be lifted out, and a new highway made ready, reaching further on. The religious problem of the human race then was to separate the human spirit from the Mistakes and Errors and Sins