THE

VOL. VIII.

No. 9.

be carried on by the young,-I mean by persons under forty.

By the time one is forty the habits of life are generally pretty well fixed, the grooves of thought and action are usually pretty well dug, and there is not much use trying to change them.

Not that this is always so. I am speaking only of the general law. There are many exceptions. History, and probably the personal acquaintance of most of us, furnish numerous splendid examples of men and women who never cease to grow, to improve, to advance, who never lose their youthful spirit; who are always ready for new truth, new departures in thinking, new enterprises; who, like trees, make new wood to the end of life.

Thus our poet Bryant grew younger in heart, more alive with sympathy for all classes of men, more ready for new enterprises and outlooks, as he advanced in age, and was never better fitted for leadership in all noble reforms than when suddenly the end came to him at eighty-four.

Mrs. Sutherland Orr tells us in her Life of Robert Browning that that sturdy poet, thinker, and man took up the study of both Hebrew and Spanish after he was seventy.

It was noted of Chanuing that he grew younger as he grew older; and his famous saying, "Always young for liberty," was uttered not long before his death.

John Wesley continued to grow in breadth and liberality of view to the very end of his long life; and some of his later utterances are so advanced as to be nearly or quite in harmony with Universalism.

The greatest reform leader in the history of modern English statesmanship is Gladstone, who has never lost the fire and courage of youth, and some of whose most daring reforms have been achieved since he was threescore years and ten.

In view of such cases as these, we may not say that nothing is to be expected from the old in inaugurating and carrying forward new movements for the benefit of the world. There are many among the old, and especially among the middle-aged, that are to be counted on for strong help and noble leadership.

And yet what I said at the beginning is true. These cases that I have cited are rather the exception than the rule. The law is, progress is the child of youth. The world must look to its young men and women for its new advances, for leaders in its great intellectual, social, and moral, and, quite as much as any, its religious reforms.

When Victor Hugo set out to reform the drama in France, he made his appeal to the French people who were under forty.

The leaders in our American Revolution were nearly all of them young men, few being over thirty-five.

pecuniary relations which tend to make them conservative, and in social and family relations which make it harder to move forward and take new positions. Thousands of men and women are in sympathy with new movements of various kinds, who yet never identify themselves with these movements or let their sympathy be known, because they are harnessed in with society as it is, in a hundred ways, and have not the moral stamina to brook the criticism of those with whom they are in close relations. Many of these persons, if they were younger, and had not so many social and business and other relations formed, would have courage to identify themselves with the causes they believe in; but now they have settled down into weak submission (a submission which, in their best hours, they are painfully ashamed of), a weak submission to the bondage of their environment. Perhaps most important of all to be con

Jesus began the great Christian movement in the world at thirty. Paul and John, and the other most efficient men who took up his work when he laid it down, were little, if any, older than their great leader.

Luther and Calvin and Wesley and Schleiermacher and Channing and Parker, and nearly all the great reformers of religion inside Christianity, began their reforms as young men.

So it is that the world always has found and always must find the leadership of its advance toward the brighter day committed largely to the hands and hearts of those of its children whose pulses throb with young life.

The reasons for all this it is easy to see. As persons advance in years, it is in the order of things that physical vigor shall decline. This of itself renders them less fitted to undertake new enterprises; for such enterprises can be carried to a successful termination only by ardent and longcontinued labor.

Men as they grow older, too, are apt to grow more cautious,-a very good trait in its place, but liable to degenerate into timidity and irresolution, and, when it has thus degenerated, fatal to all new advances.

Moreover, as men grow older, they are likely to get more and more involved in

youth to old age, they pass more from a life of prospect to a life of retrospect. The majority of men, as they grow old, come to be more and more backward lookers instead of forward lookers. But that is fatal to advance. The memory is a very precious faculty. But it is not the faculty that makes discoveries, wins battles, leads the world forward to new and larger light and life.

Only he whot eye is on the future can lead the worldbten to better things. The thought of therrormer must ever be :—

"All before us lies the way,-
Give the past unto the wind!
All before us is the day,
Night and darkness are behind.
"Eden with its angels bold,
Love and flowers and coolest sea,
Is not ancient story told,

But a glowing prophecy."

But, if it is plain why the most important leadership in the world's progress cannot be expected of the old, it is equally plain why it must be expected from the young.

With the young are physical strength and

vigor.

With the young is that buoyancy of hope which makes new undertakings easy.

With the young is that enthusiasm, born partly of abounding physical life and partly

With the young is that very inexperience which makes them willing to undertake hardships which the more experienced are apt to shrink from.

With the young is that spirit of adventure, hardihood, romantic daring, which, left to expend itself in low, unregulated, or selfish ways, makes gamblers, outlaws, military adventurers, professional pugilists, reckless mountain-climbers, jumpers over Niagara like Sam Patch, foolish riskers of life and limb and character, or disturbers of the peace of society in a thousand ways, but which, if disciplined and regulated and put under the control of moral principle, makes the heroes, martyrs, missionaries, discoverers, pioneers, prophets, reformers of the world, winners of the world's battles for the right, leaders of the world's hosts of truth and justice against falsehood and wrong.

