future great institutions, churches, property are under tenure of the Theos of our present theism, who will so be enabled to fortify himself against the more enlightened views of our own liberal brothers and sisters of the future? It was the old argument of Liberalism that the acceptance of a mediator made him a veil between the soul and God; can anything else be said of any personality that is brought between the soul and the pure ideal?

VI.

Now, I do not think that the word "God" necessarily carries with it the idea of personality, any more than gravitation personifies what it stands for. There are in nature certain facts beyond which we cannot get,electricity, attraction, motion. We must have words for them, but no such word is explanatory. Electricity names a phenomenon, but does not pretend to account for it. There are phenomena, which to me appear to represent a principle in nature quite as definite as electricity, and I call it "God." I may be told that most people associate a personality with the word "God; " well for a long time men personified Electron, and yet we have to use it. The use of language is to be understood. Words are conventional; they are not substitutes for philosophical definition. If I speak of" sunset" no one has a right to suppose I believe the sun sits down. Now, it may be that what Carlyle once spoke of to a friend, as "the long paraphrase which we shorten in the word God," will some day be better expressed. But at present I do

not know any other word which can make us understood when we mean that sacred influence which is the main fact of our inward life. Every experience must seek its expression, and, thus far, of all the terms for the ideal elements within and without us which denote their reality, the word "God" appears to me the least daring, the least descriptive, while popularly it suggests the Good. Moreover, as no sect can monopolise the word "religion," none can so degrade the word "God:" even when personalised it must be in a generic sense, and can not,. -like Jehovah, Vishnu, Trinity, Allah,-be made the figure-head of any cosmogony, sect, or special set of superstitions. It must become an increasingly impersonal expression by the very necessity of being detached from the several personified patron-deities of the various races. When the great Religion of Man has come this term will necessarily stand—as it stands now in the pages of Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and many poets-for the indefinable but majestic supremacy of perfect and eternal principles; for their unity, universality, and harmony; for their superlative glory in all things fair and grand, and the passionate love and longing they awaken in the breast of man.

Though the meaning of the word "God" is lost in antiquity, its survival confesses that not one step has been gained towards explanation since that word was coined in the immemorial past. In that great lapse of time the religious aspiration of man has survived the decay of many personal deities: men thought it could not continue without a visible deity with quite as much

reason as some now ink I ma je

cut some personification; but they fd en mer is now, under estimate the impensacie hality of the nemi and religious nature man. Is precisely that which annet fail with any firmula: I grows by their decay. It cutscars all definitors compretends al beatiti things and is comprehen fed by and in acre of tem And when all our speculations are forgotten, or have become subjects of macicgical interest. ike icse of Prziemy or Hermes. tcse wic come fer us will still be chanting with the Persian Sa 40 cu ft towerest above the heights of imagination. thought or conjecture. surpassing all that we have heard or read the ban quet is ended, the assembly damissed, and he does to a close. and we still rest in our first encomium of thee!"

But here I may be reminded that in speaking of "D fuence" I am using an anthropomorphic expression. It is indeed a word of human associations, and it is conceded that if we report anything in language at all it must be in terms derived from human experience. But it is not against any word, but against a thing that I contend. If one speaks of the deity as Father," it may be a simple expression of the heart, as if he had said Love; " but if the same individual shrinks from varying the phrase to "Mother" it can only be because the word Father” has become representative of some anthropomorphic conception. If we mean anything whatever by the word "God" it must at least be what is most exalted in our own human conception, but it may be without the limitations of that conception. Thus, it is anthropomorphic

to say

to say

"God loves," for to love is the act of man ; not so "God is Love," for we can have no idea of a man who is love. To say "God knows "is anthropomorphic; not so to say "God is Wisdom." When Jesus said “God is a spirit”—in his own sense of a viewless influence, whose effect we feel as we do the breath of the wind, while we cannot tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth-he raised the mind above every anthropomorphic conception, to the pure elemental realm of ideal and moral existence.

It has become the custom to label everybody with a party-name, and they who refuse to personify God are called Agnostics,-a word meaning one who does not know, but often held to designate one who worships the Unknowable. But for myself I decline to affirm that anything is unknowable. Nor do I worship the Unknown. What I worship is my ideal, as perfect as I can make it. Love, Reason, Right, Beauty are blended and consummate in it. In what mode or modes these subsist in the universe none can know, but it is not my ignorance that I worship; it is the ideal which I do know, though knowing not the metaphysics of it.

But is all this real? Is there in the universe any reason apart from the brain of man, or any principle of love beyond that manifested in the human heart? For myself I cannot doubt that there are in nature these supreme elements, which make and mould us rather than we them.

There is in nature an evolutional order, a geometry, a mathematical uniformity, by which are built the worlds

and the cells of bees, and which make possible the sciences of man. Upon man the universal laws are compulsory no vote of majorities can alter them, no individual will set them aside. Human culture means, their recognition, and human wisdom means instinctive obedience to then. In the wilds of Africa and in the Bank of England alike, two and two make four; and though the interests of a nation might conceivably lead it to enact that two and two make five the laws of number and relation would crush them. Reason is a principle in nature which reaches consciousness in man, but it does not grow into existence through man; for man's growth is an ascension to an inward harmony with it, in place of that coercion by it which, in his lower. condition, he shares with plant and animal.

It is the principle of progress,

Recog

Love exists in nature. and to believe in progress is to believe in God. nising as highest within us the attraction of the best, and individual growth as its expression, we look forth upon the world and discern a like law operative there. Life has journeyed from the zoophyte to Shakspere. Art has journeyed from a naked savage swimming across his river. on a log to a civilised man crossing the ocean in a floating palace; from the scrawled picture-letter to the cartoon of Raphael. Humanity has journeyed from the normal war of nomadic savages to courts of law, arbitration, and social comity. Honesty has become the best policy. The peaceful more and more inherit the earth; animal and human ferocities pass away,. gentleness and benefit survive and increase. Evermore