ing the common welfare of the Christian Church. Only the Episcopal Protestant ministers keep away, and the sympathy of their best people is inside, not outside, this circle. The next generation will see in Western Massachusetts a Christian Protestantism united in love for Christ and his religion. of love; differing as all healthy churches and Christians must, in doctrinal theories; but at heart one, and one in its radical conceptions of the essential religion of the Master. What are our duties in view of this coming unity of the Christian Protestant Church?

Not to abate in our own zeal, but rather to "thank God and take courage," and press on in every Christian work. We are on the winning side in this great conflict between Calvinism and Liberalism in our Commonwealth. The whole Evangelical Church has moved several degrees of latitude nearer us than when Peabody journeyed over the hills to be the shepherd of a little flock of Liberal Christians in the village that has become the chief city of Western Massachusetts. All that the fathers dreamed is in a fair way to be realized. If we, now that our great day of triumph is approaching, break rank and run off to join the disorderly crowd of materialism, skepticism, free religion, or any other delusion that cuts loose from Christ and his gospel, we shall be lost; our churches will crumble or explode, and our name will be fatally mixed up with the enemies of the Saviour of men. But if we can "hold fast the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free," run up the flag of God's love and man's redemption, and start forward with a mighty impulse, we shall hear a vast army following only a little way behind, and the old dreams of Channing concerning the spiritual church may become the reality of our children.

It is our imperative duty to awake in every community. where we now have a living church; exert ourselves to the uttermost to make these churches religiously effective, put our hands in our pockets and our hearts in the work. We already have a church in every large town in the valley of the Connecticut, and foundations in several of the smaller hill towns. Let us place a faithful minister in every church;

appoint a missionary to visit our feebler bodies; and endeavor to utilize what we have of spiritual power. We are sadly lacking in vitality and spiritual enthusiasm in many quarters. If our clergy and people have been troubled with too much blood in the speculative organs, and have been cold in sentiment, unsocial, half-paralyzed, now is the time for a revival. For, depend upon it, unless we are up and doing, the laurel of Liberal Christianity will be snatched from our brow by the very churches from which we came out half a century ago.

There is no good reason why such churches as we now have in several large towns in this valley should not be foremost in all Christian work and faith, and aspire to an honorable leadership in the Protestant Church. In one respect, we have an advantage, yet, over all our sister churches: we can approach the skepticism and secularism of this region more frankly, deal with it in a more Christian spirit, and present to it a more reasonable and religious form of Christianity than any. But, as a man who would establish a home for the drunkard and prostitute must be sure of his own temperance and chastity before he can recover the fallen, so shall we make no headway by compromise with the unbelief and indifference to Christianity that prevail about us. The skeptics and secularists of Western Massachusetts don't need additional arguments from us or desire the Unitarian ministry as a champion of their ideas. They can take care of their own affairs; they despise any half-and-half assent to their exorbitant demands, and have cast us off in contempt. We can go to them to preach a Liberal Christianity and apply it in all regions of life. If we form any league with them in their peculiar opinions of matters, religious, civil, and educational, we shall only be overwhelmed in the great destruction that is sure to come to everything that defies the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a Christian civilization.

We can do a good work, if we will, in the great struggle that impends between the Jesuite Priesthood and the Americanized people in this valley. Already has the new Bishop of Springfield declared war upon the common school, and

removed the children of his flock in Holyoke and Chicopee into the narrow educational pens provided by this fraternity. It is the most alarming publico-religious demonstration made in Massachusetts during the last century; and, if the policy succeeds, means a state of affairs a generation hence that we shall not love to contemplate. The way to meet this bold assault on American institutions is not to cast contempt on the most valuable side of the American system of free education, its training of the youth in the type of morality and character learned in the Christian religion, but to go to our citizens of foreign descent and awaken them to the conspiracy against their rights thus sprung upon them. If half the strength we spend in unprofitable social and theological speculations were put into good wholesome work to arouse the laboring classes among us to a higher view of American citizenship and public and private virtue, this policy would be defeated and untold troubles averted in the future.

