another as Jesus hath loved us; that is, well enough, if need be, to die on the cross for our fellow-men. Well, here in Christianity, said I, for which, in name, at least, men still have some respect, I shall find the motive power I need. Cheered and animated, I went forth and preached the Gospel of love, charity, brotherhood, and many were the burning words I let fall, and not altogether in vain. But, alas! I was not yet through with my difficulties. I could stand up and say to men, "Love one another; be ready to die for one another "; but this would not make them love. It was merely saying, "Be ye warmed, be ye filled, be ye clothed," while I imparted not the things whereof they had need. What the corrupt and selfish, who were oppressing their brethren, and through whose want of love the world was made a vale of tears and a field of blood, most needed, was, not to be told their duty, but to be made to do it; not to know that they ought to love, but to be actually induced to love. They would assent to my preaching, they would applaud my zeal, tell me I was preaching the true Gospel, and then go and sin as before. I might preach, till doomsday, the Gospel of love; but, unless I had some power to infuse the power of love, "the power to become the sons of God," into their hearts, man would continue, as of old, to be the plague and tormentor of his kind. No. I have not got hold of the lever yet. It is in vain that men are told what the Gospel demands, if there be not the authority to discipline them into obedience; in vain that I demand the disinterested affections, unless I can impart the power that calls them forth. Men are not redeemed by the teachings of Christ, but by Christ himself, by his being formed in them, the wisdom of God and the power of God, and through his indwelling Spirit constituting them sons of God, and heirs of the heavenly inheritance.

We have erred, and been carried away into vague speculations, windy declamations, and idle sermonizings. Modern sects seem to take it for granted, that all Jesus was needed for was, to remove, in a forensic

sense, certain obstacles in the way of our salvation on the side of God, and simply to teach us what we ought to be and to do, in order to be saved. I came, with Dr. Channing, to the conclusion, that the Christian life is the life of disinterestedness, charity, brotherhood, that whoever has the spirit of Christ is a true Christian; and I then assumed the Christian life as the means of effecting the social reforms I contemplated. Wherein was I wrong? Is not the Christian life the life of pure, disinterested love? And will not this life, if lived, effect all needed reforms? Unquestionably. But Christian life is the end, reforms are only the means of attaining to it. When we live that life, we have already all good, and no evil can befall us. Nor is this all. How shall we get men to live the life of Christ? If men only lived the life of Christ, we should have no difficulty; but the evil is, they do not live this life, and the very question is, How to induce them to live it?

Here is a difficulty, out of which Dr. Channing and my Unitarian friends did not help me. They said, and said truly, that we are Christians only by living the life of Christ; they said, and said truly, that the fruits of this life are love, charity, brotherhood; but the means of inducing men to live this life they did not tell. This is the great and troublesome question. How shall we answer it? Shall we say, Come to Christ, and all needed wisdom and power to live the life shall be imparted? Doubtless the wisdom and power we need are Christ himself, and all who come to him will receive them. But what means this coming to Christ? To come to Christ is, to come into moral harmony with him, to obey the Divine Law, and to be one with God. who has come to Christ, in this sense, already lives the Christian life. To propose coming to Christ, as the means of obtaining the power to live the Christian life, is to tell a man to live that life as the condition of obtaining the ability to live it!

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No, this will not do. Here is the man morally dead, and nothing will answer that does not reach him where he is, and raise him to life. What is not able to raise

the dead, to say to those dead in trespasses and sins, and who, therefore, are without power in and of themselves to move, "Come forth," as said the Voice to Lazarus in his grave, will be inadequate to the demand. You tell me, and you tell me truly, that Christ is this power, that it is he who can, and who does, raise the dead; but death and life do not stand in immediate relation, Christ and the sinner stand at the opposite poles. Some medium, then, is needed, to connect the two extremes, to bring the unholy within the sphere of the influence of the holy. It is Christ, indeed, that comes, but only through his prepared body, his ministry, that reaches the sinner where he is, and begets him to moral life and soundness.

