O Easter Address. N BEHALF of this noble fraternity you have given me the honor to speak a word to-day. Of all the festivals of the year, none is dearer, none more welcome, none more sacred to the true Christian believer, than "Easter day." We have come together in this Christian temple to celebrate the crowning fact of the Gospel of Christ. I say the crowning fact, because the birth at Bethlehem had been in vain, in vain. had been the agony in Gethsemane, and the cruel death on Calvary, had the grave been able to hold its victim in captivity. You celebrate to-day the Resurrection of Christ the Lord, who brought life and immortality to light, led captivity captive, and is Himself the Resurrection and the Life. Let no one think this strange, for I am persuaded that no one can enter your ranks as a Knight Templar unless he be a pronounced believer in the facts and fundamental principles of the Christian religion. "No one can properly be a member of our Order, which is founded on the Christian religion and the practice of the Christian virtues, who is not a firm believer in the religion of Jesus Christ. No one who does not acknowledge Him as the Savior of mankind, and believe in the atonement offered by Him on Calvary, can be a worthy Knight Templar.' *See proceedings, Grand Encampment 1883, page 73, On your behalf, then, I stand here to-day as a champion of the Christian faith, knowing full well that were this faith in mortal or material danger, your swords would be drawn in its defense. But though now they are sheathed, never again to be drawn, as we trust, in actual conflict, they represent that higher and nobler chivalry whose sword is that "of the Spirit which is the word of God," and are calculated "to remind us that we should be 'strong in the Lord and in the power of His might,' that we should put on the whole armor of God, to be able to wrestle successfully against the principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high places." I am glad indeed, that amid the dwarfing scepticism of the age,-a scepticism impregnating the very air we breathe with its poison, a scepticism which belittles God and dwarfs mankind, I am glad, I repeat, that in such an age, an institution like this dare take and maintain, as the foundation of its benevolent principles, the grand old truths of the Gospel. On this anniversary occasion, where you openly declare your faith, and point with humble pride to the keystone of your moral structure-the Resurrection of the world's Redeemer, and His life-giving power, it will not be amiss, I am sure, to look out upon the present field of inquiry and examine our foundations a little. The Templar's creed-for such he has though he does not name it so-makes emphatic the cardinal facts of Revelation, and he believes that these facts have an end in man, commensurate with their greatness and importance. He holds that "man was made a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor," that he was born to a high and noble destiny, that he has powers of soul, linked to the Divine, and touched with immortality itself. The facts of Revelation are supported by the divinely given intuitions of the soul. For centuries before the Savior's Incarnation, the best of human thought and the brightest of uninspired human intellect, had been knocking at the very gates of eternity for the truths unfolded in the Savior's life, death and resurrection. Take away the revealed truths of God's word, and there yet remains an uneasiness in the human soul, which refuses to be satisfied until these truths are reached out for its embrace. Deprive us if you will of God's revealed truths, and still there is royalty in the human soul, which, enlightened by the Spirit of God, suggests that man stands upon a higher level than the creaturely existence around him, and is destined for a higher end. It points to the dim, undefined mystery of immortality, to a supreme mind to whom we are all accountable and to the necessity of a divine Savior; and yet amid the moral darkness which has hung over the world, there are questions which have agitated mankind from the infancy of the race whence these bodies, and what their purpose? Whence the mind that animates them and what its destiny? Whence cometh man and whither is he going? Is this earth our only sphere of action, or shall we live hereafter? From deep down in the human soul comes a response-mankind is evidently going somewhere. Is he, then, like the lower orders of creation, moving on in a path marked out by fixed and unalterable lawsor is he to some extent shaping his own destiny? Is he in and of nature, governed by her laws and principles alone, or is he a free agent, standing accountable to a Creator who is above and beyond nature? There are those who attempt to measure God by His visible works. They lead us out into Nature's temple and ask us to worship her laws and principles. They point us to the beauty and symmetry of the structure, and tell us that there is an unchangable law pervading the whole. To them, the universe is one grand system of cause and effect. God himself, when they admit that there is a God outside of nature, sits chained upon his throne, while the changeless law of fate governs the universe. Mind is regarded as the product of accumulated and organized experi ences, and, like matter, governed by inevitable. force, each with its order of development and unchangable law of progress. Natural science is idolized, while faith in something beyond naturea fundamental principle in the human mind-is discarded; even those acts in man which seem most free are but the following out of some established order. Yet it is tacitly admitted, even by the strictest adherents of naturalism, that man, unlike the lower orders of creation, is not in his normal condition; for none of us are so charitable, as not at times to impute blame, guilt or crime to ourselves and our fellows, while no one will stoop so low as to assume that man was made to sin, or that the world was made to make him sin. Yet when men whose vigor, originality and power of thought we can but admire, who have justly been placed among the first reasoners of the age,when men like these become the advocates of a system, it may seem befitting for us to approach in silence, with our hands upon our lips. When, however, we see such a profane blending of the material and the spiritual, of the human and the divine,—when we are led to such unavoidable conclusions, as that the vilest wretch and the noblest saint stand on the same moral level;-that we are the same, except in degree, as the spider that stretches its web across the wall, or the fly that crawls upon the window;-that there is no higher law in man than that which governs the trees in the forest and the rocks in the field, we can but turn away indignantly,-for so long as there is a sense of dignity in man, so long as reason holds its sway in the mind, so long as history points to virtue and to vice, so long as there is a conscience in the human breast, so long as there is an inner power which discriminates between right and wrong, so long will there be a protest against such a doctrine, no matter who may be its advocates. How is it that God permits man to sit with Him at the desk of time and hold the pen that writes the history of the race, how is it that human will and divine control so co-operate that the one does not interfere with or disarrange the other, is a question too deep for human reason to penetrate. God gives us the fact, and like every |