RELIGIOUS WORK 367 



blunted. Now men have said that he only was a Christian who held 

 to a certain form of words exactly and honestly. Now they have 

 demanded a certain performance of duty as towards Christ, vaguely 

 called ceremony, a kind of opus operatum, which assured a man of 

 catholic orthodoxy because of his catholic practice. Again there 

 has been brought strongly to bear upon the individual the necessity 

 of exact obedience to " the church," that is, to a few rulers and 

 leading men who, whether elected in democratic fashion, or holding 

 office by appointment or inheritance, were supposed to excel the 

 common people in authority and intelligence, having a right to 

 interpret and to command. As a reaction from this daring assump- 

 tion of authority we are forced to note the liberalism which despised 

 all rule, all law, all tradition, all custom, sometimes even the Bible 

 itself, and made each man his own judge and religion a purely 

 personal belief. From the Church being everything she became 

 nothing. From being a slave with his spiritual food placed in his 

 mouth, and his hands lifted by command from -a central seat of 

 power, the man became a free lance, and sometimes defied even 

 God himself in his right to rule, magnifying humanity's glory. It 

 was but a step from this to leave God entirely out of the question, 

 and make right a matter of human opinion. " Where and who is 

 God? We cannot see him, and revelation is vague, often contra- 

 dictory! But we know by intelligence, no matter whence intelli- 

 gence came, that right is right. And he shall be counted good 

 who does good and is good, whether he believe or no." How 

 vividly all these varied opinions speak! We have met them all, 

 for they are all here with us even in this century. But by their 

 side, or rather out of their very midst as they jangled and fought 

 together, came this great, beautiful flower of the truth, springing 

 from the deep earth of Christ's long ago teaching, and nourished 

 by man's hungry dissatisfaction with trying to eat stones instead 

 of bread. And this flower, with its fragrance and beauty like the 

 lily, and its strength like the cedar of Lebanon, took the good from 

 all the partial contentions and became the eternal resultant of all 

 the minor forces. We must not think of it as suddenly appearing. 

 Here and there for eighteen hundred years it has blossomed in indi- 

 vidual cases, but it has never been recognized in all its glory and 

 divine might until of recent years, and it is only now becoming the 

 ideal of a Christian which all accept whether they practice it or not. 

 In other words, a Christian to-day is a man of deep personal faith in 

 Christ and love for him, and a desire to serve him and follow him. He 

 holds to the old creed in its spirit, but he finds life in that creed 

 only as it is exercised. He is not contented to be a slave, he 

 must be a son; not to assume unto himself authority, but to join 

 in the Father's work and make the Father known. He can find no 



