the hands of the older men (elders); the work of instruction was confided to those who were best informed. In order to provide for the relations of the various churches, bishops or supervisors were chosen for groups of churches; and, finally, the bishop of Rome became a bishop of bishops, or pope, and a forced and unnatural unity of forms and beliefs was thus finally secured. The effort to secure and maintain this has been the bane of Christianity, and has brought into existence the multitude of sects by which it is weakened. This terrible lesson of the past has taught wisdom to the Unitarians, who do not strive for this artificial and external unity, but depend on the true unity which springs from a common love of truth and right, and leave each church free to establish its own forms, and each individual free to formulate his own creed. There is no man or woman in the world who is searching for the truth and trying to do right to whom the fellowship of the Unitarian church is not open; and, so far as I know, it is the only church in the world of which this can be said.

What, then, is the true work of this free church? To search after truth with an unprejudiced mind, and to hold each new truth as fearlessly as it surrenders each proved error; to hold up the highest possible ideal of life as the standard to which the individual should strive to attain; to promote the spirit of love and brotherhood among men, and to exemplify that spirit by the lives of its members; to protest against wrong and oppression; to succor the weak, the poor, and the friendless; to help the sinner to free himself from his sin; in short, to labor earnestly and unselfishly to bring about the reign of peace and good will among men, when each shall, in life as well as in word, worship the Father in spirit and in truth.

To accomplish this, it is necessary that those who believe in this free church principle should unite and work together; for in willing union there is strength, just as there is weakness in an unwilling union. The church member should go to church, not only for his own good, but to encourage others who may need its help more than he; should go out of his way to be kind to those with whom he comes in contact; and should assist others to free themselves from error

and superstition, and to come out into the sunshine of truth. In doing this, he will himself grow Godward, and, unless he does this, he will cease to grow; for co-operation is the divine law of progress for the individual as well as for the race.

THE ELDER DAYS.

When I remember them, those years of mine
That were so full of action and of cheer,
I can but drop for them a silent tear,
Though I would not recall them or repine.
I drank in full life's beaker of rich wine,
Nor would complain that life is now austere,
The lark no longer sings, the sky has grown

severe.

Youth is for love and joy, when stars sing as they shine.

Yet life is rich in purpose, and I fain

Would yield to loving service what remains.
To right some wrongs, cheer some deep loneli-
ness,

Joy with the joyful, comfort secret pain,
From erring hearts remove some sinful stains,
Better is this than youth's long storm and stress.
HATTIE TYNG GRISWOLD.

THE GUARANTEE PLAN.

Definition.

A guarantee is a promise to be responsible for the payment of $100, or such part thereof as may be called for by the treas urer of the American Unitarian Association, immediately after the close of the present year, which ends April 30, 1897.

The call of the treasurer will be governed, as to amount, by the results of the contributions, as follows: If the contributions by the churches and by individuals (exclusive of bequests) shall reach the sum of $80,000, then no call will be made. If the amount contributed shall be $55,000 (which sum represents the average for ten years past), then the amount called for will be $25,000.

As before stated, only $100 can be called for under one guarantee. Therefore, if the sum required should be $25,000, it would be necessary to have two hundred and fifty guarantees to produce it. The amount called for will be governed, as it will be seen from these two illustrations, by the amount of the contributions made by the churches and individuals (exclusive of bequests).

Number and Amount.

If the number of guarantees should be increased to five hundred, then only fifty dollars would be called for under each guarantee if the contributions should keep up to the average of ten years past. Therefore, it will be seen that, the greater the number of guarantees secured, the smaller will be the amount called for under each guarantee.

The amount of each guarantee has been fixed at the sum of $100, so that the number of those able to engage in this work may be as great as possible.

It is contemplated by this that those who are able to do so will take a number of guarantees. If those who are interested in our work will enter heartily into this plan, send in their own guarantees, and induce their friends to do likewise, we shall make it possible for the work of the Association to be taken up again with more zeal than before, and with a much better promise of usefulness and success than has been possible for two years past.

