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supreme Spirit, and the supreme Spirit as pervading all beings, henceforth views no creature with contempt.

"7. In him who knows that all spiritual beings are the same in kind with the supreme Spirit, what room can there be for delusion of mind, or what room for sorrow when he reflects on the identity of spirit?

"8. The pure, enlightened soul assumes a luminous form, with no gross body; unblemished, untainted by sin; itself being a ray from the infinite Spirit, which knows the past and the future, which pervades all, which existed with no cause but itself, which created all things as they are, in ages very remote.

"9. They who are ignorantly devoted to the mere ceremonies of religion are fallen into thick darkness; but they surely have a thicker gloom around them who are solely attached to speculative science.

"10. Unveil, O Thou who givest sustenance to the world, that face of the true sun, which is now hidden by a vase of golden light, so that we may see the truth, and know our whole duty!

"11. O Thou who givest sustenance to the world, thou sole mover of all, thou who restrainest sinners, who pervadest yon great luminary, who appearest as the Son of the Creator, hide thy dazzling beams and expand thy spiritual brightness, that I may view thy most auspicious, most glorious, real form.

"12. That all-pervading Spirit, that Spirit which gives light to the visible sun, even the same in kind am I, though infinitely distant in degree. Let my soul return to the immortal Spirit of God, and then my body, which ends in ashes, return to dust!

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"13. O Spirit, who pervadest fire, lead us in a straight path to the riches of beatitude! Thou, O God! possessest all the treasures of knowledge: remove each foul taint from our souls. We continually approach thee with the highest praise and the most fervid adoration.”

Those sacred books, the Vedas, as far as we know them by translations, contain only the germs of Brahmanism, not yet developed: no hierarchy, no system of castes, no vestige of transmigration, -doctrines which, partly by foreign influence, were developed in the progress of time; so that their mythology resembles that of the Egyptians and Greeks, even contains many moral and philosophical ideas which, though disfigured sometimes by absurd fables, are akin to Christian doctrines. It is not our purpose to show how much and in which way that reciprocal influence bore upon the different

religious systems. Besides, every scholar knows how much the Ionic and Italic school of philosophy, and even Plato, are indebted to the wisdom of the Hindus.

We are, however, not blind towards the inferiority of the Hindu system, if compared with Christianity, and towards its later gross idolatry and unchristian usages, partly owing to the demoralizing influence of their Mohammedan masters; for instance, the immolation of widows, which practice has been said to have originated in the "operation of jealousy, and regular plan for the degradation of the female sex." But neither in the Sanscrit, nor in any language of the IndoGermanic branch, do we find any word which is expressive of the inferiority of females. Every student of language knows what powerful testimony this fact bears for the morality of the Indo-Germanic, in opposition to the Semitic, family. The present degradation of the Hindus does not prove any thing against the morality of their sacred books; but only excites our sympathy and compassion for them, who, as children of the Indo-Germanic, we better say Indo-European, family, are of our kin. To the students of comparative philology and ethnology, the Sanscrit and its sacred books are especially dear, and they would bail the complete publication and translation of those sacred treasures. If we had to choose between the Talmud and the Vedas, we would prefer the latter. And we cannot close this article more properly than by the following words of an eminent American scholar :

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"The Vedas are, by not less than a thousand years, the earliest documents for the history of Indo-European language, for the history, moreover, of Indo-European conditions and institutions. The civil constitution, the religious rites, the mythologic fancies, the manners and customs, which they depict, have a peculiarly original and primitive aspect; seeming to exhibit a far nearer likeness to what once belonged to the whole Indo-European family than is anywhere else to be attained. The Vedas appear rather like an Indo-European than an Indian record; they are the property rather of the whole family than of a single branch." *

*W. D. Whitney, on the Principles of Linguistic Science, p. 227.

ART. V.-THE

NATIONAL

CONFERENCE OF UNITA

RIAN AND OTHER CHRISTIAN CHURCHES.

THE National Conference, started not four years ago, amidst doubts and fears, is now clearly an established fact. The Convention which, in May, 1865, organized it in New York was large and weighty beyond all expectation, and proved that the projectors of the movement had not miscalculated. the wants or wishes of the Unitarian body. One hundred and ninety-seven churches were represented in that Convention by a body of ministers and lay delegates whose very appearance was victory, so impressive was the spectacle of such a mass of full heads and strong faces. Every man took courage as he looked at the cloud of witnesses for our faith that had suddenly arisen about him; and, before a word had been said, the real work of the Convention had been done, in the consciousness of power and the purpose of co-operation instantly developed in that representative assembly.