What are we doing to reach the masses of young men and women that crowd the great manufactering towns in our valley? We get some of them into the free seats of our churches; but, as yet, we have no hold upon them. Out of this crowd, that on every week day and Sunday evening throng the streets of these cities, is to come a power that shall bless or blast this fair valley. Every man knows there is growing up in all these villages and cities a class whose like can hardly be found in Europe; and behind it a vast wavering throng of youth on the verge of destruction. The Young Men's Christian Association has practically failed in Western Massachusetts through the jealousy of the clergy. Why should not we now occupy this field, organize in this Conference a "Christian Union," with branches in every city and large village, worked by our united force, and appeal to the people to help us in a wholly unsectarian effort for the elevation of this class of our people? Is not this our great opportunity now, to vindicate our right to lead the advancing church of Liberal Christianity in its onset upon the materialism and depravity that threaten us all? What better use can we make of our time here than to hold prayerful counsel together, and ask God to show us how we can enter this open door?

TOPICS OF THE MONTH.

BY THE EDITOR.

OUR MAGAZINE.

"THE RELIGIOUS MAGAZINE" was originally intended principally to supply practical Christian reading, such as would be helpful to parents in furnishing lessons for their children, or suggesting thoughts in keeping with the Sunday in Christian homes. It laid no claim to learning or to the philosophical or learned treatment of difficult subjects in theology or biblical criticism. "The Christian Examiner" was, for many years after our more humble career began, the able vehicle for the higher thought and more advanced criticism of the day. Our office was to supply the practical wants of the community on its personal side, doing through a magazine on a larger scale what the Christian minister is expected to do in a single parish. To awaken an interest in moral and religious subjects, to illustrate and enforce the plain precepts of our religion, to make its virtues appear binding, its truths attractive, its hopes inspiring, its promises encouraging and divine, has been the great and blessed purpose which above all others has been kept in view by its editors from the beginning to the present hour. We desire no higher office than this and no richer field than is opened before us.

But when "The Christian Examiner" ceased from its labors, the religious community with which it was principally connected were left without any organ to supply its place, and furnish for intelligent and inquiring minds the discussions on great religious topics which were demanded by the advanced. Christian thought and scholarship of the age. Our constituency did not originally include a large part of those who require such discussions. But this was the only organ in the denomination where elaborate and extended articles of such a kind could be published. The religious newspapers have done their work admirably. "The Christian Register" and "The Liberal Christian" have never exercised so wide an

influence and never have so ably done the work assigned to them as during the last few years.

Within the last four or

But gradually the need of something more than either they or we according to our original purpose had contemplated. became more and more widely felt. With the need has come the supply, at least to some extent. five years, some of the richest and ablest articles on some of the greatest and most important subjects which can be addressed to the human mind have appeared in our columns. During that period no theological journal of any denomination has published articles which lay open the meaning and the power of our religion with a deeper and clearer religious insight, a more genuine appreciation of what is holy and divine, a richer affluence of imagination, or in a style more. perfectly adapted to its subject, than some of the articles. which have been published in our pages by Dr. Sears.

Other articles of similar character from some of the ablest thinkers and scholars among us have also been contributed. We have desired to have one leading theological article in every number of our Magazine, and we have assurances which lead us to hope that we shall be able to accomplish this. We wish to be as broad and catholic as the religion of Jesus, and no more so. We stand on a Christian platform. We are certain that the religion of Jesus is large enough and generous enough in its principles to live in harmony with all truth. We believe that in its precepts of divine living it is deeper and broader and higher than any philosophy. All truth is consistent with all truth and harmonizes with it. If our interpretation of Christianity is inconsistent with any established fact, then so far our interpretation is wrong; but Christianity does not therefore fall. Because fifty generations of astronomers misinterpreted God's writing on the heavens, the stars themselves did not fall with man's mistaken theories, but shine in clearer and fuller glory as system after system has given way to a more perfect comprehension of the divine law and order. And though heaven and earth shall pass away, the words and the religion of Jesus shall only shine with a more divine significance and beauty.