Five hundred guarantees ought to be secured easily before the fall estimates are called for. The standard of giving to our missionary work is very low, not nearly so high as it is among our sister denominations. Unitarians give more liberally to every other good cause than to their own church work. Will you not now appropriate your money for a little while to our own work, and enable us to place it on an adequate basis?

Two or More may Subscribe.

We suggest that, where the ability to take a whole guarantee is wanting, two or even more persons join in such guarantees; or in small churches the Sunday-school and other organizations may unite for a guarantee, as a part of their year's work. What more useful education can the young people in our churches obtain than this, which teaches them their obligations to the great world about them, which educates them in the missionary work of their church before they come to the time in life when the responsibility for the welfare of their own churches depends upon them?

Women's Alliances, Young People's Societies,

Unity Clubs, Guilds, Sunday-schools. All organizations connected in any way with the churches are invited to join in this

work. What surer evidence of a desire to promote the cause of religion can be given than to assume one or more of these guarantees, and thus join with those who are engaged in the practical work of spreading Unitarian thought?

It will be remembered that this Association publishes all the books and tracts that are given away by the thousands each year. Your help is needed this year.

Ministers.

Ministers are especially requested to send the treasurer the names of those in their parishes who are willing to help in this matter in any way, and also the names of those who they think would be willing to subscribe to the guarantees.

The New Policy of the Association.

The new policy adopted by the Association at its April meeting this year contains the following clause:

"That at the September meeting of the board the treasurer report the estimated income for the current year, and the Executive Committee recommend a distribution of the estimated income among the following departments of our work: Maintenance, Publication, Foreign Missions, and Home Missions."

This is a wise measure, made necessary by the exhaustion of the general fund. Hereafter expenditures must be kept within the income; and, if we are to do effective work, we must know what our income is to be. Anything less than $80,000 will be very inadequate; and, unless this sum is secured in some such way as is proposed by the guarantee plan, it is difficult to see how it can be done at all.

Receipts for Guarantees.

It is proposed to publish each month in the Register the names of those who subscribe to these guarantees, unless the wish is expressed, when the subscription is sent in, that the name shall be withheld. We hope to record many subscriptions for ten or five guarantees by those who are blessed with the resources that enable them to do so.

Everybody.

Will not all Unitarians join in this effort, and rejoice the hearts of those who are try

ing to spread the truths they love so dearly? Can we not have some practical evidence of this kind that you do care for our work, that will encourage us in pushing it forward to greater success?

GEORGE W. STONE, Treasurer.

THE COSMIC PROCESS AND MORAL PROGRESS.

BY B. F. UNDERWOOD.

The late Prof. Huxley, in his famous Romanes address, startled students of evolution by taking the ground that the cosmic process is in direct opposition to the ethical ⚫ development of mankind, that the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest can never help man toward ethical perfection. Social progress, he said in substance, means a checking of the cosmic process and substituting for it another; namely, an ethical process, the end of which is not the survival of the fittest, but of those who are the best from an ethical point of view. "As I have already urged," he said, "the practice of that which is ethically best, what we call goodness or virtue, involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence."

If there is really antagonism between the evolutionary processes of the cosmos and human progress, it is very strange; for is not man himself a product of an evolutionary process, and is he not a part of the cosmos? Is it reasonable to suppose, since the cosmos is an orderly whole, that one portion of it is in actual conflict with another? As a matter of fact, is not the continued evolution of man, when he has reached a certain point in the stage of development by other methods than those which were necessary in the lower conditions, a part of the cosmic process, just as much as the struggle for life among the lowest creatures in the water, earth, or air? Is it not true that, in proportion as man has come to be an intellectual, reasoning being, the principle of natural selection has been eliminated from his life, and that the most important factors of progress have been co-operation, education, morality, etc.,—all those higher influences

which we associate with civilization? Did not Mr. Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," point out the fact that man's continued advancement would be less and less by natural selection, and that those influences which are the most important in the more highly evolved society would be more operative everywhere?

