ber that reforms can not be furthered with force. Men are minds, not matter and can not be handled as we handle lumber and iron and wheat and cotton. Of course this does not preclude regulation and prohibition of evils on the part of the state. This will follow the manufacture of sentiment and this process never stops, however delayed. Deep and far reaching was that answer of Christ to the quibblers; "Render under Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's.” Shakspeare makes King Henry say; “Every subject's duty is the king's, every subject's soul is his own." The Mormons pled religious liberty as support for polygamy. The courts replied; “You can believe as you please, but when it comes to conduct you must do what the state regards as best or suffer." There is no side of life that does not have to reckon with Christianity. Any man who holds to a Christianity which he is unwilling to apply, is holding to a husk out of which the corn has been taken. Conscience may have a fire in the furnace and basement. without opening the registers in the rooms. It is hot below and cold above. Love, in time opens the registers in every room. He who heats one room hot and calls it religion, while he leaves another cold and calls it business, has nothing in common with Christ's idea of manhood or conscience. A man's conscience is imprisoned in the castle dungeon of his soul. She cries out, but her voice is drowned by the thick walls and the sounds of the upper rooms, filled with the clamor of selfishness, the loud uproar of appetite and passion. a There The more intelligent conscience is, or in other words the more thorough one's education is, in body, mind and spirit, the more unreserved and hearty will be our assent to the dominion of love. Till then, men will assert conscientious scruples. They will call it "rich but doubtful sentiment,” mere emotion," "the mush of magnanimity " and many such names. is sentiment in it or we never should have had Christ's allusion to the lilies of the field. There is emotion in it as well as sentiment or the alabaster box would remain unbroken. There is generous magnanimity in it or Christ would not have filled the wine jars "to the brim," or said; “neither do I condemn thee," or commended the Samaritan heretic for saying; “whatsoever thou spendest more when I come again I will repay thee." Conscience considered as a simple perception of universal obligation is a witness without the illumination of experience, without the color of feeling and the light which cheers and inspires. Hence the feebleness of exhorting people to do right without filling their minds with suggestions of the value of love and the preciousness of its manifold contents. This is not needful in the field of mathematics, but if not realized in the moral realm, we shall simply mark time and never march a step. Conscience is the bare rock. Love is the round globe with all the elements. Conscience has its place. It is the oldest rock in human development. It underlies and precedes all. It makes possible what follows. It does not now grow. We can dig for it and analyze and classify it. The new strata are those deposits of grace which God has given to men as men. Love grows. It enswathes all. It saturates life. It is now in the form of summer, now winter, again it is spring or autumn. It is what we make it. In any man it is partial, but the pattern in the mount is like the overarching heavens. If blind, one's outlook will be quite as good at night as in the day. Conscience calls to duty. Love is privilege. Love includes the former. Conscience is solitary. Love is a trinity in which intellect, feeling and purpose enter, not only in the name of Jehovah, but in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. If I do things doggedly from a sense of duty, I am a slave. If I do the same thing as pleasing Christ I am his friend. If I utterly refuse to do it, love is a mere emotion and duty at best an expediency. The true lover redeems duty from drudgery by doing it out of love to the person in whom all his hopes center. Duty gains a gilding like that which the sun gives to a vast dome, around which has hung the shadows of the long night. Right conduct is better than wrong conduct whatever the motive. The act will be valuable to society. Right motive is • better than the wrong motive, whatever the conduct. Being underlies and regulates doing. The right conduct from the right motive constitutes right living. Enough of it makes a good neighborhood, a strong nation, Utopia, Heaven. Baptized obstinacy makes a very poor conscience. One who proposes to have his way at any cost, to lead or quit, to be president or nothing, may call the quality by pleasant names associated with righteousness, such as "grit" and "backbone." It is certain that like all vertebrates, he has a spinal column, but so has the mule. Here is a man as irregular as a block of chance blasted granite. All his habits are fixed. He does a certain number of things and stops. Beyond this he will not move. The easy rut of daily conduct is a groove worn smooth. Hopeful youth dashes against his unmoveable position as the ocean against a rocky shore. There is something impressive in mere power, whether it be of the wave or of the rock. But in life it can not appeal to us with great unction before we know the moral aim of the firmness or the force. Another man's little brain, not his conscience, leads him to look for gnats. He is little, petty, turns himself over and over like a goose on a spit. He has a delicate effeminate step. He nibbles off the cheese of life, surveys himself with a microscope. He scrupulously tips the beaker to drain out a gnat, and drains dry the rest, including numerous struggling camels and dromedaries, a whole menagerie. The conscience is in bad company and suffers with poor