Jehovah and Christ. This is not the way the world is going. Yet how largely Christianity is committed to these pious court flatteries, and the worship of the mere tinsel and show of authority!

Nay, authority itself is of the essence of Christianity, and in the strict sense of authority,-the power to order the conduct of another without that other's consent,-it is more and more discredited; it is steadily disappearing from civilization, every claim to obedience being compelled to justify itself to the reason of the majority of mankind.

Again, Christianity involves fundamentally the idea that a man is saved vicariously, not saved by his own deeds or his own merits. Now, that is the most remarkable element in all religion, and by that alone Christianity is doomed. I was sailing over the Indian Ocean once and a dissenting minister from England preached on the ship. There were a good many Hindoos on board, also some English, French, German, and one or two American travelers. This man preached on the blessing pronounced in the Psalms on the man whose transgression is hidden, to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity. He said that when a man had laid hold upon Christ, had accepted his vicarious atonement, that man's sins are hidden away; when God is passing by to judge mankind he would not see that man at all. The man is a sinner just the same, but he is covered all over with the mantle of Christ; that cloak hides the man altogether. God sees only the merits of his son there. After it was over I walked up to a little group of Hindoos gathered together on the deck,-a Hindoo lawyer, a Hindoo editor and a Hindoo Rajah among them. I said "How did you like that sermon ?" One answered, “We were just saying that it was the very worst sermon we had ever heard. Can you tell us how it is that people in the West preach such doctrines as that and how there can be any morality where men believe they are to be saved by some one else's virtues? If that doctrine were adopted in India, we would all give ourselves up to licentiousness." Every re

ligion in the world, with the exception of Christianity, teaches saved by his own merits and not by That is the one great doctrine that

a man that he is to be those of anybody else. distinguishes Christianity from all other religions, and that is why it has come down from century to century without being able to secure, without coercion, the real higher faith of a single man, woman or child. From that fundamental error, that merits not our own, can do anything for us, have sprung our moral evils. The other day, in my own State of Virginia, I drove from the old capital at Williamsburg to the ancient city of Jamestown, the first step of the white man in the New World. All that is left of that ancient town, founded in 1607, is part of an old church tower. The first English footprint in America was a church. I had a little negro boy with me, about twelve years of age, and we sat down on an old tombstone at the foot of that tower, and its inscription read. this way: "Here lyeth William Sherwood, who was born in the parish of White Chapel, near London. A great sinner waiting for a joyful resurrection."

William Sherwood would seem to have thought that the greater sinner he was the more wonderful would be the miracle of Christ's blood. I read it over, and asked the little negro if he understood anything about it. "If Sherwood had not so trusted in his probable theological sinfulness as to put it on his tombstone," I said, "your ancestors might not have been slaves, those Confederate earth-works yonder would not have been there, or filled with dead men." The fact that any sane man could unite his great sinnership and his joyful resurrection in one glad note of faith, is the sign of every evil. If William Sherwood, when he set his foot upon the new world, had believed that his joyful resurrection was absolutely dependent upon his not being a sinner, perhaps, when there sailed up to the town a shipload of negroes, he would not have been so ready to buy them. And in the North, if such had been the case, that ship which brought the Pilgrims might not have presently brought its load of African slaves.

The other day there was held in Cleveland a Church Congress, to which the workingmen were invited. Preachers ranging from the Catholic to the Universalist stood on that platform and discussed the reason why the workingman did not go to church. Henry George and others got up and declared that the workingman did not see the spirit of Christ there; that the workingman does not see the Christ he believes in represented in the Christianity of the world. In the New Testament there is Jesus and there is Christ; one says "Love your enemies," the other says to his enemies "Go to hell, bound hand and foot;" one says, "Whatever the priests tell you, do, because they sit in Moses' seat;" the other says, "These priests are a generation of vipers;" one says, "I came not to destroy the law and the prophets;" the other says "Moses said an eye for an eye, but I say you must love your enemies." You can prove anything in favor of oppression, of power, of authority, of slavery, in the New Testament; on the other hand, you can prove from it forgiveness, tenderness and mercy. In it you can find a God sending men to hell by millions by a great broad road, and you find there a God who sends his rain and sunshine on the just and the unjust alike. You can find anything you like in this book; and the workingman, fixing upon Jesus the worker, does not reflect that Christ means a crown, nor that Christ is Jesus raised up from his human death to be the omnipotent Jehovah, the great figure-head of ecclesiastical despotism in the world. Jesus is the son of Mary, but Christ is the son of the Emperor Constantine, the founder of Christianity.

