upon the sun are not so small in comparison with its great expanse of undimmed light as are the failures and iniquities in these relations to the unsullied brightness of the countless lives to which truth and purity are an indefeasible possession and an abiding peace. I mean these are the ratios of these things for those who will not allow their judgments to be perverted by the necessary or deliberate inadequacy of the daily press, but who appeal from this to the safer ground of their own personal experience of the facts of social life.

And, even in that sphere of life which is not limited to hearsay or report, how wide the boundaries of the unknown life, how careful we should be to make our inference from what is really known to what is not, instead of in the opposite way!

"We are spirits clad in veils ;

Man by man was never seen;

All our deep communing fails

To remove the shadowy screen."

And how much more the superficial acquaintance of the market-place, the street, the ordinary intercourse of social life. What placid faces oftentimes conceal what tragedies of grief and pain! "To smile and be a villain" is as possible to-day in Brooklyn or New Haven as it was in Hamlet's Elsinore. What do we know of the struggles and temptations of our fellow-men? We are sure that we should never have done so in their places. Nor they in ours. It is the conspiracy of person and event that makes the action good or bad. There are men who go to utter wreck upon the stormy seas who fight more valiantly with passion's wind and wave than some who come into port with colors flying, having lost no sail or spar. Meantime it is a principle of hermeneutics that, in a literary document, the general drift shall interpret the particular obscurity. Shall it not be so with our judgments of our fellow-men? It is of much more importance that we judge men's lives rightly, their obscure passages, than that we judge rightly any Bible text. But, in

sad truth, how often does one doubtful action blot out a lifetime's good endeavor in our judgment of another's good and ill, especially if we are tired of hearing Aristides called the just or have any selfish reason for rejoicing in another's fall! If our lives lift up such a banner for us that "once to have acted nobly seems a reason why we should always do so," so should they, I believe, lift up a banner for our friends and for our enemies, so that, if they have long done well, it shall not lightly be presumed that they have fallen from their high estate.

The unknown life of those with whom we are most intimate, who sit at table with us every day, share with us roof and bed, is one of the mysteries that has often pressed upon the poet's heart until it found relief in song. One sings:

"Alas! we think not what we clearly see
About our hearths,- angels that are to be,
Or may be, if they will, and we prepare
Their souls and ours to meet in happy air,-
A child, a friend, a wife, whose soft heart sings
In unison with ours, breeding its future wings."

And another sings, as many another might if they could sing:

"Do you wonder an awe enfolds my love
For the presence with whom I dwell,
My inmost friend, but a stranger, too,
Whom I know not passing well?

"Her soul to me is an upper land
Where mornings rise unseen
On pathless mountain mysteries
And dells of hidden green.

"I am so glad of her gardens sweet,
Too sacred for me to walk;

So glad of the sunlit heights too far
To echo our mingled talk!

"And I try to climb and listen and watch,

For maybe the sense will grow

Till into her loneliness I

may press

And all of her sweetness know!"

Shall we say "all"? Or is there for each soul a penetralium, a secret place, which no one may invade,— no, not his dearest friend; and is love then, then only, at its best, when it respects the barrier which makes a privacy for every individual soul? But we may well beware of that accusing, damning ignorance of kindred and of friends, which, when it is too late, smites us with irremediable pain. "Had they known him, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory." How many humble folk are crucified each day afresh by those who learn too late what saintly and angelic beingsay, what lords of glory - they have hurt and killed!

The unknown life! It is nearer to us than our friend. It is very nigh us, even in our hearts. Well says the ancient hymn,

"How little of ourselves we know!"

And well another cries,—

"Can it be in us all there are heights of will

And shadowy deeps of thought,

A land in the heart of each one's life

With self-surprises fraught?"

The same question came to the Hindu; and he answered it with his doctrine of Karma, the individual inheritance of ancestral life. It came to the Greek also; and he answered it with his doctrine of reminiscence,- something left over from a previous state of beings. If only the surprises might be always those of higher thought and holier will, not sometimes those "when our baser passions speak for us, and we stand by and wonder!" Let him that thinketh he

standeth take heed lest he fall. When the good moments come, let us economize them with a firm resolve and an indomitable will, if, haply so, the surprises of unworthy thought and feeling may, if they come at all, find no unguarded place.

THE HIGHER SECULARISM.*

SECULARISM, as commonly understood, is the philosophy and ideal and method of human life and progress that is opposed to other-worldliness; i.e., to that order of ethical conceptions which appeals to theological and religious sanctions. It may be atheistic or agnostic. It was agnostic, I believe, as represented by Mr. George Holyoake, its great English founder. We do not know anything about God or immortality, he said. Therefore, we will not talk about these things or think about them, least of all will we endeavor to utilize them as factors in our every-day affairs. But, while Holyoake was agnostic, if not personally, in the publication of his social ideals, Mr. Bradlaugh, who succeeded to his leadership, was frankly atheistic. He was no doubter. denied both God and immortality, often with much heat He and violence. It is no part of my intention to bring any accusation against these men and their modes of thought and action. If they seem to me hard and narrow, I recognize them as earnest and sincere; and I know that they have furnished a creed and an ideal to many hundreds and thousands of people who have been much in need of a creed and an ideal to steady them and direct their purposes. make this world a better place to live in is a much better To business than to be idly dreaming of a world that will be perfect from the start; and, if the secularists have emphasized too much the material comforts of existence in a world where they have been emphasized too little, they have done a timely work.

Secularism, so called, is itself a higher secularism than

*To be supplemented by a sermon called "Life in Ourselves."

the more common sort which we do not call secularism, but worldliness, meaning by that, devotion to material comforts and advantages, habitual regard for the good opinion of people of wealth and social standing, an intense preoccupation with matters of established form and usage. Here you

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have the sæculum, the world, in the sense in which Jesus found it opposed to him, in the sense in which it has always been opposed to the idealists and the reformers. Surely, that secularism which has for its world the whole circle of human interests between the boundaries of life and death is a higher secularism than this. But is there not a higher still? Does not the world in our habitual speech mean something larger than the circle of these mundane interests, as well as something infinitely larger than the social round of custom and conformity, of wealth and luxury and show, even the sum of universal order, mystery, and law? Perhaps you have in your reading, as I have in mine, found the word "secular" applied to this universal order; and, if it is permissible to use "secular" for universal, then it must be equally permissible to use secularism as the equivalent of universalism,- not the universalism of the sect, but the universalism of science. And so much higher as the secularism of Holyoake and Bradlaugh is than the secularism, the worldliness, of the famed McAllister, the secularism of science and of a religion that takes up into itself the import of science is higher than that of Holyoake and Bradlaugh. Do I exaggerate? On the contrary, I keep Iwell within the bounds of truth and soberness.

But I have not begun my talk in the way that I intended to at first. I intended to begin it with the proverb, "Tenterden steeple was the cause of the Goodwin sands." The higher secularism of which I wish to speak is merely an extension of that proverb which, I suppose, you all have heard and understand. It is a proverb of the connections of things which do not obviously appear. Tenterden steeple was the cause of the Goodwin sands? And why? Because