328 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



school as that, while there has been a good deal done incidentally? the 

 revised procedure of education yet awaits development and accom- 

 plishment ; and I think that our profession is in danger, and in great 

 danger, of going under, and of working effectively only among the 

 relatively less informed and intelligent of the community ; of being 

 borne with, in a kind of contemptuous charity, or altogether neglected, 

 by the men of culture who have been strongly developed on their 

 moral side not their moral side as connected with revealed religion, 

 but as connected rather with human knowledge and worldly wisdom. 

 The question, then, comes up, Do men need this intimately practical 

 instruction ; and, if so, must there be to meet it this life-school of 

 preachers ? 



It is said, by some, " Has not Christianity been preached by plain 

 men, who did not understand so very much about human nature, in 

 every age of the world ? " It has ; and what has eighteen hundred 

 years to show for it ? To-day, three-fourths of the globe is heathen, 

 or but semi-civilized. After eighteen hundred years of preaching of 

 the faith under the inspiration of the living Spirit of God, how far has 

 Christianity gone in the amelioration of the condition of the race ? I 

 think that one of the most humiliatinsr things that can be conteni- 

 plated, and one of the things most savory to the skeptical, and which 

 seems the most likely to infuse a skeptical spirit into men, is to look 

 at the pretensions of the men who boast of the progress of their 

 work, and then to look at their performances. I concede that there 

 has been a great deal done, and there has been a great deal of prep- 

 aration for more ; but I say that the torpors, the vast retrocessions, 

 the long lethargic periods, and the wide degeneration of Christianity 

 into 'a kind of ritualistic mummery and conventional usage, show very 

 plainly that the past history of preaching Christianity is not to be our 

 model. We must find a better mode of administration. 



We need to study human nature, in the first place, because it is 

 the Divine nature which we are to interpret to men. Divine attribute 

 corresponds to our idea of human faculty. The terms are analogous. 

 You cannot interpret the Divine nature except through some knowl- 

 edge of human nature. There are those who believe that God tran- 

 scends men, not simply in quality and magnitude, but in kind. With- 

 out undertaking to confirm or deny this, I say that the only part of 

 the Divine nature that we can understand is that part which corre- 

 sponds to ourselves, and that all which lies outside of what we can 

 recognize is something that never can be interpreted by us. It is not 

 within our reach. Whatever it may be, therefore, of God that, by 

 searching we can find out, all that we interpret, and all that we can 

 bring, in its moral influence, to bear upon men, is in its study but a 

 higher form of mental philosophy. 



Now, let us see what government is. It is the science of man- 

 ao-ins: men. What is moral government ? It is moral science, or the 