What to organize upon was, of course, the inevitable first question of a collection of delegates from churches that for a half-century and more had been contending for absolute congregational independence, and had kept jealous watch over the right of private judgment. There were old men there, who had themselves been expelled from Orthodox churches. for holding opinions more truly Christian than the creed of their persecutors. The chief obstacle to any large representation at the Convention had been universally recognized to be the inbred suspicion and dislike of our churches and our people towards any thing tending to limit their freedom of private opinion, or endanger congregational independence. Either, then, the fear of peril from this source had yielded to the stronger passion for co-operation and sympathy in Christian work and missionary labors, or else congregational liberty and the rights of private judgment had become practi

cally too generally conceded, not only in our own body, but in most of the Christian sects about us, to be any longer a subject of anxiety. Both of these influences had overcome the reluctance of our churches to trust themselves in a convention which professedly aimed at a better and stronger organization. Most of them had discovered that there are other things besides the enjoyment of liberty of thinking, for which Christian churches exist, and that those churches which do little. but assert and protect their independence, are as bare and weak in Christian graces and charities, as Daniel Boone must have been in the comforts and advantages of civilization, when the settlement of a neighbor within a dozen miles of him so alarmed his instincts of unwatched and uncircumscribed liberty, that he moved fifty miles deeper into the primeval wilderness to make sure of his absolute freedom.

And it was high time for this conviction to come to a practical head. Congregationalism has its dangers as well as its advantages; private judgment its perils and weaknesses as well as its abounding blessings. The Unitarians had carried both out so completely and with such zeal, that pretty much all the other interests and legitimate objects of Church institutions had been neglected or oversloughed. A jealous exercise of the right of private judgment had necessarily created a critical and questioning habit, which unconsciously weakens that sympathetic communion, that sweet common consciousness, which is the vehicle of the great traditional life of the Church, until the unwritten yet most precious part of the gospel faith and spirit had vanished out of their experience. Their Christian blood had, in two generations, grown thin upon a diet of speculation and criticism; and spiritual atrophy and consumption were threatening their very existence. Sitting like watch-makers with microscopes over their eyes, employed in studying the minuter distinctions in religious things, their leaders and scholars had lost the habit of looking broadly out upon the moral landscape, and taking in the wide relations of gospel truth and Christian life, until we had nearly lost the sense of God in history, Christ in the Church, and the Church in the world. So faithless in themselves had

many of the moral leaders of the Unitarian cause become, that those who did not desert to Orthodoxy, sunk, in many cases, into denominational apathy and disgust; a few disowning the very name Unitarian, others wearing it under protest; some of the ablest and most inspiring preachers rarely or never showing their faces in our denominational assemblies; while the very wisest and most prudent owed no small part of their repute for judgment, candor, and sense, to the courage and coolness with which they prophesied the extinction of our denominational being, in less than two lives.

If it had been only the ministers who faltered and doubted, the case would not have been so alarming; but the laity had become equally sceptical and indifferent. That "front rank of human nature" which a worthy and now departed minister of our faith addressed at the annual meeting of the American Unitarian Association in the Federal-street Church, five and twenty years ago, was a very choice percentage of a very select class of people! The few laymen practically interested in the prosperity and diffusion of our faith were known from one end to the other of the body, and their names could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Any thing like the present interest of the laity in our denominational affairs was wholly unheard of, and would have been regarded as almost incompatible with the decorous dulness and sleepy dignity thought to be expressive of an unfanatical, thoroughly respectable, unsuperstitious, and highly literary Christian body.

There had been much individual protest against this state of things for many years. None should forget the zealous and eloquent efforts which the colleague of Dr. Channing made to arouse the Unitarian denomination to its duty; his powerful and stirring controversial lectures, the wonder and admiration of the writer's early manhood, as the fiery stream of logic and devout passion rolled in an unbroken torrent from his lips; nor the earnest work of the two Whitmans, Bernard and Jason, nor Henry Ware's and Edward Hall's persistent endeavors to inspire our body with the courage of their own opinions, keeping them, meanwhile, baptized in Christian faith,

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