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stands in the world to-day for all its Founder died for, the highest aspirations for man, the purest love of God.

Who so ready as the liberal, to believe that a human soul has lived on earth who fulfilled the hope of righteousness that burns in every human heart, who had no will but God's, no desire but unselfish love, and could say because of such a holy character, "I and my Father are one"?

Finally, we believe in immortality, because we believe so much in God and in men. A soul that can commune with God, can never die. Our faith in the law of progress leads us to expect in another state of being a fulfilment of all that is imperfect in our earthly life. But the faith in immortality is not a leading motive in our conduct. We do not plan or speculate much concerning a future state. Whatever

it may bring will be the orderly and wholesome development of what we now are. We do not believe it requires any special preparation to die. We do not think of heaven as strange and far-away. Heaven, as Jesus speaks of it, is always ready to open and send down upon consecrated heads the white wings of the Holy Ghost. We try to think of the life to come as a glorifying of what is best in this; namely, the fulfilment of love, the peaceable fruit of righteousness. There is no immortality worth having but an eternity of spiritual life, an eternity of goodness, of brotherhood, of divine communion. And so our path to heaven lies right through the holy places of this earthly life. We would look on death and the grave,

not with the horror a perverted Christianity teaches, but as the little child who feels that heaven and earth are not divided. In short, we believe in the life to come, because we so much feel the richness of this present life that the short earthly term seems inconsistent with its generous scheme.

Strange that liberalism, in so many minds, should be only a system of negations! True liberty is the spirit that affirms. We believe not less, but more, more of God, more of Man. We trust the universe. We trust every faculty of the human soul. Our Bible has no end. We do not reject the prophets of the past. But we look for prophets yet to appear. We think the mysteries of God and Man have never any final expression. Our creeds are always open to amendment. We affirm that it is the very nature of the self-revealing God to make no pause in his education of the human soul, but ever to lead us onward into more satisfying knowledge of his Will.

THE LANDSCAPE.

A

HUNDRED leagues of land and sea,

A boundless reach of sky,

Closed round the singing soul of me,
And woke this proud reply:

"I marvel what such vast expense
Of power is nourished by,
And how my microcosmic sense

Such height and depth can spy.

"Yet where my eyes the fragments scan, Or view the glorious whole,

I find free harmony with man,

And truth which feeds his soul.

Not all your powers, earth, sky, and sea, My watchful heart appall:

The same just laws guard you and me,

One life sustains us all.

CHRIST IN MODERN THOUGHT.

"What think ye of Christ?"— MATT. xxii. 42.

CRITICAL students of the New Testament have clearly shown that even within the limits of the sacred volume different views are given concerning the nature of Jesus. To the earlier group of disciples -to Matthew, to Peter, and to James he is simply the Hebrew Messiah, the Son of David, and the Redeemer of Israel, attended by angel legions, about to seat his disciples upon judgment-thrones above the "nations," and to fulfil all that the prophets have spoken.

To Paul he is the second Adam through whom not Israel alone, but the whole human race, are to enter into a new heritage of divine life, and, passing beyond the power of sin, to become the "Sons of God," and "walk in the Spirit."

In the Fourth Gospel we see an order of ideas, expressed in the language of Greek philosophy and almost without a trace of Hebrew imagery, in which Christ is represented as the divine Word, giving light to the world and life eternal to faithful souls. this Gospel, as Dr. Carpenter has said, “the Jewish Messiah is divested of his robes of sovereignty; and

In

the writer has thrown round him the ethereal splendor of the Greek logos."

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But all these varying conceptions have their origin in the life of Jesus and the impression which it made upon the world. The Jewish fishermen of Galilee, the learned doctor of Jerusalem, and the Greek disciple who gave to the Fourth Gospel its final form, each has before him the same facts, the life of Jesus and the spiritual experience of Christian men; and each in his own way explains and rationalizes these facts, to bring them into harmony with his other ideas.

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Such is the nature of all Christian doctrine: it is an attempt to bring intellectual order into the Christian mind.

It is therefore natural and inevitable that forms of doctrine should be modified or changed as human knowledge enlarges.

We live in a time when the expansion of human thought and discovery makes it necessary to readjust the intellectual conditions of Christian faith. Faith, indeed, may live on in many minds divorced from reason. The ideas of men on the subject of religion may stand apart from all other truth, and permit no thoroughfare between. But such a state of things cannot be permanent. A religion which ceases to think can have no authoritative place among mankind. For, unless reconciliation is achieved between the truths which immediately concern the soul and the truths which lie in the secular sphere, there must be on both sides a loss of seriousness. If religion is

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