As we stand here between the old year and the new, let us resolve to carry forward all that is strong and vital. May the day of remembrance be to us all, not the looking back of Lot's wife, a time of unavailing dejection and of spiritual danger, but a restful pause, in which the pilgrim may trim his lamp and gird his loins anew! The ceaseless rush of passing opportunity, each day bringing its own claims and cares, would dissolve our lives into a flood of changing dreams. We should be creatures of circumstance, did we not sometimes collect our scattered experiences and "gather up the fragments that remain." Your experiences as they pass are often too passionately exciting to reveal their meaning and reality. Only when they have been viewed from a distance, in the silent landscape of the past, do they show their true harmony and outline. A great sorrow, when it descends upon our heads, is too near to be known. It is the cloud which has come too near the earth, and simply chills and darkens, with its blinding mist, the house on which it rests. But, by and by, the cloud of sorrow lifts, into the calm atmosphere of the past, and then sends down a fruit-giving rain upon some dry and thirsty ground; or reflects upon us, it may be, the light of heaven in nobler and more varied colors than the cloudless sky could show. In God's sight the old year needs a new to make it perfect. And only in the light of the old year shall we see our way through what the new one has in store. As we are made mindful of the changes of the time, let us hold fast to the eternal things. May the Father in his

love, enriching, fructifying every experience, lead us into the large life with Him, which is an eternal one! The perishable shapes in which the web of life is woven, these, after all, are not the reality of our lives. The ever-succeeding days and years are as the strokes of time's great bell calling us to prayers of thanksgiving. May every experience be a new door into the temple of God, through which we enter the divine fulness of grace! May the past grow rich with meaning and inspiration, and the future bright with hope and glory, until the old heaven and earth shall pass away, and God shall be all in all!

SOME SOURCES OF THE NEW

THEOLOGY.

"Can ye not discern the signs of the times?"— MATT. xvi. 3.

THE Christian Church to-day has two vast problems before it. One is practical; how to realize the kingdom of heaven among men. The other is a question of doctrinal interpretation; a question as to how far the teachings of the past are worthy of our acceptance, and how far we are possessed of larger truth than any the past has known.

I know many people think doctrinal questions of little importance compared with practical ones. They are willing to stop thinking, if only they are encouraged to go on doing; but the famous remark of Mazzini, the great Italian patriot and thinker, is as true for America as for Italy, that the political question is the social question, and the social question is at bottom the religious question.

Let us therefore bear in mind that underneath the practical problems of the Christian world, lies the no less mighty and important problem of what religion is, how it is to be interpreted, and how its sublime hopes and motives are to be made real and persuasive.

I wish to consider in this sermon some of the

changes which have affected religious thought, with the purpose of discovering what our duty is toward the ideas of the past, and what hope we may have for the future of religion among men.

Notice, in the first place, that change is as much the law of religious thought, as of any other activity of the human mind. Religions, like races, grow old and perish. The Bible itself records at least four different kinds of religion which have succeeded one another in the history of a single nation. The old Hebrew polytheism was succeeded by the sublime faith of the prophets in the righteous Jehovah as the only true God. That prophetic faith was succeeded by the priestly religion, with a temple service; which in its turn was superseded by Christianity. Christianity itself has been subjected to a perpetual law of development.

Such being the case, we might almost say that in matters not of religious experience, not of the facts of spiritual life, but of religious doctrine, opinion, and creed, the presumption was against old forms and in favor of the new. The chief argument of Orthodoxy, not only Christian Orthodoxy, but of the conservative party in other religions, is its claim to antiquity. "It is written," "It was said by them of old time,”. these are the sacred phrases by which questionable opinions are supported. But what has antiquity to do with truth? The more we consider the matter, the more evident it is that antiquity had no privilege of arriving at complete truth in religion, more than in other matters. The prophets of the past transmit