The God-principle or Divine Energy immanent in, and connected with, the dual forms of matter and spirit, must ever produce motion, disintegration, evolution and pulsations towards perfection. The old dies that the new may sing of birth, maturity, victory. The past with its lengthened shadows and suns, its defeats and triumphs, was well; so were frightful explosions, during the old Plutonian period. Fossils in silurian rocks were deeply significant as treasured histories of primeval life, bespeaking higher organized existence; and so even the possible of man, as prince of immortal nature, during coming geologic epochs. "All bloom is fruit of death; Creation's soul thrives from decay, And nature feeds on ruin; the big earth Summers in rot, and harvests through the frost, To fructify the world; the mortal now Is pregnant with spring-flowers to come; It is folly, maddened by bigotry, to ask the thinkers of the nineteeth century to hold the flag-staffs of the ancients. Parchments are fixtures. While neither constitutions nor creeds grow, souls do. As well strive to fill our arteries with the crimson blood that coursed the veins of Jewish patriarchs and priests, as to appropriate their thoughts, commandments, or religious experiences, forgetful of the living present, hoping thereby to have our spiritual life vitalized. Shall we "Load our young thought with the iron shirt, By bigots raked from some Judean grave-yard's dirt?" The yesterdays are gone; let them go! The good of the past preserved and reconstructed, Americans have to do with the to-days, and a brightening future stretching in mellowed radiance, deepening in significance, gorgeous with hope, and prophetic of a coming Eden, whose crowning glories shall be harmonial men and women, being laws unto themselves. True, the present strikes its roots back into the past. It is our legacy; and, so far as it speaks truth to the soul, let us do homage at its shrine. All those brave souls, Pythagoras, Plato, Anaxagoras, Confucius, Jesus, John, and others, martyred for principle, greatly advantaged and beautifully enriched the succeeding ages by wise utterances that have streamed in golden splendors down to the present. They were helps, having helped humanity; and yet, they are not our masters-not infallible guides. Wisdom did not die with them, and therefore they must not talk to us authoritatively. Each should be his own authority. God speaks to us just as frequently and fatherly as he did to Jewish seers. Seeing in every valley a Jordan, in every sectarian church a "dead sea," in every aspirational heart an altar of worship, in every woodland eminence a mount of ascension, and in every child an embryo angel, what special need of Hebrew bounty, styled "Revelation?" Those must indeed be "babes and sucklings," who will persist in partaking of manna-the history of bread nearly two thousand years booked-and dried fruit generally, when spiritual vineyards are clustering with grapes, and orchards are bending under a ripened luxuriance, and inspirations, like benedictions, are coming each day from heavenly realms. It is difficult to Jerusalemize Anglo Saxons. If the soullamp would burn brightly, illumining the living now, it must be lit from such inspirational fire-fountains as the wants of this age have kindled. Robes may have been well for Aaron, fox-chasing for Sampson, grazing for Nebuchadnazzar, tentmaking for Paul, locusts for the Judean Baptists, and manna for Israelitish wanderers; but "give us this day our daily bread;" that is, daily truths and principles, all alive with love from the many-mansioned homes of the angels. The waster should be the builder; and the hand that carries the "torch for the burning," should also carry the hammer for building better. Sectarian churches, doubtless, are partial necessities, and for the time being, well; as were baptismal waters for John's disciples; but give us the baptism of the Holy Spirit; or the descending divine afflatus from celestial hosts, submerging and suffusing our natures in a measureless ocean of purity and wisdom. The revengeful, repenting, personal God of Judaism satisfied the demands of the Hebrews. They could grasp no higher conception of the infinite incarnate life-principle of the universe. It still satisfies millions of conscientious churchmen, with more zeal than knowledge, who strive to fill themselves upon the mouldy crumbs that fall from the oily lips of ordained Rip Van Winkles, who "say" their prayers instead of doing them, and "profess" instead of possess the divine principles of the absolute religion. What pining! what leanness and lankness even in liberal churches! what moanings from the pulpits over "bleeding Zion!" what quiet slumberings in the pews! what efforts to make special engagements with God during winter-seasons for "revivals!" Oh what a thin, dry, fleshless, marvelously lifeless, soulless "Skeleton," is Orthodoxy! Numbers bitterly feel it to be thus, yet cling from fear, or motives of policy, to its bleached bones and encrusted symbols. Others, good at heart, yet timid, fearing the loss of position, continue