preserve even the "name that they live," pastors leaving them for the fleshpots of orthodoxy, vainly crying to heaven or beyond the sea for shepherds. The tide of the spirit of the age beating so full on other shores has ebbed away, leaving them high and dry. Old fashioned Unitarianism, says Dr. Bellows, has become a Boston notion; and the faith of Christendom is in a state of suspense.

Has the spirit which convinces the world, which conquers human hearts, filling them with a courage and hope which have no suspense," left the world? Surely, it must take some conviction to build up on half a continent free schools and colleges grand as the old cathedrals. Surely, it must be a somewhat active spirit which in a few years has multiplied a few anti-slavery men, holding hated conferences in garrets, into two millions of open lovers of and voters for freedom. And must it not have been something else than a suspense of faith which, in less than fifteen years, has raised up twenty-seven ministers, and more than as many thousands of the laity, to stand boldly where in 1845 Theodore Parker and his congregation stood alone in the United States? It is a law that nothing is ever superseded but by something better; and our eyes have no tears for the old blossoms which are falling, because they are fixed on the swelling fruits for which they make way.

The soul which has had its new advent, and now has its star climbing the ecliptic, must needs organize itself into the members and features which worldly conditions have ever made necessary for a new-born spirit. It has built its Pulpit; it has ruled in the Lyceum; it has impressed as servants those who would not be its sons; it has married Science; it now calls for the Press.

THE DIAL stands before you, reader, a legitimation of the Spirit of the Age, which ASPIRES TO BE FREE free in thought, doubt, utterance, love and knowledge. It is, in our minds, symbolized not so much by the sun-clock in the yard, as by the floral dial of Linnæus, which recorded the advancing day by the opening of some flowers and the closing of others: it would report the Day of God as recorded in the unfolding of higher life and thought, and the closing up of old superstitions and evils; it would be a Dial measuring time by growth.

THE CHRISTIANITY OF CHRIST.

[First Article. ]

CHRISTIANITY NOT OF CHRIST.

THE Christianity of Christ: it should be needless to use this phrase; for what is Christianity but the Christianity of Christ? Platonism is the doctrine of Plato; Epicurism is the doctrine of Epicurus; Calvinism is the doctrine of Calvin; Socinianism is the doctrine of Socinus; Buddhism is the religion of Buddha; Mohammedanism is the religion of Mohammed. By the same rule of speech, Christianity is the religion of Christ: not any faith in him, or concerning him, but the faith that was his own, the faith which he held and taught. But the word Christianity, as commonly employed, bears no such meaning as this. In the widest sense, it denotes the prevailing opinions of all Christendom respecting Jesus; in a narrower sense, it defines the doctrines of particular sects in Christendom. It includes every form of religion that has Christ for its centre, whether as Godhead, Logos, Prophet, Teacher, or Exemplar. It is applied to a system of speculative theology, within which there is room for every possible definition, and every imaginable notion. There is no infallible judgment in philosophy; there are no final dogmas in metaphysics; every strong argument is valid, and none is conclusive; every honest opinion is legitimate, and none is authoritative. There is no end, therefore, to the views that may be taken of Christianity. Anybody may prove himself a Christian in the vulgar sense who thinks the name worth claiming, and he forfeits all title to ingenuity who can not frame a pretext for assuming it, whether he be Hegelian or Swedenborgian, a disciple of Neander or of Feurbach. In speculation, the name Christian comprehends all, from the Roman Catholic to the dissenter from all dissenters. In practice, it comprehends the two extremes of saintliness and decency. To give it significance, it must be defined anew; we must say that Christianity is not any system of belief whatever respecting Christ, but is the faith which Christ himself as a person held and communicated; and in order to learn what Christianity is, we must a lopt the new method of historical criticism, instead of the old one of dogmatic theology.

There never was a time when Christianity was free from controversy. Disputes about its very essence arose among the Apostles themselves, and became bitter quarrel within a generation after the death of Jesus. The second and third centuries are marked deeply with the traces of theological strife within the church. In the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity was all but torn in pieces by controversial rage. The party that was most respectable in number was least respectable in temper; and if for any brief period one of the contending sects might, from its momentary position, claim for itself the sole possession of orthodox Christianity, it instantly invalidated its own claim by a display of intolerant fury that would have disgraced a Jew. The Roman church, painfully and late, established an apparent uniformity of belief in western Europe; but its definition of Christianity was from the first powerfully disputed, and at no period deserved to be called the one faith, catholic and universal. Centuries of controversy preceded it; centuries of controversy disturbed its peace. It was, at best, but one interpretation of Christianity among many, and its prominence as an interpretation was due mainly to the political eminence of its seat, very little to its philosophical and religious character-not at all to its conformity with the teachings of Christ.