The people have been deceived in this matter. In Flaubert's Salammbo there is an account of a veil of a goddess of Carthage which was regarded as the salvation and security of the city. The veil was considered so holy that no one dared look upon it or touch it. Everlasting despair was the lot of the man who should touch that veil. A foreign warrior, an enemy, managed to get into the temple alone; he took the goddess' veil, wrapped it around him, and walked through the

city amid raging thousands of people, not one of whom dared molest their chief foe for fear of touching the veil. He controlled Carthage through its superstition about that veil! He carried it outside of the town to his own camp. In the same way despotism has invested itself with the costume of Christ; not his spirit, not his thought, but the transient phraseology, similitudes and symbols through which he had to express himself in his time, the mere veil of the real Jesus. Imperialism has wrapped itself around with this, and passed on from age to age, the working people, the poor and the simple, being afraid to arrest its progress lest they should harm a true Saviour of men. They fear that Jesus may be hid in the veil. What cruel forces have been sanctioned in this world in the name of Jesus transformed to Christ! Think, for instance, of how because he is supposed to have said "I come not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it," how that savage and stupid law of "blood for blood" has fastened itself upon the world, so that not even the legalized scaffold is enough, but men take to hunting down their fellows and lynching them, and papers in great cities smile on "the rough method of Judge Lynch." No finger of shame is pointed at the crowd of cowards who fall on one and strangle the life out of him when he is an innocent man because he has not been proven otherwise,-and even if guilty is far better than his brutal and cowardly murderers. Again, there has been upheld in the name of Christ, from ancient times, that old fairy-tale about women; that the snake induced the first woman to eat a certain apple, and that like Pandora she brought all the evils into the world through it. This story is not alluded to in the Bible, except where it is told in Genesis, until mentioned by Paul. The Jews had been too sensible to build on that fairy-tale, but it was taken up by the authors of the New Testament, and by Christianity made the ground for overthrowing all the justice of the Roman code towards woman. It has been lately discovered that Jesus himself said at one time "The son and the daughter shall inherit alike," which was in harmony with the Roman

law; but that was suppressed under the old story that it was not man that sinned, but woman first fell into transgression; she was deceived by the serpent, and, therefore, the woman must be kept silent in the church, and so on. It is thus that superstition has aided oppression to pass through the centur ies, and that our social progress is to-day largely arrested by relics of institutions not based on justice, policy or reason.

The work of the world derives no inspiration from its faith. The relics linger, as the Minster does in the Iron City; but it is from the city of use that overspreads the world-institutions built in adaptation to the living time-that communities derive strength. Theology is anti-social. Let it be known anywhere that there is a judge on the Bench who visits the sins of the father upon the child, or that some man is unjust to all his children but his first begotten, and society will unseat that judge, will dislike that base parent. Only so far as our sentiment is fettered by superstition can we tolerate such principles. Man has outgrown his pious baby-house, and he must needs put away childish things. It matters little whether one man or another exhorts the world to put away childish things; it is the stern voice of our time. When Gideon cast down the altars of Baal, the inquiry was " Why does'nt Baal come and fight for himself?" When the Christian world was pulling down the altars of Paganism, the question was "Why don't Jove and Apollo come and fight for their own altars?"

And now when the Christian altar is crumbling, nothing can save it unless Christ appear with ten legions of angels to fight for himself. That is the true principle. The real interests of the world approve themselves, their advantage is selfevident, they serve not a class or a priesthood but mankind. That is the reverse of what we see in systems that survive by habit, custom, tradition; they rest on privilege in an age whose tendencies they oppose. Hammers of the Iron Age ring above church bells, the steam-whistle drowns the voice of abject supplication, and cannon thunder louder than Sinai. The old rites and dogmas can serve us no more. Love and