rarely make reformers. They instinctively defend the established; they are themselves established. All ancient religious orders had their esoteric or private doctrines, for none but the initiated. Not one of them ever had a view of humanity that could be the soul of the parable of My Neighbor. Jesus spoke all things openly, nothing in secret. Every man who could take, might take, the best truth to himself. If he only had ears he might hear. Try to appreciate the generosity of this plan. You and I live in the age when books are as common as plums and wild apples. You can not shut them up. They grow everywhere. It never occurs to you that they could be kept from the masses. Newspapers fly in the air. The Index Expurgatorius is the one most comical thing left in this age. But we forget that it was not always so. The time was, then, that a book was more rare than a telescope now. To let the masses know the wise things was absurd. They were for the sacred few. They were to divine with. The priests owned them; and so, like the priests, they were sacred. Buddha, five hundred years before Jesus, spake to the poor. Some of the Jew Rabbis, like Hillel, were generous in the same way. Pre-eminently Jesus began by calling about him the common people, the poor, the outcasts. It was that that so startled the age, so outraged the priests, so offended the conceit and the profits of the privileged few. The millionaires in wit lacked nothing for gold. The corner-stone of Jesus' gospel was, 'I come to heal the sick and to lift the lowly." It was the religion of humanity. A revolution that to-day should distribute all material wealth would be no more a surprise.

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From the standpoint of evolution Jesus does not appear as the incarnation of God, but far more than that, as the incarnation of one hundred thousand years of man. Yes, more, as the incarnation of all life, from its dawn on the earth; of all that was past, knocking at the golden gate of a higher humanity; of that One, who, being phe

nomenal in all that had lived, was in Jesus phenomenal as love. Is it any wonder that this flower of evolution should have begun by preaching Turn your minds! for God's kingdom is at hand? The kingdom of mind was asserting rule. Turn your minds; no longer your bodies in religious prostrations. The age for crooking knees and for killing sheep before the gods was passing. The age of thought, of knowledge, as religious consecration, was coming. The progress of one hundred centuries was at last put into type; the type was printed off at Nazareth. The Word that was printed, the Logos of God, was Jesus; the Word of the past to the future; the Word of Life, of Infinite life, as it at last came to mind and voice.

The history of the world began in chaos, azoic, lifeless. That vast night of time was Christless. Then the forces of Nature changed their line of work; life began to quicken in all the earth, but it was Christless. The vegetable era unfolded its marvels, lifting the elements up to a rhythm of beauty and complex unity; and the animal moved forward till atop its vertebræ was mounted a mighty brain, and thought had a throne; but it was Christless. All things waited for redemption. Man sprang out of the complexity of forms, and fought, like all the rest, a battle for existence. But his brain began to point more to the future. It hung over his senses and dominated. He became a forwardlooker. His prophetic tendency increased. His deeds corresponded. He threw down his club. He took up a pen. He looked over the world, and learned the word Neighbor. He looked upward, and he learned the word Father. God was incarnate in humanity. The brute began to die; the Christ was born. But the life of Jesus finished nothing; it only inaugurated the age of peace. The work is yet to be done. Wars must cease. Human fellowship must become a practical thought. Poverty must be brought to its minimum. "Peace on earth" must be fulfilled.

It is impossible that those who are not students of evo

lution, those who suppose men are failures and not a success, and that they were created but a few years ago, should comprehend the character and place of Jesus in history. He is too good for their narrow views of human nature; and must, therefore, be something out of natural sort. There is no satisfying a false view of man but by filling up the picture with gods, with judgments, with heavens and hells. So doing, Jesus ceases to be a child of humanity, a product of evolution, a necessity of nature. Lord Bacon says, "The kingdom of Nature is like the kingdom of Heaven in this, that you can enter it only by becoming as a little child." Only by a childlike spirit, coming with fresh love for facts, can you see that Jesus is the prophecy of the old era of brute force, facing henceforth toward love and truth. A deep, full sympathy with Jesus I hold to be an invaluable help to good desire. A man who fails to get the warmth of that great soul must lose the best stimulus to virtue and honor. You will lose rather than gain if you approach him as the mere makeshift of a creative failure; a patch on the torn plan of a god. Behold him rather as the Christ of human progress; the seal of a glorious past; the pledge of a future whose grandeur is still unfolding; but which, as it more speedily evolves its hopes, repeats with tenderness the name of its greatest expounder, Darwin; and with reverential love that of its supremest prophet, Jesus.

LECTURE IV.

IS THE GOLDEN RULE WORKABLE?

WHERE are we at the present day, and what is the present dynamic power of evolution? This, after all, is the most important question bearing on evolution as a working hypothesis. Is the golden rule yet a workable rule of average human life? Taking the standpoint of creationism, we are bound to answer in the affirmative, because a Divine Being promulgated the rule as a social law. Yet we find it difficult to see how, if man is a fallen being, and naturally alien to all good, he can be capable of comprehending or living up to so exact a standard. As a matter of fact, there is no such success as to warrant us in believing that it can be enforced. A religious paper just at hand says: "If anything can be done to lessen the tendency to crime, it ought to be done. And if the church can do nothing—and it seems to be doing nothing-then let us invoke the aid of some other power." In other words, not even the organized religious powers are having appreciable influence in checking the practice of doing to others precisely what we would not wish them to do to us.

Such is the condition of the human race that the application of the golden rule would, in many lands, lead to conflict and deeper degeneration. For what does the savage wish us to do to him? The Scandinavians of old could conceive no heaven but one, where, fighting all day, their wounds would heal at night. This ideal still survives in

German. universities, where the finest fellow is the one most ready to fight a duel. The Aino's golden rule is to eat till he can swallow no more, and drink himself drunk for the sake of his gods. His ideas of life and industry are not conformable to temperance and justice. It will not do to say we will do to others as they ought to wish us to do, or as a Jesus would require; the rule is a reciprocity on the level of the reciprocal agents.

There is as yet no approximation to equilibrium in moral development. Probably each race has a predominant virtue as it has a predominant vice. Arabs will not get drunk, but they will kill. The Esquimaux will not steal, but they will lie. The Yankee will not lie, but he will manufacture lies. Thrift, as a ruling virtue, has begotten in us a tendency to place the means inferior to the end. We not only inherit the animal propensity to crowd our neighbor to the wall to secure the manger to ourselves, but we do not feel the wrong of feeding him on adulterations that involve on our part fraud, on his disease. The business-man who ever thinks how his sales are going to make or to break his neighbor is rare; unless it be to make sure that he does break him.

I open another religious journal, and read that "The natural man is an enemy of God. The gospel is unpopular with the masses. 99 This is but an echo of all the creeds. Whatever Christianity was with its founder, it is now a religion that despairs of this world. It does not believe the golden rule can ever be applied in the present life. It sees hope only in a future world; and then only by an arbitrary and irrevocable separation of the believers from the unbelievers. So extreme is the pessimism of popular Christianity on this point that it does not, even in the next life, make its paradise depend on the golden rule, but on the absolute despair of it, namely that the saved has no righteousness of his own; he enters heaven by Jesus' righteousness. What does this amount to, but that