The Protestant movement made a ghastly rent in the seamless coat of infallible orthodoxy. Two Christianities glared at each other in western Europe-disputed in words, fought with bloody weapons of war; and while this great battle was waging, other smaller Christianities crept from their hiding places, and took sides. Then Protestantism split into fragments, and each fragment was a new Christianity, carefully distinguishing itself from all the rest. The printing and distributing of the translated Bible caused an immense increase in the number of sects. Old men learned the alphabet for the sake of spelling out the sacred text; young people, just past the age of childhood, crowded the churches to hear it read. It was a common thing for several to contribute for the purchase of a single copy of the precious volume, and to retire with it to an upper chamber, or to a forest solitude, there to study its word. In those days of costly books, every German Bible, and especially every English Bible, was the seed of a new doctrine, and it was not long ere Christianity became an unmeaning name. Definitions of Christianity are num

bered now by hundreds we have Trinitarians, Socinians, Arians, and Humanitarians; Lutherans and Calvinists of several shades; Romanists; Episcopalians, high and low; Presbyterians of all sorts; Congregationalists of many colors; Moravians, Mennonites, Campbellites; Quakers, orthodox and heterodox; Methodists under different names; Baptists diverse in kind; Shakers, Universalists, Unitarians, Swedenborgians; two or three schools of so-called Orthodox; Dorrelites, Millerites, Mormonites, and multitudes more. Christianity, as commonly understood, is not one thing, but many things. There are numerous Christianities; there are several hostile and irreconcilable Christianities. How are we to find the true one? We can not find it unless we have a new definition of the term Christianity, and seek for it as the faith, not of Christendom, but of Christ.

But none of these various, conflicting Christianities can claim to be called the Christianity of Christ. The oldest of them can not advance that claim; nor can the most eminent. Neither Roman Catholic Christianity nor Protestant Christianity can assert that pretension with any plausibility. If we go down to the primitive dogmas which lie at the basis of every largely-professed system of Christian belief, to those central and root doctrines that are held in common by all the leading sects-which Protestantism, making in them mischievous alterations, borrowed from the elder church, and which that elder church traces back to apostolical traditions-these radical and "essential" doctrines, so-called, have but a nominal connection with Christ: they bear his name, and that is all.

The religion of Jesus is the peculiar form which the religious sentiment took in the soul of Jesus; it is identified, therefore, with his person. But Christianity as commonly professed has its origin in forms of the religious sentiment that were antecedent to the birth of Christ, and as respects its elemental dogma might have grown up independently of him. Its connection with him is accidental, rather than substantial. Christianity is the legitimate offspring of intercourse between the Eastern and the Western thought, both passing through the medium of Judaism. During the long term of their Babylonish captivity, the Jews, as their apocryphal books declare, had become familiar with the religion of Persia, and had softened with the philosophy of oriental mysticism the hard features of their ancient Hebrew faith.

The space between man and God is filled up with angels and demi-gods; a belief in incarnation prevails; the two principles, Ormuzd and Ahriman, modestly take their place in Jewish theosophy; speculations upon the nature of God are common, and assume the Eastern cast of thought; and in several minor points, as we shall see presently, the character of Judaism was essentially modified. On the other side, through the Alexandrian Philo, the philosophic Jew, the Hebrew religion was brought in contact with the Western thought, and soon became blended inextricably with it. Thus, before Christ appeared, the three currents of speculation-the Persian, the Hebrew, and the Greek-had mingled in one stream, which was directing its course westward. This was the fountain-head of the Christian church. As it passed through Judea, it chanced that the name of Christ was bestowed upon it, giving it a human interest, and linking it with historical associations. The pure ideas of the East and West received from Christ a local and historical reality; the heavenly Logos of Philo wanted nothing but human personality, and this personality was furnished by Christ. It was due rather to accident, therefore, than to necessity, that the religious belief of the Western world was called Christian that belief itself, as a system of theology, existed in embryo before Jesus was born, and might have come to its maturity without any forming agency of his.

It is no impossible or extremely difficult task, though it is a tedious and laborious one, to prove that Christianity is not of Christ. Its central doctrines are borrowed directly from the world's philosophy, which we loosely and reproachfully name Paganism. Take its doctrine of a threefold personality in the being of God-the doctrine of Trinity; this is demonstrably of Pagan extraction. The Roman Catholic church confesses that it is not taught in Scripture, and receives it on the authority of tradition purely. The dogma of Trinity is the offspring of Gentile philosophy; not that in its perfect statement it can be found in Gentile philosophy, either Platonic or Persian, but the seed and root of it is there. It is of Gentile parentage, and was nursed by Gentile influences. The Krept, Phtha and Reith, of Egypt; the Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, of India,-give us a dim foreshadowing of the Christian doctrine. When Plato teaches that God is distinct from the created world, and yet is one with it, because it is the reflection of his perfect mind; when he