I.] Rooted in Moral and Religious Faculties.

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or advance of commerce, or engines of war or education could save a nation weakened by moral rot. In so far as a nation is immoral, just as far is it weak, and unless morally regenerated it will assuredly perish.

But my next point many be disputed by many, and that is this:-There is no public or private morality possible without religion, and then of course no true civilization without a religion. Man has a religious instinct that must be satisfied, which unmet by a something true to match it degenerates into dark superstition and cruel rites, and which untaught may be wrought upon by designing men to enslave the mind and block the wheels of progress. If, however, this faculty yearning for the unseen, supreme, and absolute being, the author of our nature and the universe in which we dwell, is met by a revelation which our reason tells us is worthy of belief, it lifts man, not out of the present world in which we live, but gives him the consciousness of superiority and authority over all that is temporal, and of an heirship to that which is eternal. Man is a worshipping animal, “deifies and adores the first thing he meets rather than cease to adore." This religious faculty is the most fundamental of all our faculties, if developed healthily, ennobles, impels our whole being forward and upward, the soul of all true progress. True religion, meeting the most fundamental faculty of man's nature, is the most expansive and elevating power in the world. Corrupted, it is indeed corruptio optimi pessima, the worst of all debasing evils. To attempt to discard all religion because of its frequent abuse, and the errors believed and the crimes committed in its name, is as illogical as the asceticism of the monk, which curses the world because of the evils wrought in it. The man of well balanced mind is neither monk nor infidel; he is religious and

social; he neither exiles himself from man nor seeks to repudiate

1 Coquerel.

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The Religious Faculty a Reality.

[LECT.

God. And it often happens that as men drift away from a religious life, some low superstition develops within the soul. 'Tis very true that in individual cases, the religious instinct seems to be educated away. But blindness in many an individual does not prove the non-existence of light, and the atheism of a few abnormal individuals is as nothing compared with the overwhelming testimony of all lands, of all ages, proclaiming with the united voice of every language, the hunger cry of the human soul for the infinite, that feeling after God, which must have something in which to trust.

Nor is this religious faculty a mere sentiment which can be cultivated by philosophic speculation, or by almost any kind of thing called a religion. The universal hunger of the human heart after God, this mysterious longing for supernatural sympathy, those hopes and fears for the unknown hereafter, can never be satisfied with milk and water disquisitions on "the true, the beautiful, and the good" in the abstract. The sinstruck conscience with forebodings of wrath, and seeking the pardon of a loving Father, will never be satisfied with learned discourses about the evolution of conduct, the evanescence of evil, and the comparison of relative with absolute ethics. The soul that yearns after personal conscious immortality, and looks upon that hunger as a prophetic instinct of future life, will never be satisfied with any lean theory of transmission of influence; nor will it be much hurt by the small talk of would-be philosophers about this hunger being selfish and low. As well might they tell the common sense of mankind that the desire for food was low and selfish and animal. And what if it is? Whatever you like to call it, it is there, and it must be satisfied at any cost, philosophize as you may, and so with the hunger of the soul.

The world's religious instinct will not be satisfied with mere hints and suggestions and theories; this faculty demands something definite, something authoritative, which will compel

I.]

Faith is not unscientific.

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the heart's belief. But now as soon as faith or belief in authority is spoken of, up rises the wrath of a certain class of people who call themselves scientists but are not truly so, and they cry out "faith is suicidal of science!" "belief is destructive of reason!" Nothing could be more unscientific, more absurd, than such assertions as these. We ask no one to study the sciences by faith, or to allow belief to take the place of thought, although the doctrines of Euclid are as really founded on faith as the doctrines of Christ. There is a place for the microscope, and another for the telescope, and they cannot be interchanged. It would be absurd for the astronomer to ridicule the microscopist, because he cannot see the mountains of the moon with his little instrument that was made for an entirely different purpose; and equally absurd for small thinkers to ridicule faith, because it is not adapted to a sphere for which it was never intended. We are subject to laws, to limits, to authority on every hand, obeying which we have freedom, as fish in their natural element; and outside of which is death, as to the fish thrown upon land. All matter is subject to physical laws, the individual is subject to social law, the citizen is subject to political laws, the mind is subject to mental laws, the soul is subject to spiritual laws, and being a conscious personality seeks a conscious personality, as the source of that law to which it feels itself subject. Religion is the attitude of man to that supernatural authority, and any communications which may come from him. And here microscope, and telescope, and crucible, alembic, scalpel, and test acids and whole laboratories of instruments and experimentalists cannot help one iota-a revelation must come in; nor is it a region of blind acceptance of every thing presented by any class of men. But if any man, or any book, or any system of doctrine, be it Koran, Zendavesta, Pitaka or the Bible, comes asserting a right to proclaim to us eternal verities, the will of the Supreme, or the facts of the

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Religion must be scientifically Tested. [LECT.

future world, before we believe, we must ask for their credentials and submit these credentials to human reason. And now you may call in your microscope and telescope and alembic and all the army of scientific experimentalists, with all their facts and specimens and knowledge, and let them test those credentials for you. Don't be afraid; those credentials are very important; if they are false it will be the height of folly to believe the message they bring; if they are true, it will be still greater folly not to accept the message they offer. Test them well, for they are the scientific links between the natural and the supernatural, which if proved to be true will make your faith as thoroughly scientific as any other exercise of the reasonable mind.

No religion that cannot produce its credentials and triumphantly present them to the test of reason, can stand before the onward march of science, can for a moment be considered as an element in true civilization. No religion which debauches the mind can produce thereafter true morality of heart and life, and in the march of science must go to the wall.

And that brings me now to a statement which I do not ask you to accept on my authority, or on the authority of the Christian church, but which I ask you seriously to consider, and to test scientifically. It is indeed the centre of my thesis, and to prove which this course of lectures is being delivered. And the statement is this: you have seen that there is no true civilization possible without the salt of morality, and that there can be no general morality without religion; I now make the statement that there is no religion but Christianity that can stand the testing of science, the probing of advancing thought, and that can be the torch, the sun-light if you will, of true civilization of modern times. In every religion there are elements of truth, but the large proportion of palpable error brought to light by modern education, vitiates the good, and those religions that are unscientific are doomed to perish.

I.]

Christianity stands the Test.

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But amid all the crash of falling creeds, Christianity stands out as the one exception, the soul of all true progress, whose path is being cleared by the march of intellect, and whose power is being more and more unfolded by the magnificent triumphs of modern mind. And the reason is twofold: (1) its credentials, when tested, are found genuine, and thus it demands and obtains a hearing from the thoughtful mind of man; and (2) it is the only known force by the help of which the higher elements in the perfect unit of a true civilization can be produced, and all its legitimate influences tend in that practical direction.

III.

WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?

And now the question properly arises, what is Christianity? Just here let me ask you to dismiss from your minds for a moment all definitions and representations made by opponents of Christianity, whether found in the scurrilous refuse of Tom Paine or Robert Ingersoll, in the superficial pages of a Draper when he leaves his proper sphere, the partial statements of pseudo-scientists or the ponderous but defective philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and bear with me while I give you the view from within, from the Christian stand-point.

Very briefly then, we hold that Christianity is (1) a revelation of the mind of God to the mind of man through Jesus Christ, and of the means by which man may be in eternal harmony with God; and (2) an unfolding to us of the Creator's ideal of a complete man, in the man Christ Jesus, and of the way by which mankind may reach this ideal; the following of which is the progress of the truest civilization, and the attain