a constant rotation of sects to speak to you, the moral purpose of the whole Union at your service, if you gain nothing else from it, brothers. I think it was a Unitarian critic, a member of a church whose right to the name of "church" every other sect denies, that said of you, " Theodore Parker did not leave a church, he only left a 'Fraternity." The great Master said, "One is your Master, and all ye are brethren." I do not know what better name could be taken by His followers than" Fraternity." If you gain nothing else from your pulpit, you will gain this, courage. You will unfold in your natures a courage to listen to every man. You will be able to say to yourselves, "I know I am right, I know why I am. right, and I dare to listen to the best that any man can say against me," and that is the corner-stone of character, which is better than intellect; that is the cornerstone of manhood, which is next to Godhood, and the nearest that we can come to it. CHRISTIANITY A BATTLE, NOT A DREAM. A discourse at the thirteenth Sunday afternoon meeting, Horticultural Hall, Boston, April 11, 1869. O tell the truth, the subject is one not very familiar to my beaten path of thought, and I am present rather at the urgency of the Committee to take a share in the discussion of the topics for which the doors were opened, than from any earnest wish of my own. But still I should be ashamed to say, after having lived thirty years of active life in a community stirred as ours has been, that I have not some suggestions to offer on a topic so vital as the one which I have named. Every man who has lived thoughtfully in the midst of the great issues that have been struggling for attention and settlement; every man who has striven to rouse to action the elemental forces of society and civilization' which ought to grapple with these problems, - must have had his thoughts turned often, constantly, to the nature of Christianity itself, and to the part which it ought to claim, to the place which it really occupies, amid the great elements which are to mould our future. There is a great deal of talk about Christianity as the mere reflection of the morals and intellect of the passing age; as something which may be made to take any form, assume any principle, direct itself against any point, at the bidding of the spirit of its individual age. It is looked upon as an ephemeral result, not as a permanent cause; and when viewed as such, men very naturally class it with the other religions of the world, which have all been results, not causes, effects, not sources of action. As I look at Christianity in its relation to absolute religion, religion the science of duty to ourselves, to our fellows, and to God, as I look at Christianity in reference to religion, I want to say at the outset that it, for me, occupies an entirely distinct place, an entirely different level from any other of what are called or have been the religions of the world. If you go to the East, for the last three thousand years you find a religion the reflection of its civilization, the outgrowth of its thought, steeped in its animal life, dragged down by all its animal temptations, rotted through with license, with cruelty, -with all that grows out of the abnormal relation of the body to the soul. And the only distinctive element in this outburst of Hindoo religions, Buddha and Brahma too, the only redeeming point is a sort of exceptional intellectual life, which busied itself exclusively with the future; which struggled to plan and shape life, and mould it on the principle that to be like God, you were to trample out all human affection and interests, thought, duties, and relations; and the moment you became utterly passionless, without thought, without interest in aught external, you were godlike,— absorbed into the Infinite and ready for the hereafter. The only thing remarkable in these Asiatic religions. is that they were infinitely below the popular level of morality and intelligence, while intellectually they busied themselves with nothing but the future state; not in one single thought or effort or plan or method with man as God places him on the surface of this planet. And it was a religion so much the actual result of the moral and intellectual life, so moonlike a reflection, that in due time, after a century or two, society in Hindostan was infinitely better than its religion. I know, of course, of the bright gems of thought that glisten here and there on their sacred pages, original, perhaps; interpolated nobody can say when, possibly; but, whether so or not, exceptions to the broad, popular estimate of the religion of the age. That was in itself so weak, so poor, so immoral, so degraded, so animal, that any social system in Hindostan which had not been better than its gods, would have rotted out from inherent corruption. I repudiate utterly and indignantly the supposition that in any sense Christianity is to be grouped with the religious demonstrations of Asia. If you cross the Straits and come to the fair humanities of ancient Greece, to the classic mythology which gave us the civilization of Greece, the same general truth obtains. The mythology of the age was so literally and utterly a mere reflex of its earliest civilization, that the finest specimens of human life find no prototype at all in the religion of the classic epochs. Where in the Greek mythology do you find any prototype for the nobleness of Socrates or the integrity of Cato? If Athens and Rome had not been far better than Olympus, neither empire would have survived long enough to have given us Phocion, Demosthenes, or Cato. Religion is the soul of which society and civil polity are the body, and when you bring forward the exceptional lives of thoughtful men, living either in Greece or on the banks of the Ganges, as a measure of the religion of their age and country, I reject it; for I go out into the streets of both continents to ask what is the broad result - grouping a dozen centuries together — of the great religious force which always, in some form or other, underlies every social development; and when I seek it either in Greece or Asia or Mahomet, I find a civilization of caste, exclusively a civilization of animal supremacy, a civilization in itself natural, not wholly useless, but superficial, grovelling, and short-lived. In a world covered over with this religious experience, out of a world lying in murky ignorance, except where one or two points like Athens and some old cities of Asia towered out of it by an intellectual life, all at once there started up a system which we call Christianity; the outgrowth of the narrowest, and, as the world supposed, the most degraded tribe of human beings that occupied its surface. I am not going to touch on its doctrines, because I do not believe that it has many doctrines. I do not believe that out of the New Testament you can, by any torture of ingenuity, make a creed. I do not believe that the New Testament intended that you should make a creed. The sneer of the infidel is that you may get anything out of the New Testament. It is like the napkin in the hands of a juggler. It can be made to assume many shapes, church-towers, rabbit'shead, baby's-cradle, but it is a napkin still. When you torture the New Testament into Calvinism or Romanism or Catholicism or Universalism or Unitarianism, it is nothing but the New Testament after all. There are certain great principles inherent in Christianity, as a religious and an intellectual movement, that distinguish it from all others, judging in two ways, either by the fair current of its records or by the fruit of its existence. There are two ways of judging Christianity, one to open its records, and the other to trace Europe and its history under the influence of Christianity. - I wish to call attention to two or three principles of Christianity which are not included in any other religious system, and the first is the principle of sacrifice. "Bear ye one another's burdens" is the cardinal prin |