The sinner, we are told, comes to Christ by faith; but, prior to his coming, he can exercise only the sinner's faith, which, from the nature of the case, cannot be a faith that unites him to Christ; but, at best, only a faith that brings him to the baptismal font. The faith that makes him one with Christ, which is "the evidence of things not seen, and the substance of things hoped for," a faith which overcomes the world, and enables him to hold communion with the Father, - the blessed privilege of the true disciple, is not possible to the sinner before he has been raised from the dead, and made alive in Christ. It cannot be proposed, then, as the means of obtaining the wisdom and the power which we need, in order to live the true life of Christ; for it is itself the fruit of that wisdom and power. It is a product, not of the moral state in which the sinner is before regeneration, but of that moral state into which regeneration introduces him. So faith cannot serve as the medium of bringing us into moral harmony with Christ, because it is itself a result of that harmony, and presupposes it.

There can be no doubt, that, to a certain extent, the preacher is the medium through which Christ and the sinner are brought into relation, but he is not, and cannot be, a sufficient medium. Here is the rock on which all modern reformers split. They proceed

on the hypothesis, that, if men do but come to a knowledge of what the truth demands, there is no difficulty as to the practical realization. They begin by calling a true doctrine of truth, the TRUTH itself, and then, because the Truth has always the inherent power to sanctify, conclude the doctrine will realize itself. Proclaim the truth, say they, and it will make to itself hands, erect the temple, and institute the practical worship of God. So I for a long time believed, preached, and wrote. But such is not the fact. The fallacy is not, that truth is not vital, puissant, and able to do to the uttermost all we ask of it, but in the fact that what we proclaim as the truth is not the truth, but the philosophy of truth. Truth is the Living Power, the ontological Principle; not, as we too often, in our shallow philosophy, define it, the agreement of our ideas with their objects. The doctrines we preach may be true, and are true, so far as they give a correct view of the truth, but they are not truth itself. They may be important, indispensable, in bringing us to the truth, within the sphere of the influence of the living ontological Principle; but it is not our belief in them that gives us the power to will and to do, but truth itself, that of which they are true doctrines. Our theory of truth, that is, our philosophy, may be adequate and sound, yet it by no means suffices for our redemption and sanctification. Here is the profound REALISM of the Gospel, and here we see how opposed to it are our modern Conceptualisms and Nominalisms. The Church condemned as heretics both Roscellin and Abélard.

Nor are we obliged to rest here. All history comes in confirmation of this conclusion as to the inefficacy of theory, of doctrine, or philosophy, however true or sound it may be. We may regard Christianity under two points of view. Under one point of view, it is the ETERNAL WORD; not the word which God spoke, but which God speaks. In this sense, it is the Word incarnated, "God manifest in the flesh," for the salvation. of men. We may also regard it, under another point of view, as the philosophy of this Eternal, and Living,

and therefore Creative, Word. In this last sense, it is philosophy, or theology; that is, a doctrine, or rather the doctrine of Life; not doctrine of Life because it gives life, for the WORD gives life only as being Life itself, but because it explains the origin, principle, and genesis of life. Now, in this sense, as a philosophy, Christianity is older than the Advent of our Saviour. Plato had many very just views of Christian truth; Cicero, Apollonius of Tyana, Seneca, and others, taught morals not at all inferior to those we find in the Gospel. The best instructed Christian may study, even to-day, many of the productions of Gentile philosophers and moralists with advantage, and find. much to illustrate and confirm his faith in the doctrines of the New Testament. Yet what have these philosophers and moralists done for the world? They wrought no moral or social revolution, changed no old customs, abolished no superstitious practices. They in no sense purified the national religion, or the national manners. Rome, after her own great moralists and her acquaintance with Grecian philosophy, became more corrupt than ever, and her religion degenerated from its ancient grandeur and severity into Bacchic orgies and Isiac obscenities and prostitutions. Why was this? and why, the moment the same doctrines are taken up and preached by a few humble fishermen and tentmakers, do they found an institution which changes the whole face of the moral world, just in proportion as it extends, and which subsists, even to this day, in all the freshness and vigor of an immortal life? Because the philosophers had only doctrines, and because the fishermen and the tentmakers had, besides the doctrines, that of which the doctrine treated, Truth itself; for they communicated not merely the words of Christ, but Christ crucified, the wisdom of God, and the power of God, Him who declares himself to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Our blessed Saviour did not come merely to teach the truth, for he was it; he did not come to establish a true philosophy, for he was that of which all sound