And, then, to make all the rest effective, with the young is time,-time, that most precious gift of God, without which all other gifts lose their value. With the young, life is just beginning, while with the old it is drawing toward its close. To the young man and the young woman a stage opens large enough for a great play.

A young man going forth to usefulness is like a farmer sowing grain in the spring time. All the long season is before him for the growth and ripening of what he sows. But, when an old man goes out to do good, though what he does will not be in vain, yet it is like the gathering in of aftermath, or, at best, the sowing of seed of some late crop, that can fill a niche, and bring some partial return from the otherwise idle soil, but can never take the place of the crop that has had the whole season for its growth.

A young man of twenty or twenty-five may reasonably look forward and expect fifty years for labor and achievement. Think of it! fifty years! and such years as our great nineteenth century offers, and as the still greater twentieth century so soon to arrive will offer! Does not such a season invite to the sowing of the best possible grain? Does not a stage so large and splendid urge to a play the noblest possible.

Thus I think we are able to see why it is that the best reforms of the past, religious

and other, have been so largely the work, not of those far on in life, whose wisdom and experience might well make them seem the natural leaders in such advances, but of the young, and why it must remain the same in all future time.

And, now, what are the religious reforms which to-day in this country wait for the enthusiasm, the strength, the courageous leadership, of young men and women,—especially liberal young men and women, because of the fact that they are liberal?

No person that is at all intelligent regarding religious history can doubt that Christendom is in the midst of a great theological transformation. The primary cause of it is the unchaining of the human mind, the growth of the spirit of inquiry, and the rise of science in the modern world. A profound distrust of the great historic creeds is springing up everywhere, even inside the very denominations whose orthodoxy has been regarded as the most firm. Restatements of Christian doctrine are being undertaken on every side with a view to getting rid of dogmas that honest and intelligent men can no longer accept. Ingersolls before great congregations of thousands, and our great monthlies and weeklies and dailies before the public at large, criticise the current theologies on the score of their unreason, their immorality, their cruelty, their dark and revolting representations of God. And only poor lame answers are made, or can be made, to the criticisms. There is a wide-spread feeling that the churches are failing to reach the people as they ought to reach them, failing to do the practical good of many kinds which they ought to do.

Everywhere is ferment; everywhere is unrest; everywhere is dissatisfaction with what has been and still is; everywhere is an eager, if often a blind, reaching out after something better.

Prof. Briggs of the Presbyterian body is one of the latest prophets. He tells us that more enlightened views of the Bible, of the character of God, and of religious doctrine in many particulars, are coming, and that, as a result of it all, there is to be a religious reformation greater and more beneficent than even that which Luther inaugurated four centuries ago.

Everything indicates that Prof. Briggs is

right. Men cannot get along without religion, nor do they have any desire to. So long as they sin and suffer will they seek to find in religion and in God sources of comfort, purification, and strength. Not "no religion," but a "worthier religion," is the demand of the best thinking and deepest feel ing of our time.

We see, then, what is required of the young men and women of intelligence, earnestness, and power to lead, who are coming on the stage of responsibility in this crisis time. It is nothing less than the great, the arduous, the many-sided and difficult, but the grand and incomparably important work of shaping the new reformation. Christianity is advancing to a new birth. You, young men and women, must be its prophets. To you is committed the task of helping our modern age from darkness to light; from doubt to intelligent faith; from old, artificial moral sanctions to new natural ones; from outgrown and unworthy views of truth to others abreast of the best knowledge of to-day; from foundations for religion that are failing to others that cannot fail, cannot because they are laid in the very soul of man and in the nature of the moral universe.

There is usually little safety in predictions concerning the future; and yet the working out of great laws and tendencies may sometimes be foreseen. We have advanced far enough now to be able to foresee, with tolerable certainty, some at least of the leading outlines of the new Christianity that knocks at the door.

Let me sketch a few of the more marked of those outlines.

First, it is clear that the new Christianity coming will be more reasonable and enlightened than the old has been. It will be preeminently the child of the light. It will not shun inquiry, it will not distrust science, it will not fear Biblical criticism. It will welcome knowledge from all sources. It will try to keep fast hold of the truth of the past; but it will also open its eyes to new truth in the present, and it will believe that the future is to bring still larger revelations of truth. It will believe in progress and growth. Its source of authority will not be found in any book, but in the mind of man and in the nature of truth. It will apply reason to everything, believing that thus it does the will of Him who gave man reason.

Thus all its doctrines and precepts will be reasonable: whatever is not, it will cast out as for that reason certainly not from God. This is not saying that it will not contain mysteries. There are mysteries everywhere, and must be so long as man's mind remains finite and his knowledge limited. So the better Christianity may have connected with it many things which we only very imperfectly know; but it will contain nothing intrinsically irrational,-nothing in its nature self-contradictory, like, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity. It will not cling to superstitions and absurdities merely be cause they are ancient.