to preserve their ecclesiastical connections, faithfully hugging their theologically "dead mother's breast!" The wisdom of importing all our religion from Asia-Minor is more than questionable, since God is as present with us as with the Asiatics, inspiration being a universal in-breathing from the Infinite. "He sends his teachers unto every age, To every clime, and every race of men." The remembrance of corn that yellowed in Kedron's valleys, the milk and honey that flowed in the lands of Canaan, and the figs and pomgranates that reddened around Olive's mountain, gladdening the disciples of the Nazarene, can not satisfy spiritual hunger; nor can the Jewish crude notions of retrogressive demons and sacrifices offered a personal, local, jealous God, satisfy the growing desires of our inmost nature. Church doctrines are but husks to spiritual consciousness. John Wesley, in an inspired moment, said: "I am sick of opinions; give us good works and the faith of practical benevolence." Scaffoldings are necessary only during the processes of building; and chaff, after the ripening of the grain, is but sport for the winds! Why, old theology appears about as pitiable as would the ancient Hebrew method of treading out corn beneath the hoofs of lazy oxen, to a spirited western farmer in charge of a modern threshing machine. When human bodies die, sectarists have good sense enough to bury them from sight; but when their creeds perish, becoming as offal to investigators, they strive to embalm and preserve them beneath gothic piles and costly cathedrals, to the merriment of metaphysicians and the almost infinite sorrow of angels. As well strive to bind the waters of the ocean with a rope of sand, or hush the winds fresh from Eolus hand, as to bid the currents of free thought cease circulating among inquiring masses that dare to assert their independence. Popes and priests have measurably been shorn of their power. Century-mossed systems have lost their vitalizing force, and creedal ceremonies have become dull and irksome. The great throbbing heart of humanity calls for living inspirations, and greater, grander truths fresh from the Father and the angels that do the divine will. Emerson, in an address to the Senior Theological class at Cambridge, said: "It is my duty to say to you, that the need was never greater of a new revelation than now. From the views I have already expressed, you will infer the sad conviction which I have, I believe with numbers, of the universal decay and now almost death of faith in society. The Soul is not preached. The Church seems to totter to its fall-almost all life is extinct. I think no man can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling, that what hold the public worship once had on man-is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affections of the good, and the fears of the bad. The prayers and even the dogmas of our church are wholly isolated from anything now extant in the life and business of the people." A perfectly vigorous and original life, founded upon the science of the soul, is what seems fit and admirably adapted to the genius of this country, now freed from the blight of oppressive institutions; and this life-status is to be supreme, sure as physical landscapes are reflected in individual character, as climate affects religion. "Light! more light!" relative to immortality, the soul's capacities and to the glories of an infinite future, is the demand of our growing humanity. In answer thereto the church offers us "faith" and clerical leading strings, sanctified by custom, telling us to be good, submissive, quiet "babes in Christ;" and then, just over Jordan, we shall find the jasper city paved with gold, and musical with saints serenading "the Holy One of Israel!" But this faith imparts no free, spontaneous energy. It soon degenerates into a languishing formality, a dry cant, a narrowing nondescript, an inexpressible churchianic hybrid between life and death, as "revival" confessions demonstrate. Faith is elemental in the human mind, but this ecclesiastic faith, devoid of reason, and "without works," is dead! The eccentric Carlyle says, that, "just in the ratio that knowledge increases, faith diminishes; consequently, those that know the most always believe the least." The age demands, not aping shadows, gloved gentry, nor cowled clergymen fashioned to order in "Theological Seminaries," bewailing the sins of Greeks and Jews, and aiming arrows of rebuke at the poor Hittites and Moabites-not sluggish conservatives infected with stagnant, deathly torpor, staying on earth as do oysters in their bed, praying for the Millennium, because they then hope to "sit"-sit under "ambrosial" vines-fearing to brush down cobwebs in their temples lest the roof fall in, and piously opposing the "new moon," out of a profound respect for the old, forgetting the Carlylean maxim, that the "old skin never falls from the serpent till a new one is formed;" but it demands men and women enthusiastic and full-orbed, who see in every soul a possible Christ, in every life a symbol-thought of God, in every |