should be liberty in the churches than that men should seek liberty by abandoning their birth-right. A man is in the Presbyterian Church, and is preaching Christ, and love, and self-sacrifice, and industry, and purity, and heavenlikeness; but then, he is preaching them without an absolute belief in the endlessness of punishment; and people say to him, "Why do you not join the Universalist Church ?" In other words, the power of the Spirit of God in the souls of men is not considered as enough to make one orthodox. The interior life of a man is regarded as inferior to organization, and to schedules of doctrine. But the true conception of a church organization is one in which men shall be like Christ, and in which, being like Christ, they shall be free-free to think, free to speak, and free to act.

It is a thousand times more important that young Mr. Tyng should stand in the pulpit of the Episcopal Church and preach the truths of Christ as he feels that he is divinely ordained to preach them, than that he should renounce his fellowship with that church because he does not feel called upon to submit to all of its restrictions. It is infinitely better that he should stand in that church until he has demonstrated that it permits the liberty which he claims, than that he should go out of it and found a new sect. It is better that men in the Presbyterian Church who hold a different and a larger view than is held by that church itself should stay where they are, and prove that the Gospel of Christ grants the freedom which they assert their right to exercise, than that they should form a little pocket sect some where else. Sects are good in their place; but what we need is not so much more sects as that the sects which we have should be more Christian, and that those who are in them should utter the truth, and stand up for it, and suffer for it, and earn the right to be ca.led Christians. What we need is more sects in which a man shall have the right to think as God inspires him to think, and to speak as God moves him to speak. Such rights are things not to be bartered or thrown away. But they are withheld by the church. The church has superseded Christ. The Christ-spirit is sucked up in creeds; and it is to be wrested back again.

The men, however, who seek to bring about the change are not to do it by leaving the organizations to which they belong. And I stay in the Congregational communion, not alone because it is the church of my fathers, and because I reverence it; not alone because I think it is the simplest and the nearest Christian in its organization: I stay in it, among other reasons, because many men say that a minister in the Congregational Church shall not have liberty to do that which the spirit of God inspires him to do, and I say he shall! Envious or low-thoughted men may say that such things indicate policy. Yes, they do; everything that is wise is politic; and I assert for my kind the right to receive God's inspiration in living free souls. I assert in behalf of the liberty of Christ's people, that no church on earth has a right to coerce them, to domineer over them, or to cast them out because they will not speak shibboleth as that church speaks it. In Christ, men are free; and I stand on the declaration of the apostle, who says, "The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance against such there is no law." They stand in their own divinely inspired liberty, above law, not because they are without law, but because they are doing that which the law requires from a higher ground than that on which men ordinarily stand-from spontaneity, and not from coercion.

A church must be organized so as not only to permit the action of personal liberty, but even to inspire it. It has no inherent rights superior to the rights of the Fruits of the Spirit. The necessities of externality are not to domineer over the living force of men whom Christ has made free by the inspiration of love. Orthodox or heterodox, anger and bitterness and pride are wrong. The inspiration of love, heterodox or orthodox, is always right. Expel the malign, the mechanical, the deadening routine, with orderly cant and decent stupidity. But let light shine. Give place to personal inspiration. Let the sweet graces have liberty. He whose orthodoxy inspires bitterness should be disciplined. He whose heterodoxy inspires love, meekness, goodness, faith, joy, longsuffering, should be exalted.

Chris

I have but one other view which I will now urge. tianity has failed to make as rapid progress as it should have made, because the character of the Lord Jesus Christ has been hidden, and because a corrupted theology has presented to us a God that will never subdue the world, and that never ought to subdue it. If there be any truth in the mission of Jesus, who came to deliver us from our sins; if there be any truth in the compassion and suffering of Christ; if there be any truth in that whole wondrous history, in which, "being in the form of God, he thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of man; and being found in fashion as a man, humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross,' then, indeed, we have a description of God. He is a Being clothed with infinite power, who uses himself for the succor of the weak, of the ignorant, and of the sinful. is that Principle of inspiration in the Universe that lifts men up from animal conditions, and waits patiently for them till they are brought into higher and divine relations. That is the conception of God in Christ Jesus. Christ has no

meaning if that is not it.

