and twenty elders fell down and worshiped him that liveth forever and ever." And again in a following chapter we read of the redeemed, "They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them."

And this is the kind of worship we pay to sovereigns and magistrates! And Mr. Folsom's language implies that it is all right and proper to render it to a finite being, placed not only on the throne of God, but "in the midst of the throne." And what is one of the reasons he gives? Why, Dr. Channing and other worthy people did the same, and to call it idolatrous would be à reflection upon them. I do not know how Dr. Channing and the rest regarded the Apocalypse, or whether they regarded it as a canonical book; and, if I did know, their opinions as such would not control my judgment, any more than those of a long row of scholars and saints reaching all the way from Justin to Neander. How John himself was taught to regard such worship as paid not merely to sovereigns and magistrates, but to one of the angels of heaven of large commission, he has told us, for when he fell down to worship before the feet of the angel he was promptly rebuked: "See thou do it not, for I am thy fellow-servant and of thy brethren the prophets. Worship God."

I can worship neither "sovereign" ñor "prophet" nor archangel, nor any created being whatever placed on the throne of God, and "in the midst of the throne," and my conviction is still the same, that if Christianity demands this of me it is as gross a system of idolatry as can be found among the religions of the earth. The Greeks who worshiped Apollo under Zeus the Supreme did not put their sub-deity so high as this; did not make him the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the Ending, the First and the Last. No: I believe all this worship is rendered to the Logos of God who appeared in the Son of man; to God speaking or humanized to our finite conceptions and deepest spiritual needs. It is the Logos which was in the beginning

with God, which was God in self-revelation bringing forth to us the wealth of the divine nature and its deepest and tenderest love. Does any enlightened person need to have it argued with him that "the Lamb as it had been slain," appearing in the midst of the throne of God, is neither a lamb literally nor a mortal man who had been put to death; but the divine Logos rather, symbolizing the Eternal Father as Sacrifice, Mercy, and Love, love so tender that, like our human love, it can be wounded, can bleed for us, can give itself away in eternal offering for our redemption; a love of which the sacrifice on Calvary is only the outward symbolization, but the best, the highest, and the tenderest which our earthly annals can afford. We talk of "the Fatherhood of God," and make it a cold and sounding generality while God is far off in the Unknown; and Theodore Parker, having sounded all the changes upon it till he must have felt it a wearisome platitude, began to call God his mother, and he might have added sister and nurse, or any other words of endearment from our human relations, without coming anywhere near to that experience of the divine love which the disciple finds in Jesus Christ as the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world; which made Faber exclaim in excess of emotion :

"I thrill with painful joy to find

God's fatherhood so nigh."

I do not think my critic any more fortunate in his interpretation of Paul than in his interpretation of John. Here, again, why not let Paul interpret himself when he says every knee shall bow at the name of Jesus? Is it a mortal man or the Divine Logos who in the work of human redemption is highly exalted above every name? Turn to Colossians (i. 15-19) where this is said of the Son: "The image of the invisible God-the first-born of the whole creation. For in him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in the earth, visible and invisible; thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers; all things were created by him and for him. And he is before all things, and by him all things subsist. For it pleased the Father that in him the

whole Pleroma should dwell." Here again, is the Logos of the Golden Proem, without whom "nothing was made that was made." And a passage exactly parallel we find in the letter to the Hebrews, written not by Paul, but by one of his cotemporaries, where, as I read it "the Son" is the Logos again, "by whom God made the worlds," and who speaks of him as one above all angels in the words, "Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever," and yet again, "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of thy hands." I am not aware that any of us in doing honor to sovereigns, magistrates, and prophets make them the creators of the whole universe.

