reaching its most intolerable development in the Westminster Confession. The Nicene Creed has seemed to us as far as possible from the simplicity of Jesus. But it is heart of his heart compared with the Westminster theology. It is of this that the English Churchman, whom I have already quoted, says that Paganism had nothing viler than its doctrine of the atonement, nothing so vile as its doctrine of predestination, and that its God is the most horrible being which it is possible for the imagination to conceive. These are strong words; but I cannot see that they are a whit too strong to state the unvarnished facts. And yet I know that there are men as good and true as any men alive who think, or think they think, that the Westminster Confession is the ark of God, on which we may not dare to lay destructive or irreverent hands.

Jesus, the wandering Jew, and nowhere else rejected with such scorn, nowhere else so homeless, as in those doctrinal and ceremonial developments which have been more conspicuously characteristic of Christianity in its historical development than anything else. No room for him in the portentous theological statements; in the tawdry splendor of ecclesiastical disfigurement, no place for him to lay his head!

And, if this were the whole story of the relation of Jesus to the Christian centuries, it would be miserably sad. It is miserably sad, even as a part of the whole story. But it is only a part; and there is another part that is full of encouragement and strength and peace. There was no room in the inn for Mary and her child, in the dear lovely legend that is worth a thousand ordinary facts and figures that are indubitably true. But there was room in the stable, in the oxen's stall, the manger where the oxen fed, a cradle for the marvellous child.

There is a sign and symbol here of what has been true of Jesus in his relation to the Christian centuries. His essential spirit of undogmatic, unceremonial religion has indeed wandered wide and long; and it has been spurned away by those who have been boldest in their claims on his authority.

But, if there has been no room for him in the inn, there has been room for him in the stable. If the proud and boastful theologians and ecclesiastics have cried out upon him, "What have we to do with thee?" there have been doors flung wide to him; and homeless hearts have made a home for him as pure and sweet as that which, when he was child embosomed him, on Nazareth's hillside street. Thousands and millions have found room for him, and to spare, because all of these have apprehended religion as he apprehended it, as simple trust in God and love toward men, as mercy and compassion, as loving most where there was most need of love, as striving for an inward purity of desire and thought, contented with no mere conformity to an external law. And not only so; but many thousands, millions, who have not apprehended religion in this simple way, in spite of their belief that without certain forms and doctrines no man could be saved, have shown forth that heavenward trust, that manward love, that inward purity, which, wherever they are shown, are a right hearty welcome for the essential spirit of Jesus to come in and make itself at home.

I do not know who does? how much of this simplicity of religion has been inspired directly or indirectly by the spirit of Jesus wandering through the world. Sometimes it seems as if it must be very little, his spirit has been so over borne by hostile elements. But, if the Church has had her proud ecclesiastics, she has also had her humble pastors and teachers. If she has had her Babel-building theologians, she has also had her simple and great-hearted men and women, who have made "the sweet reasonableness of Jesus" their possession, and his secret theirs. But it would have gone hard with the wandering Jesus if his only welcome among men had been that for which his own spirit had prepared the way; if thousands upon thousands had not, simply because they were men and women, living in God's world, found the same reason and authority for believing the religion of Jesus as he found,- the witness of their own honest minds and loving hearts.

In the legend of the Wandering Jew, it is the climax of his misery that he cannot die. In the parable of the Wandering Jesus, it is his deathlessness that glorifies his name, and is the peace and comfort of our hearts. That the ecclesiastics and the theologians have not been able with all their selfish or mistaken zeal to crush out the spirit of Jesus is the most splendid testimony that we have to its imperishable vitality. If it has survived so long and in spite of so much blind or wilful opposition, why should we doubt that it will survive for centuries and ages of the coming time, or that it will have in them a more unimpeded course and a more glorious triumph than it has yet had at any time since first it started on its endless way?

"His living word sprang from the heart of Man,

Eternal word of love and liberty.

Fearless he gave it to the winds again :

'Twas manhood's native tongue, and could not die.
To his dear brotherhood life's pulses leap,

And wakening ages answer deep to deep."

THE CHARACTER OF JESUS.

IN old New England times the preparatory lecture, as they called it, was a feature of commanding interest in both ecclesiastical and social life, which in those times were almost, if not altogether, one. It was preparatory of the celebration of the Lord's Supper on the Sunday following. My sermon of this morning is a kind of preparatory lecture, preparatory of the coming Christmas festival, the tendency of which is to be exclusively an affair of personal kindness, in which the personality of Jesus counts for very little, notwithstanding much ado about the legends of his birth and infancy. But, when we celebrate the birthday of any other man of great renown, we habitually address ourselves to a consideration of his character. By so doing we imagine that we can best do honor to his memory, and get strength from his example. If, then, we have welcomed Jesus back from his long exile, in some supernatural sphere, to the warm precincts of our human life, there seems no good reason why we should not accord to him the treatment we accord to others; no good reason why we should not celebrate his birthday, or the day traditionally fixed as such, by a consideration of his character, with a view to making it as serviceable as possible to the edification of our own characters and our self-encouragement in every good word and work.

There is nothing to surprise us in the fact that the character of Jesus has not heretofore, and especially in those churches which are called orthodox, been a favorite theme at Christmas or at any other time. Strictly speaking, Jesus has had no character for the traditional theology, for character is that which differentiates man from man; and, if

Jesus was something other than a man, a normal human being, then to speak of his character is somewhat beside the mark. Even if this were not so, so much strength has gone to the discussion of his nature, or to the discussion of his offices and work, that little has been left for the discussion or the apprehension of those intellectual and moral traits which make up the sum of character.

Our older Unitarianism and our newer Orthodoxy occupy almost precisely the same ground. There are passages in our Unitarian sermons of fifty years ago that would fit so nicely into Dr. Abbott's, and others such as his, that you could not find the seam. Nothing is easier than for these theological liberals to say that they are not Unitarians when the charge of being such is brought against them. They are not Unitarians after the manner of Channing's earlier preaching. Their theology is a more advanced theology than his their Jesus is a much more human being than was his pre-existent Christ. They are not Unitarians after the manner of the frankest of our later Unitarians, who are prepared to accept not only the main proposition that Jesus was a human being, but all the corollaries inherent in that proposition. But they are Unitarians after the manner of such Unitarianism as that which was dominant among Unitarians some fifty years ago, a Unitarianism whose passwords were that Jesus was a perfect man, the ideal man, the perfect revelation of God in perfect man, all of which terms, I am obliged to feel, imply a certain lack of intellectual seriousness, a failure to apply the mind closely and severely to the facts in hand, to the end of seeing just what they import, and are merely an ingenious endeavor to make out of them something bearing a resemblance more or less remote to the things which have been done away.

It is simply fatal to any lucid apprehension of the character of Jesus to pronounce him at the outset a perfect man or the ideal man. Could we prove either of these propositions, we should still be far enough from establishing a doctrine of his unique divinity, and much farther from iden