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FIFTEEN YEARS IN BOSTON.

PART II. TENDENCIES OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND LIFE.

LAST Sunday morning, I discussed the condition of our own church, our own immediate ecclesiastical and religious condition. I looked back over the fifteen years that I have been with you, and tried to trace some of the changes and tendencies, to find out whether we had gained or lost ground, as to what we had accomplished and what we ought to try to accomplish in the immediate future. But that which is going on within the limits of any particular church is only a part of that larger problem with which all of us must deal. Every church is surrounded by an environment. Every church is only a little fraction of a larger whole. Every church is in the midst of surroundings, conditions, tendencies, which either hinder or help on that which it is attempting to do. We need, then, in order to comprehend our whole position, to study a little the conditions that surround us, the tendencies of religious thought and life in Boston so far as we can comprehend them, so that we can understand what forces are with us, what are against us, what is the drift of the age; and then we shall be able better to understand whether our outlook is a hopeful one, and what we may expect to accomplish, and how soon we may expect the reaching of certain definite results.

This larger surrounding is made up of two main elements. First, we need to consider the condition of that body to which we belong, the great Unitarian denomination or movement, whichever you choose to call it; and then we need to consider the relation in which this stands to the larger relig ious life of the city. It seems to me in general, concerning

our own Unitarian body, that there has been since I became acquainted with it a distinct, a definite growth, a broadening, a heightening, a deepening of its religious life,—a growth determined, indeed, by the grander forces that make up the life of this age, but chiming in with those things that promise for us a grander and better religious future.

There are two ways in either of which I might get at the statement of what I believe to be the truth concerning the tendencies of our Unitarian religious life. I might relate to you some of my own experiences. I might tell you in what sort of an atmosphere I found myself here in Boston fifteen. years ago. I might enlarge somewhat upon what perhaps might properly be called a religious change of climate during that time. But, though this would tell the story very effectively, I shrink from it, because it involves so much of personality, and because my motive, my purpose in it, and certain allusions that I would be obliged to make, might be misunderstood; and I wish to say nothing whatever in criticism of any of my brethren. I shall, therefore, approach the statement of this fact from another point of view, and I am supplied with the means for doing this by a newspaper controversy which was carried on last summer while I was out of the city. Some fragments of it, however, have fallen into. my hands, enough to give me the material for saying all that I shall find necessary to say.

One of our older clergymen, known all over the country, no longer in the active ministry, representing the more conservative side of our religious belief and life, has been seriously grieved over what he regards as the unfortunate tendencies of our modern Unitarian life; and he expressed his feelings and his views in the public papers. What he thinks is taking place gives me occasion for noting what I think is taking place. And it is curious, perhaps, to note that I agree with him almost perfectly as to the drift and tendency of our Unitarian body, only I do not at all draw from this drift and tendency the inferences which he draws. He looks upon these movements as something to be lamented.

I look upon them as only one feature of the enlarging revelation of God's truth and quickening of God's divine life on the part of the people.

There are two things which he states. He says that Unitarianism has been drifting from the position of supernaturalism towards what he calls naturalism. In confirmation of this statement, he quotes a few words which I had better read to you. They are a resolution passed at a public meeting of the Unitarian Association on the 24th of May, 1853:—

"Resolved, That the Divine authority of the gospel, as founded on a special and miraculous interposition of God for the redemption of mankind, is the basis of the action of this Association."

That is, Unitarianism, as set forth by its representatives in 1854, declared itself as based on a belief in a supernatural and miraculous interposition of God for the salvation of mankind. He says this no longer represents the general attitude of the Unitarian body; and he grieves over it, and thinks it a falling away from the truth. I believe that it no longer represents the main drift and tendency of the Unitarian body, and I rejoice in it as a larger manifestation of what I look upon as divine life. No, friends, the revelation of God through science as to the kind of universe we are living in, as to the age of the earth, the antiquity of man, his origin, his nature, the results of the critical study of the other religions of the world, and of all the scriptures of these different religions now open to our inspection and comparison, the result of all these is that we can no longer believe in supernaturalism,-in a supernatural, a special, a miraculous interposition of God for the salvation of mankind. This, however, does not mean I beg you to mark this - that we are any less religious, that we believe any the less in God, that we are no longer believers in the spiritual nature of man, that we do not believe in the relation of the soul of man to God. It does not mean that we are becoming materialists in our science and in our philosophy, instead of spiritualists in the higher use of that word.

It means none of these things. It only means that we do not believe any longer that God's universe is a duality, -it is a unity, a universe; and God and his love, the spiritual nature of man, the relations between his nature and ours, all these now we think are perfectly natural. We do not look upon nature as a machine, external to God, away from him, running by some mysterious force, into which God makes occasional miraculous irruptions for the carrying out of some purpose that he could not reach by purely natural means. We believe that God does not take to pieces, or undo, or interfere with, with one hand, that which he is all the time doing with the other. We believe that what are God's habits of working.

called natural laws are merely People talk sometimes about a natural law as though it were a thing or a person or a force. What do we mean by a natural law? We mean merely the statement of a general truth. We say that water will always freeze at a certain temperature, that ice will always melt at a certain temperature. We say it is the law of water and of ice to do this. We do not mean, however, that law is an entity that ever does anything: it is merely an expression of an eternal truth.

So our Unitarianism has not drifted but grown towards naturalism in this higher sense of it. Not that we leave outside or forget or overlook anything that was ever included in it before, only now we think of God and his love and his grace and his care and of our own souls and of the relation in which our souls stand to him as perfectly natural, as included in this one scheme of the universe.

This same clergyman says another thing about Unitarianism. He says that the emphasis is coming to be laid more and more on ethics and not on what he calls religion; that we are more moral in our teachings, our aims, our endeavors, than we used to be. I admit it, and, instead of lamenting it, I glory in it.

Some of the old churches teach that the main thing in the church organization is the sacrament; that we get into