and power. Is any one of them better fitted than Christianity to meet the wants of the human soul?

Christianity has lost some of the weapons with which it was doing battle one hundred years ago. Its trust is not to be henceforth in an infallible book; the arsenal of its terrors has been despoiled of much that was once a great reliance; censure and coercion can no longer be profitably employed. But, in some respects, it has been strengthened for the work before it.

The Christian doctrine has been greatly simplified. The elaborate creeds of a former day are disappearing. The metaphysical puzzles, in which so many minds were once entangled, are swept away. It is now well understood, among those who are the recognized leaders of Christian thought, that the essence of Christianity is personal loyalty to the Master and obedience to His law of love. Such a conception prepares the way for great unities and co-operations.

The doctrine of the divine immanence, when once its deeper implications are understood, must have important results in Christian experience. The God in whom we live and move and have our being will not need to be certified by documents or symbolized by sacraments or demonstrated by logic; our knowledge of Him will be immediate and certain. If He is, indeed, the Life of all life; if He is "more present to all things He made than anything unto itself can be"; if He is "the stream of tendency, whereby all things fulfil the law of

their being"; if He is really "working in us, to will and to do of His good pleasure," then life possesses a sacredness and a significance which few of us have yet conceived. This truth sanctifies and glorifies the whole of life. It is the truth which lies at the heart of what is known as the "new theology"; and, if the Christian pulpit can but grasp it and realize it, we shall have such a revival of religion as the world has never seen.

The God who is over all and through all and in us all is known to the Christian Church of today as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is through the spirit that we know Him, and He is the Father of spirits; His character is revealed to us in the life and words of Jesus; our relation to Him is shown us in the filial trust of Jesus, and our relation to one another springs from this relation. The two truths of the divine Fatherhood and the human Brotherhood are the central truths of Christian theology to-day. This has never before been true. Men have always been calling God Father, but in their theories they have been making Him monarch. He was as much of a Father as He could be consistently with his functions as an absolute sovereign. The sovereignty was the dominant fact; the Fatherhood was subordinate. All this is changed. It is believed to-day that there can be no sovereignty higher than fatherhood, and no law stronger than love.

The doctrine must have vast social consequences. When it is once fully accepted, and all that it im

plies is recognized and enforced, society will be regenerated and redeemed. If all men are, indeed, brothers, and owe to one another, in every relation, brotherly kindness; if there is but one law of human association -"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"; if every man's business in the world is to give as much as he can, rather than to get as much as he can, then the drift of human society must now be in wrong directions, and there is need of a reformation which shall start from the centres of life and thought. We need not so much new machinery, as new ideals of personal obligation.

This idea that Christ has come to save the world; that His mission is not to gather his elect out of the world and then burn it up, but to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here, and that it is established by making the law of love the regulative principle of all the business of life, is practically a new idea. Many, here and there, have tentatively held it, and their faltering attempts to live by it have produced what we have had of the precious fruits of peace and good will among men. Charity and philanthropy have not been unknown; the spirit of Christ has found in them a beautiful expression; within that realm the Kingdom of Heaven has been set up. What we need to learn is the truth that the law of love governs the factory as well as the hospital; that the statesman and the economist must reckon with it, no less than the preacher and philanthropist.

Such is the issue which the logic of events is forcing upon the Christian Church. Christianity must rule or abdicate. If it cannot give the law to society, the world has no need of it. Not by might nor by power can its empire be established; only by clear witnessing to the supremacy of love. But the time has come when there must be no faltering in this testimony. Hitherto, it has hardly dared to say that Love is King; the kingdoms of this world have been conceded to Mammon. With the dawning of the new century comes the deepening conviction that the rule of Mammon never can bring order and peace; and it begins to be credible that the way of the Christ is the way of life, for industry as well as for charity, for nations as well as for men.

That the principle of the Christian morality is the foundation of the social order, and that society will never be at peace until it rests on this foundation, is the claim which Christianity is now prepared to make. The ground of our hope for the continuance and prevalence of the Christian religion lies in the conviction that it will be able to make good this claim.

WASHINGTON GLADDEN.