fied. The most astounding problems cease to be appalling. We can feel that mankind have been groping after improvement; that they have done what was in them as they saw and knew; that they sought the true and good, as they understood them, and through the only means within their reach. We feel that our duty consists in carrying out the original intention, not in thwarting it, in strengthening the creative principle, not in eradicating it.

That the soul of goodness is in every case hidden might be expected. Certainly it is; all roots are hidden; the root of evil more deeply than any. In some cases it is so well concealed as to be thus far undiscoverable. But faith assures us that it will be discovered in due time. Though of the soul of things little is known, enough is known to create a buoyant confidence in the sweetening, saving powers of society; a confidence that breaks out in the familiar expressions, "It is all for the best ;" "It will all come out right in the end;" "Ever the right comes uppermost." That confidence has its root in a faith which rests serenely on the constitution of human nature, and assumes a principle of perpetual renovation working at the core of things; a faith that stills the troubled sea of existence and causes doubt, fear, sorrow and the agony of disbelief to "vanish like evanescent waves in the deeps of eternity and the immensity of God."

XII.

THE SOUL OF TRUTH IN ERROR.

אז

N the New Testament the spirit of evil and the spirit of falsehood are one. Satan is the father of lies. Jesus says to the unbelieving Jews: “Ye are of your father the devil; he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar, and the father of it." Paul speaks of the "working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deceit." "Who is a liar," asks John, "but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He that denieth the Father and the Son is Antichrist.”

"Many de

ceivers are come into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist." And again in Revelations: "And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations

no more." These early believers, in the simplicity of their faith, cannot persuade themselves that one who differs from them in opinion can be sincere. They who are not disciples are knaves. They who teach other doctrines are impostors. Heresy and falsehood are synonymous terms. As their own belief became clear and firm, a feeling of infallibility accompanied it. The disciples wanted to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans who rejected the Master. They were of another party, therefore they were of the devil. This sense of certainty, this utter confidence of spiritual assurance, may indicate remarkable exaltation of mind, but it is accompanied with a remarkable disagreeableness of temper. The habit of looking on one's opponents as liars is conducive neither to goodness nor to truth. Till dogma becomes pretty well formed, it is never done; but after it has become pretty well formed, it is always done. The first Christians regarded all faiths save their own, especially what they called Gentile faiths, what we know to have been the faiths of the keenest minds of their age, as inspirations of the devil. A legend of St. John relates that, on one occasion, seeing Cerinthus, a noted heretic, enter a public bath, he warned the inmates to flee for their lives, for the building would surely fall on the false pretender. Thirty years ago, Mahomet was always called the "Impostor." He still is called so by zealous Chris

tian writers. In the generations immediately subsequent to his career, the Arabian prophet was held in horror by the Church as the "Adversary," the father of lies himself. He was cursed as a false god, to whom human sacrifices were offered. Our ugly words, "buffoonery" and "mummery are supposed to derive from the nicknames given to him. Three hundred years elapsed before he was honored with so harmless a name as false prophet, impostor, heresiarch. It was magnanimous in Dante to assign him an honorable place in hell among the great sowers of discord. Orcagna, a celebrated painter who lived nearly a century later, introduced him into his picture of Hell on the wall of the Pisan Campo Santo, along with Averroes and the antichrist, the three roasting in flames, as despisers of all religion. In the middle ages, Mahomet was regarded as a sorcerer, a debauched wretch, a thief, a spiteful cardinal who invented a new religion in order to avenge himself on his colleagues who would not make him pope. There was no limit to the abuse that was heaped on the prophet's name; and all because he was not a Christian. He was no believer, therefore he was a liar.

The Romish missionaries in India finding there a religion in many respects resembling their own, were confident that the devil was trying to baffle them by a counterfeit of the true faith. Here were fine spiritualities, noble moralities, lofty

worships which owned no indebtedness to their church. Of course they were delusions of Satan. Had the Buddhist worshippers called themselves Christians, their beliefs would have been welcomed as inspirations from above; as they did not call themselves so they were denounced as instigations from below. Their beauty was their bane.

It is the fashion to speak of the religions of the East as tissues of error and superstition, their good points being concealed, their bad points being magnified; their truth being qualified, their error being exaggerated. The zealous Protestant polemic still denounces the Church of Rome as a mass of imposition. Its priests are hypocrites, its theologians are dishonest attorneys, its teachers are abettors of fraud, its devotees are either dupes or knaves. The furious "liberal" cannot allow sincerity to the preachers of trinity, deity of Christ, vicarious atonement, depravity, eternal perdition. Honest men, they think, cannot believe such nonsense. They must be either deceived or deceivers. And the judgment is handed down from sect to sect. Error is antichrist; and everything is error which we do not assent to. Infallibility is the claim of each petty sectary, and infallibility will put hundreds under the ban. Strange, that people should be content with uncertainty where uncertainty is both needless and dangerous, and should demand certainty where certainty is neither possible nor wise. But