ers, written in mystic lines upon the lily's leaf, symbol in the best affections of every parent's heart, effluent f all those beneficent arrangements which make the w a glorious home for humanity, and hinted sweetly in poetic confusion of those lights in the Syrian sky, to wh perhaps from that upper room in Jerusalem, he poin the gaze of his disciples, uttering for them their strugg meaning, when he said, on the night of the last supp "In my Father's house are many mansions; if it w not so I would have told you?" Given to us in way, we are made, not only to receive the truths of divine goodness and parentage, but also to feel that it the open secret of all nature, waiting only for the disce ing soul to catch its import; we are taught to look w welcome upon every new illustration which any scien or any saint, bears in from nature of the heavenly God ness, as proving that the rays of Christian light ha struck with new splendor upon the world, and to feel th we are away from nature if it is not the habit of o thought; and we realize that the religion which began the spontaneous instructive assurance, pervading the so which launched it, of the Infinite paternity, commits us the fearless and full interpretation of that truth by all t wisdom, and according to all the needs, of the world.

"Baptizing them into the name of the Father." W delight to read in this the great commission of the religio of Jesus to the world to carry out that truth into all th results which it justifies, to saturate feeling with it, an to hold it as the key-note of faith, with which every othe truth must be toned in harmony. The fragmentary in structions of Jesus, drawn out by the shifting accidents his short career, implied this faith; and so when th Gospel is to pass out from his personal superintendence and to be given by the hurrying Apostles to the genera mind of the world, the message seems to be, "Take thi great doctrine, O ye peoples, as the chief legacy of heaver to earth; take it as the inspiration of your thought and the life of your philosophy; take it as a rich principle only feebly developed as yet, and draw it out in all its consequences, which will become parts of the Christian religion, if they are fairly drawn; cling to it as the great sun-truth, around which, as Christian thinkers, all your

other ideas must be disposed, and from which they must draw their light; take it, and interpret it, and make this universe a home by its radiance, and so flood your life with holy joy!"

Regarded in this light the baptismal formula recognises the most important principle, that the first records of our religion are filled with the germs of truth which Christ, the great Sower, has scattered over the soil of the church, to be developed by the light and climates of after centuries. It puts us in the right attitude towards the first documents of Christianity, which give us the name and force into which our spirits must be baptized, and which they are then to develope for themselves, rather than the detailed and systematic truth from which we are to gather our instruction by texual compilation. And so it should seem that we may judge of the fulness of our baptism into Christianity, by the extent to which the thought of the church, or the world, is permeated with the sense of the paternity of God. For only to the degree that our philosophy is colored with it, our theories of the universe illumined by it, our conceptions of destiny brought within its sweep, has the great commission to the Apostles been fulfilled with us. All our defects of faith in that principle, all our hesitances to apply it as the touchstone of truth in controversies, all our beliefs and moods of feeling inconsistent with it, and that will not come by natural evolution out of it, are signs of our imperfect baptism into the name of the Father.

It is quite remarkable, therefore, that the Christians who hold that truth with the greatest fervor, and unfold it with the largest freedom and with the most ample richness of results, are treated as the most conspicuous heretics of the church. Not that there is any party which as yet has worthily unfolded the latent burden of that word; but it is an astonishing fact that, just so far as that work has been attempted, the church has recoiled with anathemas and fear. For the fundamental controversy in the Christian church now, is about the question, whether or not Christianity is a sacrificial scheme, or only a special revelation; and the decision turns upon the radical conception formed of God. Is the throne, or the home, the chief symbol of His rule? Do the laws of the court, or of the family,

express the methods of His jurisdiction? The pro arguments against the liberal Christian interpretati the relations of human souls to the Infinite, their tance to favor on terms of penitence and a new d tion, are drawn from the grating mechanism of law, and the impropriety of the adoption of such a pline by a human ruler or judge. Men do not se the typical picture of divine government is that of fect home; and that only such ideas of sacrifice and of reconciliation as are consistent with a perfect pa government of his children are admissible in the Ch faith. They do not see, and yet they ought to, that principle of any theology that shrinks from that stone is contraband in Christendom, however it ma hold itself by subtle analogies from the imperfect me in civil society of maintaining the sanctity of law. dare not believe, as yet, that their Maker is so good; dare not accept the principle that whatever flowed the loftiest conception which the wisest and most spi mind can reach of the infinite love of God, is part o Christian religion,-just as much part of it as if Jesu spoken it, since we are baptized into that name committed to all that streams out of it in the advan human feeling and thought.

