The Evohition of Arms and Armor. 183 



" Dream not that lielm and harness 

 Are signs of valor true : 

 Peace liath higher tests of manhood 

 Than battle ever knew. 



*' Henceforth to Labor's chivalry 

 Be knightly honors paid ; 

 For nobler than the sword's shall be 

 The sickle's accolade." 



The lesson, however, does not stop with statesmanship. 

 Keligion is a fiekl where precisely the same principle is at 

 issue. What are creeds, forms and great ecclesiastical 

 systems but the outward armor in which men have sought 

 to protect the inward spirit of religion ? What are many 

 of the churches and denominations of the past but mon- 

 sters of the theologic ages, rivaling those of geology in 

 their fierceness ? What the rack, the stake, the thumb- 

 screw, the inquisition, and, later, all the awful imagery of 

 eternal suffering, but the teeth and claws and jaws of the 

 old brute-world reappearing on earth in subtler and sharper 

 forms ? Their use has no doubt been honest and natural ; 

 their hardness and cruelty have been thought a necessary 

 means of defending and perpetuating their inside truth. 

 But how futile they have been ! How many of the old 

 dogmas are now as dead as the old brutes ! How certain 

 are all the institutions and all the churches, whose trust is 

 in any outward letter or outward form, sooner or later also 

 to go ! And for the same reason, the use of their vitality 

 in the wrong direction ; the impossibility of anything thus 

 hardened to adjust itself to the world's ever-changing spirit- 

 ual climate, and the pressure at last on their believers, 

 under the effort to make them ever stronger and stronger 

 against their foes, of their own dead weight. On the other 

 hand Christianity itself lives, the great spirit of all religion 

 lives, because an element within it has always acted on the 

 other principle, refused from the start, as with Jesus, to 

 encase itself in any words or forms, used its Divine food for 

 inward growth, adapted itself to the world's progress, and 

 relied, when assailed, for its real defense, on the inner 

 Aveapons of reason, spiritual insight and the power of truth. 

 When religion first started, ages since, from form to faith, 

 from outward authority to iiiAvard insight, and from one 

 vast body to a multitude of little sects, it did indeed seem, 

 from the ecclesiastical standpoint, as great a mistake as 



