they are Jews and must have no dealings with the Samaritans. If, all at once, some signal could be struck, obedient to which men should range themselves under the banner of their most excellent ideals, what marching and what countermarching there would be! The Presbyterian and the Unitarian, the Roman Catholic and the Agnostic, the Jew and the Christian, also the Christian and the Mohammedan and Buddhist, would find themselves standing side by side, lifting up shining faces to the same eternal verities of tighteousness and truth and love. And in the aggregation that would thus be massed in a majestic unity we should have the true Church Universal, a church not of the letter, but of the spirit. The truth is her prophetic gift, The soul her sacred page, And feet on Mercy's errands swift Better a religion of high and glorious ideals than any amount of theological conviction without such ideals. Better, too, the apprehension of such ideals and their due reverence than any amount of the most just and admirable intellectual opinion which is mere opinion, and does not wake and stir the soul to "deeds of daring excellence," or the right hand's patient service of which the left hand knoweth not. Can a good tree bring forth evil fruit? Sometimes, apparently. Mr. Emerson sent his pears and apples to the agricultural fair at Concord; and the prize committee visited him to make inquiry how it was possible for him, with such good varieties, to raise such poor specimens. I think that sometimes Unitarians have found themselves making a similar inquiry, wondering much, and humiliated not a little, when they have found the Unitarian trees a choice variety, they had supposed-bearing so little fruit of righteousness, so little sympathy, kindliness, and aspiration, and not far away some gnarled and scrubby Presbyterian stock blossoming like an apple-tree in early June, and duly bending to the "When a god ground under the weight of ruddy fruit. would ride, anything serves him for a chariot”; and when a man, full of all peace and charity, would go riding forth to help and cheer and bless his fellow-men, any creed will bear him on its scaly back as safely as the monster Geryon bore Dante and his guide, in great, long, sweeping circles, through the seventh pit of hell. There are men and women cherishing the harshest creeds who have the tenderest hearts. There are men and women in all the churches whom no church can call its own; who thrill with wonder at the tender grace and solemn mystery of things; who lift up their hearts with awe and reverence and trust to the ineffable Good; who love the things which made the Man of Nazareth what he was; who go about, as he did, doing good to all who are in need of service, small or great. It is refreshing and consoling to remember that these things are so. But there is danger that their soft and tender radiance may blind us to the fact that we are bound not only to the reverence of all valid ethical and spiritual ideals, but also to the utmost clearness possible of intellectual vision. Intellectual clearness and devotion to ethical and spiritual ideals are not, as many seem to think, opposing terms. The heart does not grow apace, as many fain would have us to believe, upon "the ashes of the burnt-out mind." We want more intellectual life and vigor than we have, not less. The more, the better. Then, however glad we may be, and must be, to find men's ideals transcending their dogmas, we shall so conceive of God that we shall not reverence the loftiest ideals less heartily because we find their personal embodiment, not in Jesus only, or Mary his mother, but in thousands of sons who have lived well, thousands of mothers who have shown forth a tenderness as warm and sweet as Jesus knew on Mary's tender breast. It makes no difference what a man believes? Nay, but it makes a world of difference. Just that. For the world in which we live is fashioned by our thought, our "shaping spirit of imagination." The ideal is the principal thing. Nevertheless, then, and then only, are we at the top of our condition when we so think that our ideals inhere for us in a divine reality, and are no mere projections of our spiritual imagination on the trackless void. That great scholar, James Darmesteter, found in the development of the Hebrew religion nothing but the development of an ideal,— no approximation, however slight, to a divine reality, a living God. There are many who believe with him; and nothing is more convincing of the validity of his conception than the enthusiasm of his own response to the ideal which was developed by the prophets of Israel, climbing from height to height until upon the summit we see it shining in the face of Joseph's peasant son. But one thing is sure: the prophets never thought or dreamed that they were merely developing and worshipping a moral ideal. They thought they had seen "the king in his beauty," the Father in the fulness of his grace, or at least that the things which they had seen "in clear dream and solemn vision " were parts of his ways, however little was yet known of him. It was a living God whom they adored, not an ideal, however glorious, that was the strength of their heart and their portion forever. Either they could not have forced their lips to prophesy in the name of such an ideal, or it would not have stirred and thrilled and mastered them as did their thought and service of that Yahweh in whom they had put their trust. Its word in their hearts would not have been to them like a fire shut up in their bones, so that they were weary with forbearing, and they could not stay. What was true of them is true of all mankind. In this sense, at least, "The soul knows no persons." However grandly men may be stirred by an ideal of infinite goodness and perfection, they must, I am obliged to think, be stirred more grandly and effectively when they conceive of that ideal as inherent evermore in an Eternal Power, which is forever making for the righteousness of that ideal. I steadier step when I recall That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall. And this No less on this account the truth stands fast that it is mainly by the ideals we cherish that we are transformed into the image of their beauty, truth, and good. truth is as far as possible from the untruth which declares that our ideals have no commanding force unless they are embodied in some person, human or divine, and is removed by infinite diameters, on the other hand, from such a position as that of Émile Zola,- that religion is a provisional utility, a plaything which humanity, "still a child, still in the go-cart," cannot yet do without, a good enough thing for those who are not as yet aware that they are being fooled. For, however persistent the reality of religion, and whatever sweet and noble confidence we may have in the efficacy of impersonal ideals, I wonder much how any man can doubt that our ideals become much more persuasive, much more inspiring in their quality and commanding in their force, when they are embodied, or conceived as embodied, in some man or god. In the mean time the supreme necessity is that men should embody in the concrete of action their ideals of moral excellence, whether these are or are not conceived as inhering in some person, human or divine. There have been men who have imagined that there is no divine embodiment of their ideals, who have nevertheless done well. "O God," said Theodore Parker over the grave in which an honest atheist lay buried, "though he denied thy existence, yet he obeyed thy law." That was doing well; but how shall any man do well while failing, not to embody in the good of action his best thought and dream, but in the stout endeavor to do that? So failing is to see the vision fade. Of all unities of the spirit, that is the best which gathers into one great family all those who try with patient minds to know what things are true, and with courageous hearts to do the best they know. THE UNKNOWN LIFE. DID it ever occur to you how little we know of the life of Jesus, even assuming that we do really know all that is set down in the first three Gospels, to say nothing of the fourth? Should we include the legends of the birth and infancy, we should only have an addition of a few days; but, as Martineau has said, "They do not belong to the kind of record that can commend itself by self-evidence; and other evidence they have none." The story of his lagging in the temple with the doctors, while his parents sought him sorrowing, would add another day; but that is manifestly an attempt to fill in the gap of thirty years or more between his birth and the beginning of his ministry,—to make that long and painful silence vocal with his praise. All that we really know of Jesus from the Synoptics is the period of his ministry, and this was from twelve to fifteen months long. Reckoning fifteen, with Martineau, of the four hundred and fifty days, we have some mention of - how many do you think? About thirty-five,— one month and four or five days over constitute the mete and bound of all our knowledge of a life about which more has been written than about any other, and which has shaped the feeling and the action of the world as has no other. These thirty-five reported days are scattered irregularly over the fifteen months of Jesus' ministry. In one place three months and in another two are left in absolute silence. One day, that of the cornfield, exhausts onetenth of all that Matthew has to tell; another day, oneeighth; another day, one-fifth. One day, that of the fig-tree cursed, exhausts one-seventh of Mark; and five days, onefourth of Luke. 66 It appears, therefore, that twelve-thir |