882

B 193 jov 1370°

V.3

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

This Volume is the third and concluding one of the series projected by the author and prepared in part for publication some years before his decease. Like those already issued, it is composed of certain Discourses written and delivered in the usual order of Sunday service, while he was Minister of an independent Religious Society in Hopedale, Mass., his place of residence for nearly fifty years. In its completed form the work may be regarded as embodying his mature and undoubted convictions touching the great questions of truth and duty which engaged his attention and taxed his energies during the greater portion of his long and active life; as his last contribution to the religious literature of the world; his legacy to inquiring and progressive minds in generations that were to come when he should have passed beyond the scenes of earth and time. It is the fruit of a definite and disinterested purpose on the part of the writer to serve his Maker and his fellow-men in some substantial, enduring way — a purpose which dominated his whole being and which gave meaning, dignity, and worth to his character and career.

The three volumes which make up the series, all bearing the common title of "PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS," follow each other in the natural and logical order of succession. The first, under the sub-title of "THEOLOGICAL DOCTRINES," treating of the Divine Order of the world and universe and the Moral Government under which all rational and responsible beings therein exist, constitutes the foundation upon which the theory and practice set forth in the subsequent ones rest. The second, devoted to that

department of the common subject denominated “PERSONAL Righteousness," is designed to portray and illustrate the quality of character and order of life in the individual which are generated and required by the ethical principles and spiritual forces the first essays to disclose, elucidate, and commend. The third, pursuing the same line of thought and carrying the same method of proceedure out to larger issues and to more comprehensive results, endeavors to delineate, under the head of "ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY,” the true nature, purpose, and work of the Christian Church, as indicated in the life, teachings, and example of its Founder; its purpose and work being, not simply to formulate, maintain, and promulgate a given system of faith or scheme of doctrine through the agency of carefully devised and appropriate institutions, ordinances, and ceremonial observances, but to make that faith or doctrine conduce to the renovation of personal character, to the extension of the realm of human brotherhood, to the right ordering of the conduct of men in all their relations to each other, to the reconstruction of society and the modeling it after the Christian ideal, and to the building up, in righteousness, love, peace, and joy, of a heavenly kingdom on the earth.

The special object or design of these volumes cannot be easily misunderstood. It is to restore the long-lost simplicity and purity of the religion of Jesus Christ to the thoughts and hearts of men; to lead the lovers of truth and good back from the errors with which ignorance, superstition and barbarism had obscured the person, the teachings, and the mission of Jesus to the real man of Nazareth, as he was when he went about Galilee and Judea doing good; healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, preaching the Gospel of the kingdom, and turning men from darkness to light, from sin to holiness, and from the power of Satan unto God. It is to portray him, not as he has been represented for fifteen hundred years by theologians, dogmatists, and creed-makers, but as he actually appeared to those who gathered about him when he was upon the earth, listening to his words, and catching the contagion of his pure and disinterested life; to affirm and empha

size the practicability of his principles and spirit in all human concerns, under all possible circumstances; and to urge the duty and importance of applying those principles and that spirit to the thought, feeling, and conduct of men in all the affairs and relations of life. In this regard the author was but anticipating if not helping to put in motion the obvious trend of the religious world in these later days, of all Christian denominations whatsoever name they hear the trend away from the medieval or traditionary conception of Christianity to that which, according to the most trustworthy records, obtained among the primitive disciples and evangelists; away from a scholastic, speculative faith to a practical, living one; one that shall renew, uplift, and perfect the hearts and lives of individual men, establish a divine order of human society upon the earth, and redeem the whole world of human kind.

That this trend actually exists and has become a marked feature of modern church life is most manifest and unquestionable; one of the encouraging signs of the times. It has already wrought a notable change for the better in a multitude of particulars since the Discourses which appear in this work were written. Old-time creeds have been greatly modified or are superseded by more modern and better ones. Belief, as a test of Christian discipleship or basis of fellowship, is giving way to character and Christlikeness. The suspicions and animosities that formerly embittered the relations of different denominations are dying out, and mutual respect, confidence, and co-operation are taking their place. The humanities are rising to prominence in the church at large; to lift the burdens and remove the disabilities that multiply the sorrows of mankind are getting to be therein a prominent interest and concern. The evils of existing industrial and social systems are recognized as never before, and as never before are professing Christians of all faiths casting about for ways and means of remedying them. Earnest and devout men and women on all hands are discussing social problems and seeking methods of bettering the relations of different classes of people to each other, and of

developing a more humane, fraternal, and Christian type of civilization. Many theological schools and other seminaries of learning are establishing Lectureships or Chairs of Sociology, under the growing conviction that there are radical defects and immoralities existing in the present order of human life, in its larger and more comprehensive aspects; and the more high-minded and Christlike of publicists and statesmen are counseling, as in no other period of history, mutual amity between the nations, arbitration instead of an appeal to the sword for the settlement of disagreements and grievances, peace and not war as the standing policy of states and empires throughout the world. The Divine Fatherhood and Human Brotherhood are coming to be regarded not as merely sentimental abstractions, glittering generalities, iridescent dreams, but as practical truths, inspiring and transforming ideals, the watchwords wherewith to stir the hearts and arouse the zeal of men to the sublime task of building up here and now the kingdom of God. True followers of Christ, all lovers of their kind, may well rejoice that these things are so, and give thanks therefor to the Author of all good; and since these things are so, it is more than probable that, had the Discouses contained in the present and two preceding volumes been written by the same hand twenty-five years later than they were, many of the strictures in them upon the nominal church and much of the censure applied to it for its infidelity to the principles and spirit of the primitive Gospel, would have been considerably modified, if not omitted altogether.

And yet it is by no means certain that those strictures and the accompanying censure are not even now in order, and to a considerable extent needful as a testimony to "the truth as it is in Jesus," and to the life, individual and social, which his religion delineates and requires. For notwithstanding all that has been done in the direction indicated notwithstand

ing the progress that has been made along the lines which this volume pursues, the church is still in important respects far from the ideal herein set forth, far from that state of moral and spiritual pre-eminence which qualifies it to be a