conduct between Sundays. A thousand misleading conventionalities confused the vision of Christian thinkers.

Faith, for example, was given an ecclesiastical definition, and was made synonymous with theology. The true believer was he who assented to the pronouncements of the theological doctors. Faith was set apart from reason; believing was made a substitute for thinking. Still wider was the distance between creed and character. No man's sense of religion was affronted by the account given of the French cardinal, who was declared to be mean, cruel, avaricious, and dishonorable, but very religious! Benvenuto Cellini broke all the commandments, but attended the services of the church with regularity and devotion, and believed that his steps were guarded by the blessed angels. An honest, pure-hearted, God-fearing heretic, no matter how upright his life, would go to hell. But a loyal son of the true church, who recited the creed and knelt at the sacrament, might live most basely, and yet have place hereafter with patriarchs and saints among the saved. Faith was shown not by works but by words.

Inspiration had reference, men imagined, only to the composition of the books of the

Old and New Testaments. The Holy Spirit ceased to speak when the last apostle died. Isaiah was helped to write his sermons by the dictation of the Lord God Almighty; but Chrysostom and Augustine, Francis and Bernard, had to get along by themselves as best they might. The men who wrote the Hebrew Psalms heard the melodies of heaven; but the writers of the Christian hymns looked into the silent sky. A very different conception from that of the good people of the elder time, who held that even the architects of the new church which was built in the wilderness were inspired of God. Different, too, from the belief of the apostles and brethren who met in convention at Jerusalem, and claimed that the Holy Ghost was with them as he had been with their fathers. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the God of Peter, James, and John, they held. They set no narrow limits to God's assisting benediction.

By the same mistaken interpretation a picture, if it had a religious name written on the frame, was accounted to be sacred. If there were some other name, the picture was held to belong to the secular side of art. If the artist painted a mother and a child, and set halos

about their heads, the painting belonged to religion; take away the halos, and it belonged to the world, the flesh, or the devil. Music which was set to the words of Holy Scripture was considered to be sacred music; poems of patriotism, sung in time to the tramp of marching armies, were outside the province of the church. To build a cathedral was to do a service to religion as much could not be said regarding the erection of a block of model tenements. To be a vestryman in a parish was to hold a religious position: it was quite a different thing to be a councilman in a city. The affairs of the church were considered in religious conventions; that good adjective was not given to the assemblies which discussed the needs of the state. St. Philip and St. James were honored by a day of commemoration; but it was not customary to celebrate with religious services the birthday of Washington, and the heroes of the Civil War were better remembered by the state than by the church.

This distinction ran between great spaces of human life, dividing it right and left into the sacred and the secular. The province of religion was narrowed. The church attended to certain phases of the affairs of men, and stopped

there, saying little about what lay beyond, accounting that to be none of its business. "To make men better" was a phrase having but a limited meaning, applied almost entirely to the direct concerns of the soul.

But when Jesus was here he was interested in all that entered into the life of man. He cared for the soul, but not for the soul only. He desired to save men- body, mind, and soul. It was his wish and his purpose that men and women should be happy here and now, without waiting till they go to heaven. He attended a wedding-feast, and contributed to the enjoyment of the guests, without holding a prayer-meeting or preaching a sermon. He came down from the mountain of the Transfiguration, and found a lad possessed of the devil, and straightway healed him. The sight of sickness moved him to compassion. He did not account it a matter of small moment that people should be hungry. He was stirred to sympathy by the privations of the poor. He made himself the enemy of disease and death, of avarice and selfishness, of poverty and ignorance, as he was the enemy of sin. To him, all life was of concern, and all that had to do with the best living of it came within his province.

That is the spirit of the new attitude of Christian men toward human needs. It is being understood now that the church of Jesus Christ is meant to touch the whole circumference of society, and to deal with every day and every place. Jesus came to make men better, and sent his disciples to make men better in every kind of way. The Christian intention is that every human being shall have a chance, and every kind of chance. The purpose of the Christian religion is to uplift all life; to make good citizens, wise statesmen, unselfish politicians, honest lawyers, conscientious doctors, just judges, prudent housekeepers, industrious mechanics, scrupulous salesmen, public-spirited capitalists, fraternal employers, high-minded reporters and editors, intelligent school-teachers, genuine Christians, who will not lie nor steal nor abuse their neighbors, nor do any mean, false thing. And Christianity is interested in everything which is meant to make earth more like heaven, in the progress of education and its universal extension; in the improvement of machinery; in the discoveries of the men of science; in the researches of the scholars; in political reform and social betterment; in the houses that men and women live in, and the