I cannot imagine any possible reason why those Unitarians who receive the gospel message in its integrity should forego the power, the inspiration, the renewing grace which the Logos doctrine has ever had among the followers of Christ. As held by the early Church, it does not infringe in the least upon the central doctrine of Unitarian theology, the essential oneness of God. It has commended orthodoxy to thousands of hearts and minds which extract this from it and leave the errors, and I have not a doubt that thousands who are not orthodox are in tacit acknowledgment of the same truth, but who would shrink from its formulation because human symbols are too poor for it. In one of the largest and most devout of our Unitarian gatherings, as I remember, when the communion was too pure and deep to warrant the suspicion that any factitious or idolatrous element was in it, every heart seemed touched and every eye grew moist as the old coronation hymn was sung, —

"All hail the power of Jesus' name,

Let angels prostrate fall."

Dr. Channing, I have supposed, after receding from the Arianism which he held in the earlier years of his ministry, came into this form of the Unitarian Christology, or something like it, though neither he nor any other liberal Christian would make it a test of fellowship. If honored names are of any value they could be multiplied indefinitely and I quotę from two other writers on another page.

ΤΟ

TOPICS OF THE MONTH.

DR. GANNETT.

We were prevented by ill health from preparing at the proper time such a notice of this dear and honored friend as his character, his services, and the place which he held in our affections, in our religious body, and in the whole community, seemed to us to demand. His death has taken our thoughts back to our earliest acquaintance with Unitarian ministers, and has brought up so vividly before us the beloved and saintly forms of those who were associated with him from the time of his ordination that we have wished to include them also in our notice of him. For, though no man was more independent in his opinions, or could stand alone more firmly than he when his reason and conscience required him to take a position in which he could not have the sympathy of his brethren, yet he did not love to be separated from them. He gladly acknowledged his obligations to them. In his great humility he looked up lovingly and admiringly to men who were by no means equal to himself. He was of a most social and friendly nature. He was not one who loved to eat his morsel alone. He delighted to have his friends with him singly or in groups-the more the better. And he was, all his life long, profoundly interested in the cause of Liberal Christianity. In giving a slight sketch, as we hope to do in our next number, of the movement which resulted in the separation of the two great branches of the Congregational Church here in Massachusetts, and especially in bringing before our readers the distinguished men who welcomed him into the ministry and who through years of earnest labor in his society shared each other's anxieties and hopes, we are sure that we shall be doing that which would give him far greater satisfaction than if we should devote all our space exclusively to him. We love to think of them, as we knew them once in their goodly fellowship here, and we love to

463

think of them as they are there now "in solemn troops and sweet societies," with so few of their number- beloved and honored ones-still left behind. still left behind. We are sorry to have deferred our article so long. But many touching and beautiful notices have been published. The dreadful disaster by which his earthly life was brought to a sudden and violent close shocked, benumbed, and paralyzed our feelings for a time. Three months will only clear up our atmosphere, remove to a distance the disturbing elements, and bring back the natural features of our friend as he appeared to us in his daily life and conversation.

THE CHICAGO FIRE.

This has been the great sensation and the great event of the season. In 1840, we passed through the village of Chicago, which contained then rather more than five thousand inhabitants. After an absence of thirty-one years we visited it again four months ago, and witnessed the wonderful creation which had been wrought within that comparatively short interval of time. We saw streets of massive and imposing structures reaching apparently to any extent one behind another. But the friend who was with us intimated that though all this was real and substantial and almost marvelous in so new a city, yet going back a little way in any direction we should find buildings of a very different order. Among them, we suppose, were the combustible materials, heaped up so near, and in form and magnitude so admirably fitted for burning, that when they were once ignited, under the pressure of a violent wind, fire-proof buildings went down like card houses in the flames before them. But though the accumulated fortunes of years have been swept away, the indomitable energy, the forces of mind and character which built up the city once still remain, and they will build it up again.

Wonderful indeed has been the enterprise of the Chicago people, wonderful the skill, the foresight, the fertility of resources, the faculty of adapting means to ends, the power of appreciating all the forces, material, æsthetic, social, and moral, which are needed in order to build up and secure a