Dog Tray's experience. Critics and cynics sometimes distress young Christians, but there is less to fear from them than from the dude of either sex. The most that can be feared is a rare case of appendicitis. Professor Drummond has pointed out that even the vermiform appendix serves to mark the fact of evolution. Christianity is the greatest thing in the world. It is made small only by the necessities of the single minds that attempt to measure it. It includes the bare point of abstract right as a base of departure; nay, an attendant factor of all progress. Only our experience can give us any light on what is right or wrong. Christianity therefor exalts education, She would set men free from despotism in church and state. She would take the obscure mothers, nurses and the "sisters of charity" and put their names in the calendar instead of the more pretentious and ambitious. The halo around their lives is not necessarily lessened or increased by some distinction on the head or on the sleeve. The time has come when we see the passing of the king and the priest. Where are the prophets? They rise from the people. The priests become prophets, not all of them to be sure, not all the people become prophets, but in the bloodless revolution of intelligent conscience Zacharias will be counted with Peter and Luke and Timothy and Dorcas. When the crucifixion scene was closing symbolizing eternal love by the most extreme test it is recorded that the veil of the temple was rent in twain. Doubtless the Christian agreed with the Jewish church, that the event was without meaning and the veil was soon restored. Direct access to God continued the peculiar prerogative of a class, the spirit generated in the cross however continues to rend the veil, and to bring all men face to face with God. The body is a temple. The furniture, the ark, the cherubim, the holy of holies are all there. Conscience when intelligent may make greater use of pictures and images taken from the best artists, but it will send every man to God, to nature and to the Bible. In order to honor the Jesuit, the Pilgrim, the Puritan and the Huguenot it is not necessary for us to repeat their mistakes. How great would be our debt to the Jesuit, if we were inspired by his example to do for humanity what he did for a part of the visible church. Neither should we be uncharitable toward the early Protestants because they did not see more truth at once. They no more acted without cause, than do the Irish people in their protestant attitude against civil tyranny. We have been a long time learning that nothing is sacred but the soul, and that the Bible, the churches, the Sabbath, everything derives its sacredness from its power to serve the soul. Let the papal Protestant and the protesting Catholic see this and work together on moral lines. We can all use the old forts and breastworks as convenient though not permanent camping ground. When, thanks to God, there was a revival of learning, and a printing press to make it last, this question arose in France; Shall the nation slay her best citizens in the name of conscience?" Those in power said, "Yes." At first, the Huguenots of the great middle class were loyal to the king. Allegiance to his sovereign was duty to his God. When, however, by royal sufferance, the Divine testimonies were scoffed at, when truth was trampled in the streets, when common justice was denied, when the most devout and respectable people were driven from their homes, then at last their stern and patient souls accepted the duty of the hour and went forth to battle, with the New Testament in their knapsacks, inspired songs on their lips, and the name of Jehovah on their banners. The king had broken up their congregations, exiled their spiritual leaders, burned alive their brethren, winked at nameless outrages. Yet no power could suppress them. Forest depth and mountain cave, river marshes and castle dungeons, resounded with their hymns. The echoes reached the royal palace. The very watering places of the nobility caught the fascination. Persecution followed. The crimes of spiritual despotism follow each other in quick succession. Blow succeeds blow till the sweet strain of melody dies in the flames of St. Bartholomew. "If the work of the church be this,” men exclaimed, “to lay penalties on conscience, to treat sincerity as a crime, to give the flame the noblest and best hearts of the nation, then away with the church. If this be the service of God, then let us have no God. Let us have reason and humanity, brotherhood and equality instead." Germany, England and Holland joined forces with what remained of France, to check-mate Rome, but not till after they had lost their best blood. On our new soil, America proposed to plant the tree of liberty, till guarded by two oceans, we could throw off the shackles of tyranny, hold back by education and by law the Goths and Vandals of bigotry and ignorance, lifting up at last the charmed life of human brotherhood. If our earth shall ever witness that bright hour of evolution, of which prophets dream and poets sing, the era of a perfect liberty, worship and life, the era of a true religion within a true state, then in that consummate flowering of the centuries the eye and sense of History will discern the bloom and perfume of a conscience reigning as love, free as the air, strong as the hills, and as immovable as the solid globe. There are but two great fundamental truths which our experience attests as the only essentials which we are beyond all doubt, to teach to our children. There is no such thing as a guilty opinion, but if the testimony of those to whom we are accustomed to give greatest deference, avails anything, we must stand for God's Fatherhood and man's brotherhood and stand in the authority of love, never more in the love of authority. |