وو

He

Now, if you present to me a God sitting back of eternal forces, creating millions of men for victims, and who is going on in endless succession creating them only that, as he turns the world over, they may roll into everlasting perdition, I am repelled from it by every quality which the Gospel inspires and develops. Go, with all necromantic arts, and cull your simples for conjuration in the shadowy realms below, where sin, and wrong, and hideous cruelties, and detestable iniquities have swarmed, and bring them up from thence, and out of these form a conception of a regnant being fit to rule in hell; now tell me, wherein does that portraiture differ from the portraiture which men have often made of Jehovah? They have made an infernal portraiture, and they call it God! I take every tear-drop that was shed in Gethsemane to rub out the infamous falsehood! I take every drop of blood that flowed on Calvary, and with that I would make the heavens glow as clouds do when storms are pierced and driven by the con

quering sun; blood, not as the emblem of cruelty, but a the emblem of mercy. Do not preach to me a God who hates the world, and treads it under foot, and treats it as if he were a hideous tyrant, making his own pleasure and glory such that they can be augmented by the aimless sufferings of myriads of men; do not preach to me. such an abominable devil, reveling in cruelty, and call it God preach to me a Being that made himself of no reputation, who suffered for men, and walked the earth with his arms about them, and with his heart beating against their hearts, in order that he might show them what God was, and how God felt.

As, after a long day of storm, the sun in the west breaks forth, and all trees rejoice, hung with gems, while the storm itself, moaning and murmuring, dies away in the mountains; so, when the night of heathenism and the storm which ascetic theology has caused shall have passed away, then bring forth the new vision of God-that ought not to be new after two thousand years-Jesus Christ, whose power was in love, and joy, and peace, and whose disciples are to be known by love, and joy, and peace, and longsuffering, and gentleness, and goodness, and faith, and meekness, and temperance; and let Him reign! Then the sun shall stand in the firmament for a thousand years, and the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth shall be one, and he shall rule everywhere, from the rising of the sun until the going down of the same!

Depart, cruelty, and come, mercy! Go down, hideous despotism: rise up, sweet liberty and love in Jesus Christ! Come, Thou that once wert crowned with thorns; let the stars shine from around thy brow; and all our hearts shall be joined to thee. Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly.

PRAYER BEFORE THE SERMON.

AWAKEN in us, our Father, some sense of those mercies which, unasked, are descending upon us. It is not because of their supplication that the flowers receive thy dews by night and thy sun by day. They know not, and they come into being only after all these influences. And thou art beforehand with us. It is thy grace that makes us think of grace. It is thy fore-running blessings that quicken in us a desire for blessings. If we long to escape from fault and sin it is thy work that hath in part been accomplished in us which breeds the desire. And so thou art evermore seeking us; and when we lift up our voices to thee, they are but the echo, the response in us, to thy call. So we rejoice while we supplicate, believing that our prayers are answered in that they are made, and that the answer of prayer is often the very desire of prayer.

We rejoice in thee. We rejoice in the consciousness of thy nearness to us. We cannot understand thy greatness. We are at a loss in our understanding and in our imagination concerning thee. We canuot comprehend thy goodness, it so conflicts with the mixed pride and selfishness of our natures, struggling with generosity and with love. We are ourselves so poor in goodness that the royalty of thy nature, the sovereignty of thy love, we cannot fathom. We are more puzzled with this than we are with the infiniteness of thy naturewith thy thought-power and thy hand-power.

We rejoice, O Lord, that thou art interpreting thyself to us, little by little, out of ourselves, and that that goodness which is the fruit of the Spirit in us is, little by little, forming in us some type or conception of thee. But how much greater art thou than our thought of thee! How free is thy bountiful nature. How can we, as it were shut up and imprisoned in earthly shells, know of it? What do they who dwell in shells on the sea-coast, buried in the sand, know of the depth and the power of the ocean in which they live? and what do we who lie buried on the edge of the eternal and the infinite of thy realm know of the wealth and the commonwealth of God's heart? O grant that we may not be arrogant, as if we knew. May we be conscious of our immense ignorance. May we not seek curiously to interpret those yearnings of our souls which seem prophecies, and which seem to touch something, we know not what. We see dimly. as through a glass. We see where the morning sun is to arise, and where the light is to come and gather brightness. We see the glorious clouds that receive the light of the sun. Lut the orb we do not discern.

We pray that we may therefore stand in our conscious ignorance, and seek to know more and more of the way in which thou art to be known, by filling ourselves with the graces and the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ with his patience; with his forbearance; with his sympathy for all men; with the protection which he granteth, by his thoughts, by his enthusiasm aud by his fervor, lifting men up and inspiring them with patience and courage, and godliness of life.

So may we put on Christ. So may he dwell in us, that, being Inspired to do the things which he did, and to live in the realms of