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that Brahmanism has never forgiven Buddhism for ignoring the gods, and the Hindus finally drove its followers out of India. The one doctrine which the philosophic Hindu of today defends, and in which he finds his strength and his conIsolation is his doctrine of God. The best truth that can be found in pantheism, namely: the Divine immanence, is found in the Christian idea of God, coupled with the best truth that can be found in Jewish monotheism, God's personality and control over nature. To the Christian theist the Hindu pantheism with all its fascinations is a golden fog blotting out many a star of truth and hope, because the divine personality is obliterated or obscured. Judaism intensified the thought of God's individuality, His separateness from nature, which is yet His living garment, as Goethe says, and there is lasting truth and comfort in its manifold representations of God as Father, Mother, Husband, King, Fortress, Sun, Shield, Rock, and Star.

But ancient Historic Judaism failed to teach a perfect theism. The Jew made the mistake of believing, that as God's worship had been localized and restricted it must always remain so God had been localized on mount Sinai where the law was given, in the pillars of cloud and fire, the symbols of His guidance and glory, in the tabernacle and the temple, at Shiloh and Jerusalem. God had had a special people with a special worship and a peculiar revelation of himself. And the Jew did not understand that when Jesus appeared, the hour had come for a wider disclosure, when the true worshippers were to worship Him in spirit and in truth. Judea had been the cradle of the highest spiritual knowledge; but Christ came to send it forth as a strong man armed to all nations. Back of this localization of Deity, back of all these visible manifestations was the Infinite One whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, whose children were to be the spiritual followers of that Abraham who believed God and was accepted of Him, before one altar had been piled at Shechem or Bethel, and when Canaan was no more sacred than the unpierced wilds of America; to this higher truth Israel was blind; to this higher truth the Christian world has sometimes been blind, having fallen from the height of the Master's teachings. But, if the early proclamation of the Gospel meant anything in the realm of Theism, it meant the bringing home to men's hearts the spiritual truths and forces which came from the teaching, the person, and the work of Christ. It meant the truth that God is Îove, that God is light, that God is spirit. Christianity in its purity has held the human heart and mind to the great truths

which make spiritual worship possible and which make idolatry a degradation of man's nobler self.

The Christian theist has learned the secret of worship. He has learned that he himself is spirit, that the soul which works through the hands and looks through the eyes, which thinks, and loves, and wills, which has a mysterious relation to the brain, is distinct from its bodily servants. The human spirit refuses to submit to the measuring line and the microscope, and to the tests of the chemist and the mathematician. Man is spirit and may discern and worship God. God is spirit, hidden to the eye, inaudible, intangible. He is love, which has a thousand manifestations, shining in the dew and glowing in the heavens, resplendent in household affections, dazzling at the Cross, but itself only discerned by that love in man which is also invisible to the eye. God is righteousness, evidenced in the crumbling of an empire and in the sting of a child's remorse, but revealed only to that conscience which no crucible can analyze, to that spiritual substance in man which is as much more ethereal and sensitive than light as the rustle of the star-beam is more delicate than the roar of Niagara. God is wisdom, shown forth in the changing seasons, in the cleansing rainstorm, manifest in Providence and in supernatural revelation, but thus shown forth only to that reason in man which sends its invisible thoughts from star to star and binds with invisible cords the footstool and the throne of God. God is spirit, and His worshippers must adore Him through the mind and by the medium of truth. He dwelleth not in temples made with hands, as Paul said to the bewildered people of Athens, neither is worshipped with men's hands as we are endeavouring to persuade the bewildered people of Asia. It is only by the activity of those faculties which take hold of God, it is only by an individual appropriation of the truth through the ministry of the Divine Spirit that the human soul is purified and thus, fitted for true worship.

Christianity goes to the nations to-day and begins the uplift and regeneration of the spirit by teaching that God's true temple is in the hearts of men. Their souls must be made holy, for God is a God of perfect righteousness, of unspotted holiness. Christianity taught the ancient Greek and would teach the modern Hindu to be ashamed of deities who are not adorned with ordinary human virtues. Did not Lord Bacon instruct us that it is better to have no conception of God, one that is unworthy of Him? Holiness is God's

diadem, the crown of His perfection, without which power and wisdom and love itself lose their highest glory. The Christian messenger instructs men that the God who now commandeth all to repent has never committed the slightest wrong, that all His ways are righteous, that all His acts are perfect, and that if any vice existed in the character of God, the worshipping universe must be dumb. Seraphs would veil their faces, not in adoration, but in shame, and the multitudinous symphonies of heaven would die out in a dismal and discordant wail, and the pure-shining stars, musical with praise, must cease their spheral chimes and hide their holy splendors, for the light had forsaken the brow of Jehovah, and all His realms were darkened to their utmost bound.