Man could not have attained to the condi tion which he has reached by virtue of the struggle for physical existence. The condition has been attained in a social medium in which the production and preservation of the ethically most fit have been the result. The complex social life could not have been evolved without co-operation, without family ties, without respect between the sexes, without the recognition of the rights of neighbors and communities, without the restraint of crime and the encour agement of moral culture; and all these are just as much a part of the cosmic process as the destructive strife that prevailed ages ago between man's ancestors. Up to a certain point that fierce animal struggle was important. That point having been reached, it gradually declined, and has since been replaced, to a considerable extent, by pacific methods, in which the struggle has been competition in useful arts, in methods of education,-indeed, in emulation generally. Industrial evolution involves much suffer ing; but it is a wonderful modification of and improvement on the bloody struggles of the past. And a vast amount of thought is directed to lessening this competition, and diverting the force thus expended in the interests of the whole people by methods of co-operation. The savagery and brutality in men, the result of ages of struggle, cannot be eliminated or destroyed by a few hundred or a few thousand years of culture; but the very fact that they have, to so large an extent, been subdued and restrained and brought under the influence of the intellect and conscience, is the strongest proof that, with the continuance of man's evolution, they will be overcome to a still greater extent, and the results of the later evolutionary processes will be more permanent and more regnant in man's life.

Man's moral nature is the efflorescence of evolution. It is the outcome of the strife and suffering which have prevailed on the earth during the million of years that it has

been the abode of sentient beings. That mighty unseen forces have been back of all these processes is evident from the outcome. Man with his moral nature, making use of the natural world, will aim to bring the conditions around him as far as possible in harmony with his ideals, but to say that fundamentally there is opposition between the cosmic process and the evolution of man is to affirm what is inconsistent with that conception of the unity and order of the universe of which Prof. Huxley was an able and eloquent expounder. Savagery and civilization are different aspects and conditions of the life of the human race; but between these different conditions there has been no discontinuity, and no "antagonism" except that involved in growth from lower to higher states. Continuity is the fundamental fact of evolution, and all the lower stages in the process of evolution have been necessary to make possible that "course of conduct which in all respects is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence."

PRESIDENT HYDE ON UNITARIAN

THEOLOGY.

Liberal Orthodoxy has of late given to the world many fresh and strong books. One of the best of them is "Outlines of Social Theology" by Rev. Dr. Hyde, of Bowdoin College. It is profoundly religious, thoroughly modern, and full of stimulating thought. With most of it Unitarians will be in cordial agreement. All the more curious is it to see how the author fails to understand Unitarianism in one of its most characteristic ideas. On pp. 63 ff. he says:— "The Unitarian objection to the doctrine of the divinity of Christ is forcibly stated in the following passage from a sermon by Rev. J. T. Sunderland, on the subject, 'Was Jesus God?' 'A God pinched and compressed into the limit of our finite humanity becomes thereby of necessity a very meagre and small God. Jesus, born as a babe and in a few years dying; during his boyhood growing in knowledge as you and I do; after he was a man sometimes disappointed; trying to accomplish ends, and again and again failing because of opposition, declaring that there were some things

he did not know,-furnishes a picture of a God so meagre, so inadequate, so like the little gods that the heathen believe in, that we instinctively push it aside, and demand for our worship something infinitely higher and larger, lifted wholly out of the category of this finiteness.' At first sight this line of objection seems irrefutable. It seems to reduce the belief in the divinity of Christ to the most absurd product of childish credulity. Apparently, the believers in the divinity of Christ are guilty of imposing on God the most cramping and confining of limitations. In reality, the objector himself is subjecting the conception of God to the most serious and fatal of all limitations. He is denying to God the power of appearing in finite form, of revealing himself in terms of humanity. A God thus incapable of self-revelation would be the most impotent and useless being conceivable. would be no God at all. He would be merely the unknowable abstraction of agnosticism. . . . In denying him the possibility of manifestation in the limitations and finitude of humanity, we have reduced our conception of him to that abstract being which is the same as nothing."

...

He

As Mr. Sunderland is out of the country now, attention may here be called to the fact that Dr. Hyde's criticism applies to something Mr. Sunderland does not say. Indeed, in the very sermon here quoted, Mr. Sunderland tells us that the work of Jesus was "to reveal him [God] more clearly than any other great religious teacher or prophet had ever done." And, as a careful reading of the quotation itself surely shows, his objection is made not to a doctrine that says "Jesus was in his personality and character a revelation of God," but to that doctrine that says, "Jesus was the Infinite God."

