Hedge and Martineau; and until there is some other communion that is large enough to include them in its fold, and brave enough to do them rightful honor, without misrepresenting their opinions or their spirit, we must even do as Dante did, and make a party by ourselves.

Not only so, but our advantages will lay on us the obligation to do all that we can to make the Unitarian denomination more vigorous in the future than it ever has been in the past, and to spread abroad its doctrines as they have never yet been spread. We owe this to the beauty and the glory of our faith; and we owe it to the fidelity of those who, fighting against such odds as we have never known, planted their banner well inside the enemy's lines, and kept it from all stain. That ours is one of the smallest of the sects should "She is a not abate our courage nor diminish our regard. little college, but we love her," Webster said of Dartmouth, "Were not Unitarians few and dehis own Alma Mater. spised," said Channing, "I would not be a Unitarian.” Defect of size has never yet, in churches or in states, debarred them from men's passionate affection. Judea, Greece, and England, "compassed by the inviolate sea," are proof enough of this. Moreover, if Unitarianism has been numerically weak, it has been strong in intellectual force and moral consecration. It has been great in personality, in leadership, in culture, in ideas, in sympathy with science and reform.

But, while I should be enumerating our obligations, I am merely adding to the list of our advantages. No matter. And these can all be Our advantages are obligations. summed up in one,― the obligation to make ourselves worthy of the calling wherein we are called, worthy of the Unitarian tradition and the Unitarian faith. To do this, it is not enough that we deny the truth of what good men have believed in past times, and still believe with various degrees of modification and sincerity. There are Unitarians innumerable who, having done this, think they have done all; and they have not learned the A, B, C, of Unitarian religion. There are people in all the orthodox churches the latchets of whose shoes they

are not worthy to unloose, because somehow their irrational opinions do not prevent them from having a genuine ethical passion and a lovely spiritual experience. These are the indispensable things; and, compared with them, the most brilliant intellectual radicalism is dust and chaff. Thank heaven, there is nothing in the essential nature of Unitarianism to preclude their presence and their power. And the one obligation laid upon us is, however extensive our intellectual range, to make it as intensive as may be, to realize in deed and life its spiritual possibilities, making our daily walk and conversation such as they should be to be accordant with such doctrines as we hold concerning God and man and all their wonderful affiliations with each other and the universal world.

There is one aspect of our own history that is full of encouragement. There was a time when a good part of all our Unitarian energy was wasted in the vain endeavor to prove ourselves as orthodox as we had ever been. That was our silly period; and, because we cannot now regard it without shame, we cannot bear to see our liberal orthodox friends doing the very things that we did formerly. But, because that period of unreality did not long persist with us, we are confident that it will not long persist with our orthodox friends; and we are impatient, for their sakes, to have them enter into that estate of freedom which we so much enjoy. We do not all enjoy it as we might and should. There are many Unitarians who disguise their real thought in "damaged phraseology"; many who do not shape their expression on their real thought with absolute sincerity. We confess these things with shame, and hope to better them.

I must confess that, when I think of all that Unitarianism means, of the splendor of its intellectual and ethical tradition, of its glorious principles, and its grand conceptions of the world, humanity, and God, of the great names and high examples that have adorned its history, I often wonder that there are not a greater number of persons, even in this noisy, superficial time, who are irresistibly and irrevocably drawn

to place their time, their money, and, what is needed most, their lives, at its service. If we could have a consecration and devotion equal to the splendor of our ideas and the significance of our history, we should have a hundred churches where we have but one; and every one of them would have its throng of joyful worshippers. Did you ever hear of Hippocleides, the Corinthian youth who danced upon his head upon the table at a great dinner, and upon being expostulated with by his host, whose daughter he was about to marry, answered, "Hippocleides doesn't care"? Now, do you know, I think that many of our Unitarian people and our Unitarian churches ought to take that Hippocleides for their patron saint? Why, but because they do not care? It is nothing, or next to nothing, to them what becomes of the Unitarian body or the Unitarian faith. If they have any time or money left, after attending to every selfish pleasure, they may give a little of the one or of the other or of both to further our denominational interests or those of a particular church. But not until the last are first and the first last will these interests be paramount in their consideration or approximate to such a height. And what business or art or work of any kind would thrive when treated in this fashion? That more of our churches do not vanish into thin air is simply owing to the indomitable persistence of a few tried and faithful souls, whose spirit made unanimous would make such a difference in the Unitarian body as the warm body of the earth will know between this barrenness of the winter's end and the full tide of June's delicious green with every rose abloom.

THE DIVINE EXAMPLE.

My starting-point is that passage in the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus holds up the conduct of his heavenly Father as an example to his disciples. Do so and so, he says, that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven; for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust. "Be ye therefore perfect," he concludes, "even as your heavenly Father is perfect." There are not many texts in the New Testament that have been so much abused as this, so much misunderstood. I have heard it quoted hundreds of times, and almost never with the meaning that it has as it stands in the fifth chapter of Matthew, forty-eighth verse. As it stands there, it has no such meaning as is commonly attached to it; namely, that man can be and should be an imitator of the divine perfection, considered in its total manifestation, at least upon the moral side. Some have contended that we have here a flying goal, an ideal impossible to realize, but nevertheless one forever lifting us to heights of more complete attainment; while others have contended that the goal can be attained, that man can be morally perfect even within the limits of this present life. We have had not only individuals here and there, but great bodies of believers, calling themselves Perfectionists, holding to this form of thought. Some of them have contended for a perfection coëxtensive with that of God; and others have said: "To be perfect as God is perfect is to be perfect according to the measure of our being. He is perfect as God. We must be perfect as men." Now it is not to be doubted that, whichever of these lines has been adopted by sincere and earnest men and

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Here and there a man, imagining himself to be already perfect, has been a melancholy spectacle. From first to last there have But the majority have said in heart and had already attained," while still pressspirit of the immortal poet when he

women, great good has been the general result.

been many such. mind, "Not as if I ing onward in the sings:

"Profounder, profounder, man's spirit must dive;
To his aye-rolling orbit no goal can arrive.

The heavens that now draw him with sweetness untold
Once found, for new heavens he spurneth the old."

We can find no better exhibition of this method than in Dr. Channing's preaching. The imitableness of the divine character was one of the most fruitful and inspiring of those attraction. glorious themes which ever had for him a supreme And what was the perfection of God as he beheld it in clear dream and solemn vision, as he made it shine before the eyes of those who listened to his solemn and impressive speech? It was simply the impersonation of his own moral ideal; and, being that, it was an object worthy of all admiraBe sure he never fancied that he had tion and desire. already attained or imagined that any one else could so fancy It is of the very essence of the moral with good warrant. ideal to recede as we draw nigh to it, to enlarge as we embody it in thought and deed.

Be ye therefore perfect even as the moral ideal is perfect. When we consider in what strange directions Christian thought has sometimes gone, it would appear that we have here a safer and more excellent injunction than the New For see: Testament one which it imperfectly translates. John Stuart Mill said he would call no being good who was not what he meant when he applied that word to his fellowcreatures; but not all the Christian theologians have been persuaded that this way of thinking is the best. A being has been called good and called God and called by many tender and endearing names, whom we should never think of