Second, if the coming Christianity will be more reasonable than that of the past, it will also be more ethical. Indeed, it will rigidly apply ethical standards to every thing, and cast out without the slightest hesitancy whatever cannot bear the ethical test. Thus it will not keep in its creeds clauses and statements which three-quarters of those who subscribe to them declare they do not believe, as, for example, the Church of England does in the retention of the damnatory clauses of her Athanasian Creed. It will carry at least as much honesty into its creed-subscription as it asks a business man to carry into his business. It will not teach theories of the Bible which make God as bad as very wicked and bad men; that is to say, which make him the instigator of murder, as in the slaughter of women and helpless children by Joshua, or the inspirer of cruelty and hatred, as in the fierce impre cations of the 109th Psalm. It will not preach atonement schemes that are immoral, putting the penalty of guilt upon innocence, and letting the blackest villain go free if he is mean enough to hide behind the merits of another, as the atonement scheme of the popular theology does. It will not teach doctrines of election, of the fall of the race in Adam, of depravity, and of an eternal, hopeless hell, which make God a tyrant and a fiend, as these doctrines in their Calvinistic form do. All these things-immoral survivals as they are of a darker past-the better Christianity will put away, giving the world in their place teachings as sweet and ethically high as the Golden Rule of Jesus, as the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, as the instincts of the purest human soul.

All this is only another way of saying, Third, that the coming Christianity will be more truly Christian than that of the past. That is to say, it will be less of Calvin, of Augustine, of the Westminster divines, and more of Christ. It is amazing how utterly what Jesus made the centre and soul of his teaching has been left out of all the great creeds of Christendom. In the Presbyterian National Assembly held in New York City for the discussion of the creed of that body three or four years ago, it was pointed out by a prominent member that the Westminster Confession (the doctrinal standard of the whole Presbyterian denomination) does not contain the doctrine of the love of God, even in a foot-note. And yet what is Christianity, if it is not the love of God? Christianity must go back to the simplicity of its Founder: that is the growing demand of the modern world. The Golden Rule, the Lord's Prayer, forgiveness of enemies, worship in spirit and in truth, love to God and man,everything indicates that these are to be the very corner-stones of the better Christianity that is coming. Therefore,

Fourth, the coming Christianity will be less sectarian and more united than that of the past. For, tell me, over what in all its history has Christianity quarrelled and fought and divided into hostile sects? Has it been over the simple things of love and duty and life? Not so; but over forms, ceremonies, rites, and especially over speculative theologies and hard dogmas of the schools. What keeps Christians apart now? Is it the spirit or the teachings of Christ ? Not in one case in ten thousand. So, then, you see that, if the coming Christianity is to be more natural and reasonable, and nearer to the simple teachings and life of its Founder, it will of necessity be less discordant, polemical, sectarian, and more harmonious and united.

And this leads to the most important point of all: the regenerated Christianity coming is going to consist, to an extent that few even of the most broad and progressive of us yet realize, in the simple good life; that is to say, in neither dogma nor ceremonial, nor any other artificial thing, but just in pure, Fonorable, and useful living. He shall be counted the best Christian who is the best man, and who does the

most good with his time, his talents, and his money.

Edward Everett Hale tells us that fifty years ago, when he was in college (at Harvard), the absorbing interest among the leading young men was literature. To-day he finds the leading minds in the same college turned to a most remarkable degree to social science. The great inquiry among them now is, not about Byron and Keats, but about capital and labor, poverty and intemperance, social reforms, how the practical evils of society are to be removed. The same is noticeable in other institutions of learning. This is religion in the concrete. This is the religion of human brotherhood in practical operation. This is the religion of Jesus baptized with the nineteenthcentury spirit and set to genuine nineteenthcentury uses. No sign of our times is more hopeful than this wide turning of the attention of educated and earnest young men to practical religion.

Believe me, this mould of the practical is that in which the better Christianity is to be largely cast. The Christianity coming will be alive to its finger-tips with enthusiasm for humanity; with sympathy for misfortune; with desire to help those in need; with interest in movements for temperance, for education, for charity, for the prevention of pauperism, for bringing the rich and the poor into closer relations, for elevating the slum population of our great cities, for purity in politics, for the execution of just laws, for the protection of homes, for social purity, for the humane treatment of animals, for justice to the Indian and the Negro, for the prevention of war, for the alleviation of suffering, for the practical building up of the kingdom of heaven on the earth.

Young men and women, do you see nothing inspiring in the thought of such a religion? Be as sure that such a religion is coming as that to-morrow's sun will rise. The dissatisfaction with the old is because the old is not this. The protest against the old is because the old is seen to stand in the way of this. The protest will not cease until the old gives place to this better new.

And now upon whom must the main burden and responsibility of bringing in the better new devolve?

There is only one possible answer. It must devolve upon those whom God is