Certainly, that is the doctrine to which Unitarianism has been opposed. To us it is absurd to say that the whole of God was in the man Jesus, or that the "light that lighteth every man" was complete in any one man. It seems that our liberal orthodox brethren either cannot or will not distinguish between the divinity of Jesus and the deity of Jesus. Unitarians do deny the doctrine of the deity of Jesus, for we cannot believe that he was God himself. But Unitarianism does not deny the divinity of

Jesus. On the contrary, it affirms the divinity of Jesus and of all men. All human excellence comes from the incarnation of God in the souls of men: this is one of the most characteristic affirmations of our faith. We reject the orthodox doctrine of incarnation because it denies more than it affirms. It makes humanity Godless, in order to make Jesus God, and is thus both irrational and irreligious. In our view, all human goodness is a revelation of God. Either this is true, or there is no revelation of God in human life at all. If the partial goodness of the average man is not, so far as it goes, a real incarnation of God, then the more perfect goodness of Jesus cannot be considered such an incarnation. The Unitarian protest against orthodox Christology is directed against two points: one, the doctrine that the revelation of God in humanity is or was confined to Jesus; the other, the assertion that the revelation made in Jesus was complete and final. We object to the orthodox doctrine so far and only so far as it makes the incarnation in Jesus exclusive and absolute. Unitarianism affirms that the human and the divine as such open into each other. There is no gap, to be bridged only by a special and exclusive revelation. God is always and forever imparting himself to men just as far as they are able and willing to receive him. The essential elements of human nature, reason, conscience, and love, are from God. By just so much as any man has these, by that much is he a partaker of the divine nature. God has entered into him. The revelation of God in Jesus was not, then, the only revelation God has made of himself in humanity. It was simply the most conspicuous and influential example of the universal incarnation of God in man. Nor can it be considered an absolute and perfect incarnation because we do not know enough about the life of Jesus to warrant us in ascribing to him that absolute perfection and finality of which Dr. Hyde and others make so much.

We find no fault in the man; but, when we remember how little we really know of his life, we object to the use of language that implies that we know all about him. And the fact that those who are fondest of asserting the finality and perfection of Jesus continually resort to metaphorical

and figurative interpretations of some of his deeds and sayings, in order to uphold their assertion, shows that the absoluteness belongs not to the historic man of the gospel records, but to the ideal man in the mind of the interpreter. Now, unquestionably this ideal is very largely derived from the character of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels. But the records only suggest it: they do not give us the ideal in its completeness. And, aside from this, it is surely a pure assumption to say 'that any man, however perfect, has exhausted or completely fulfilled the possibilities of human nature. What those possibilities are can be known only when the last act of human history is over. But, unless our faith in immortality is false, that time will never come. This is true of the revelation of God also. There may be in the future a greater than Jesus; and, should there be such, he will be a more perfect revelation of God than even Jesus was. Meanwhile, however, the carpenter's son is for us the best teacher and helper. In him we know

"The fatherhood

And heart of God revealed."

But not in him only: in all true men and noble women we see a revelation of the character of God. For the Unitarian thought regarding incarnation is that all human excellence is an incarnation of God: and, the higher the excellence, the more perfect the incarnation.

But the purpose of this article is not to give an individual statement of Unitarian thought, but rather by means of a few citations from representative Unitarians to show that, in spite of his fine spirit, Dr. Hyde has completely misunderstood and seriously misrepresented Unitarianism. Thus he makes much of the idea that God must be known in terms of nature and humanity or not at all (p. 65). He does this by way of criticism upon Unitarianism. Here, again, his criticism does not apply. Nearly seventy years ago, at the ordination of Dr. Farley, Dr. Channing gave a magnificent exposition of this very principle as the basis of his "one sublime idea" of the divinity of man. In this sermon on "Likeness to God," preached in 1828, he says: "That man has a kindred nature with God, and may bear most important and ennobling re

a