But now we may open volume after volume of the treatises on divinity, by the most able and pious w of the church, and we shall find chapters on the o science, omnipotence and omnipresence of God, on holiness, His justice, and His hatred of sin, on the tri and atonement, and the conditions of salvation,scarcely ever a page, and never a chapter, on the D Fatherhood, the personality of Infinite Love. The tion of man as a criminal in the universe before the b eternity, and the intricate conditions of a verdict of ac tal, exercise the wit and fervor of the thinkers of Chris dom; but no book which can be used in the divinity sch no treatise of theology from any reputable quarter, to forth the universe as a home for man, his life as a trai in the Father's house, his sin as the blight and infam ingratitude, and his destiny, if he will only keep in the of the infinite purpose, an illimitable hope,

What might not human life be now, what might

the glory of the church be, if all its energies had been devoted to interpret and impress that central fact of the New Testament, if it had said with eloquent joy to human nature," here is your hope, here your life, here the inspiration of your mind, the probe of your conscience, the resource of your heart in trouble, and your warrant of everlasting trust,-this universe was born out of love and is ruled by conscious all-wise mercy; there is no earthly being so good as God, there is no human parent beneath whose disposition, if lifted to the throne of this earth, you would think it a supreme privilege to live, that is so good as God; every ray of human virtue and tenderness points upward and loses itself in the fountain of that light that irradiates eternity!"

How glorious the landscape of the church would be, how rich its volumes of theology-living bodies of divinity, not anatomies of its skeletons-if the various sects had been the interpreters of that vast globe of truth; no other Calvinists but the delineators of love as justice, and the strong grasp of the celestial beneficence; no other Methodists but such as are prophets of its wealth in the gift of Jesus and the treasury of grace; no Swedenborgians except the seers of the mystery by which every star, and rock, and stream, and hill is a hieroglyph of its wisdom; no Unitarians but exponents of it especially in the spiritual laws that enfold our actions and weave our days into moral unity; the peculiar Universalists only poets of the Apocalypse when death and hell shall be cast into the lake of fire, and the tears be wiped from every eye, and the New Jerusalem descend out of the sky; and the Catholics dramatists of it in ceremonial art, liturgy and suggestive hierarchies charged in every office with posi tive and practical good will. If we were wholly Christian sects, such would be our mission,-to be the various instruments through which every note of the symphony of creative and redeeming love is to be worked out from the simple theme which gladdened the air of Palestine from the life and lips of Christ. Then, the heart of the world would have been reached and melted long ago by the voices of the church. Its literature would have been sublimer than the stars, richer than sunset, sweeter than flowers, more delightful than the bursting of trees in

e

spring-time bloom. It would have been the sugge ness of all this, and of the mellow sentences of lifted up into essay, treatise, sermon, and song. movement of Christ in history would have been cont through souls that would have flung their highest tho and sentiments of the infinite Fatherhood into socie a luminous ever-extending trail of the Christian revela and so we should have had a Christian literature, n now unreadable, cold, logical, analytic and dreary living, sympathetic and positive, baptized in the nam the Father.

"And of the Son." In harmony with the spirit o Christian religion we should read this second stateme the baptismal formula, not as the declaration of a element in the Godhead, to be associated with the Fa in our thoughts, but as representative of that So which Christ revealed in his person and his truth. refers not to God but to humanity, as represented in Ch The answer to the fact of the divine paternity is the posture, consciousness, and service of humanity. only as we are sons that we know inwardly the realit the divine paternity. Christ is the type of sonship, exponent of the principles, feelings and faith by which are superior to nature, by which we have the assured of heavenly kindred, and which, if triumphant, would b the race together in a fraternity of children.

The church has always felt that the life of Christ wa representative life, emblematic of the privileges and g that belong in essence to all created natures. The f has been constant in Christian history that he is the sec Adam, in whom we have federal unity. We should cl to this faith with firmness and with fervor. Howe exalted we feel compelled to rank Jesus in the scale created existences, we should hold to the faith that he typical of the special station and relationships in wh all souls stand, and which all souls hold towards the finite. And just as the church is committed to a thorou development of the doctrine of the Father, as part of Christian religion, so they are commissioned to unfold the glory of Christ's attitude and life in the world, as true scheme of man's existence and his offered privile What intimacy of intercourse between the soul of Jes