The Christian goes to men with the teaching that since God is holy, the way of life is the way of holiness. While Christianity is a spiritualism that does not despise Nature, and a monotheism which does not separate God from His world, it is also a morality which neither divorces "the inner from the outer life" nor breaks "the organic bond between the individual and society." As the God whom Christianity discloses is ethical, He is honoured by an ethical life, which includes a fraternal spirit toward men and a filial spirit toward God. "All ethical conduct is grounded in religion and all religious conduct is determined ethically." The power not ourselves that makes for righteousness is intensely concerned in regard to the interior dispositions of men. He dwells only in the hearts. of the pure, the merciful, the meek, the righteous and the loving, and the lowliest savage of the African forest, the humblest Pariah of the Hindu jungle, may construct for God a temple more acceptable to Him than any miracle of beauty that ever topped the hills of Attica or is to-day embowered in ilex trees beneath the snowy cone of Fusijama. It has been the aspiration of peoples and the ambition of kings to embody their thought of the Supreme One in enduring and costly stone. Through the centuries has breathed the spirit that "Roofed Karnak's hall of gods, and laid The plinth of Philae's colonnade."

We bow before the religious genius that raised the manypillared fanes of antiquity. We behold with wonder how the vigorous faith of the Middle Ages blossomed out in the Christian Cathedral. Piety has yearned for an earthly habitation. Beneath the dome of St. Peter's Church in Rome, you feel the uplifting joy of being where it seems worthy that God

should dwell. You enter the great vestibule and push aside the heavy curtain and slowly absorb the suggestiveness of a scene which sometimes dwarfs and dims the spaciousness and splendour of the outer universe. You walk the consecrated pavements where armies might move with freedom. There is no oppressiveness in this grandeur, no gloom in this solemnity. The cheerful light falls tenderly through the ever balmy air, on marble and mosaic, on bronze and gold. With exultation you move toward the central shrine of St. Peter. Everything magnifies as you approach. The pilasters expand into pillars, which seem mighty enough to uphold the crystal arches of the heavens. Slowly the majestic dome opens to your vision, a sculptured and emblazoned poem, lifting the aspiration to sublimer heights, while its vastness seems lovingly to enclose and shelter your greatest thought of God. But, while your heart is thus opened by the sensuous imagination, the Divine Spirit finds His home not amid those luminous spaces, but in the worshipper's soul, and without irreverence he may say with Christ, there is something here "greater than the temple." Here is love which interprets love and renders praises which are more acceptable than the adornments of the world's cathedral. The architecture of man is the plaything of time. The sanctuaries of human pride disappear. The road from Delhi to the Kutub Minar is strewn far and wide with ruinous domes and broken columns, "the traces of three religions." On Mount Gerizim the Samaritan worships at a broken shrine. The wild stork perches on the columns of Ephesian temples. It is the whiteness of a shattered beauty which the Parthenon now lifts into the violet ether of Athens. And the time shall come when the golden lamps about St. Peter's tomb shall be extinguished and the miracle of Michael Angelo shall mingle in the dust of ancient Rome, but the architecture of God abides. "Ye are the temples of the Holy Ghost." "Fairer far than aught by artist feigned, or pious ardor reared," are the holy places of the soul. The Divine One has tabernacled in humanity and made it sacred. In the believer's heart according to the New Testament, Christ dwelleth, the hope of glory.

But besides this unity and spirituality there is still another supreme fact in the Christian revelation of God which pre-eminently makes it fit to become the universal faith of mankind. Christianity alone reveals the Divine One as continuously and mercifully seeking after mankind. It shows us God standing by the side of fallen man at the beginning with gracious purposes that overtop the curse,

and outrun the consequences of transgression. It shows us God inaugurating a system of redemption and recovery and lifting above the red flag of the primeval anarchy the banner of his love. From first to last the Bible is the call of God to His earthly children. The Saviour of mankind expressly declared that He had not come to condemn the world. He came to reveal the God of all grace, and a most difficult work of the messenger of Christ, whether in Canton or Calcutta, is to persuade men who have thought of God as remote and impersonal, that He loves them with an affection overpassing their utmost imaginations. When we get any faintest glimpse of the divine Fatherhood which is the background of Christ's redeeming work, and try to measure with our limited vision the immeasurable pity of God, a compassion which was not brought into being when the angels first choired the heavenly songs of Bethlehem, we learn, often slowly, to trust in the midst of all the perplexities and griefs of life, that divine heart whose pulse beats, as the Christian believer feels, are the life of the universe. And we believe and strive to make others believe not only as Abraham did, that the judge of all the earth will do right, but that the Father" Who would rather suffer wrong than do it," will never see one slightest shadow of injustice darkening the glory of His great white throne. The Christian Bible is the enfranchisement of hope; it is the word of Him who came to destroy the works of the devil and who did not fail; it lifts the Cross with its disclosure of the bleeding heart of infinite pity above the troubled life of humanity and fills the whole sunset horizon of our faith with the jewelled splendours of the New Jerusalem. It is the gracious and helpful attitude of God towards human sin and sorrow which it seems to us that men the world over need to apprehend. Among the ten thousand difficulties of the Christian teacher in China to-day, not the least is really to open the heart of the people to the central truth of redemption, God's love in Christ. Preach to them hell and they believe in that already, and they have gone far ahead of Dante in making it horrible. They will tell you of eighteen tiers of hells, a hell eighteen thousand miles in circumference and a thousand miles high, an iron city, a metropolis of direst tortures, fire falling from above and ascending from below; they will tell you of caldrons of burning oil and lakes of blood, and hills of knives, and dungeons of bubbling filth, and bridges of snakes and cylinders of eternal fire. But the God of Calvary who stretched out His hands to death from love to the guilty, and who carries the heaven of grace in His heart,

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