courage, it is not that my heart was unfeeling, but I consoled myself with the thought that our separation would not be for long." With these words of undying affection and faith I bring my quotations to a close.

1

How beautifully sound these consenting voices from East to West, from century to century, uttering the great Beliefs of the human race. Into what a "large place" they summon us out of all narrow limits of sect and Church, even beyond Christianity itself, into that great and universal church of the race, whose unity is the unity of the Spirit, whose fellowship is the Brotherhood of great hope and profound spiritual ideas. One Truth, one Right, one Love, one immortal Faith: The Reason, the Conscience, the Heart, of man in all times and under all skies, essentially identical: and over all one God and Father of all, giving to all His inspiration and His revelations as they were able to receive.

The passages that I have gathered into this paper are but a scanty gleaning from a broad and rich field. Of course a good deal of a less interesting, less elevated, even opposite character may be gathered from the like sources. But their existence does not invalidate what

I have presented. I have made no claim for entire uniformity, but only for universality in the great ideas. I do not say that all men have believed, but that among all peoples and in all times of which we have account, these beliefs have existed; that, they perpetually recur, indicating a natural gravitation of the human mind toward them; that they are the common property of the human race, and not the exclusive possession of any special people or religion. The mind or man, human nature, bears these ideas and sentiments of God, of Right, of Love, and of Immortality as certainly, as naturally, as generally, as the earth under all climes produces plants and trees. Superficial variations, of place, climate, race, culture: essential unity of idea.

I do not know why the view which I have been presenting and illustrating should be thought hostile to Christianity. It is of course hostile to the narrow and exclusive claim often set up for Christianity as a special and unparalleled interpolation into the current of religious history. It is hostile to the extravagant and unfounded claim made for it, as being the only true religion, the only authoritative, only divinely inspired religion, the only Revelation. It is hostile to the unwarranted distinction which calls Isaiah, David, Paul, the Evan

1 Cited by Denis II, 40.

gelist, "sacred writers," and Socrates, Plato, Zoroaster, Cleanthes, Epictetus, Aurelius, "profane." It is hostile to the notion that the Hebrew and Christian Testaments are Holy Scriptures, and that the Vedas and Avestas are not. It is hostile to the arbitrary and unmeaning distinction made in theological treatises, and in theological professorships, between "Natural" and "Revealed" Religion. As if all religion were not revealed in the spiritual nature of man through the normal and constant action, and through the original and per petual relations, of the human and the divine spirit!

Indeed, when we find precisely the same thoughts, say of the Fatherhood and goodness of God, of the sacred obligation of righteousness, of purity of heart, of love to man, of self-sacrifice for the truth, in Hindu, Persian, Greek, or Roman writings, and in Christian gospels, with what reason shall we continue to call them in one case an "authoritative revelation," and in the other only a "human philosophy;" in one case a "divine inspiration," and in the other only the result of "unassisted human reason?"

We all know how prevalent, how almost universal, this whole way of speaking is among Christian writers: "There never was a time," says a distinguished Calvinistic preacher of Europe, "when there did not exist an infinite gulf between the ideas of the ancients, and the ideas of Christianity. There is an end of Christianity if men agree in thinking the contrary." And a distinguished Unitarian preacher in America says: "If the truths of Christianity are intuitive and selfevident, how is it that they formed no part of any man's consciousness till the advent of Christ. How is it that the only regions in which this consciousness is attained are those in which the words of Jesus are familiarly known?" He goes on with still more emphasis; "Many of you are familiar with the Greek and Latin authors before, at, and after the Christian era. Do you find in them, the remotest approach to Christianity, the faintest tokens of a religious development which culminated in the gospel? . . . . . If Christ and those who wrote concerning him be left out of the question, is there so much as a fragment of the literature of his age that implies an advanced maturity or wisdom as to the truths appertaining to man's nature, duty, and destiny?" To such questions, even making all allowance for the extravagance of statement, the quotations I have made are a sufficient and complete answer. It seems to me that such writers as these are not "defenders" of Christianity so much as its partizans: they do more by such claims in its behalf to destroy than to establish it with thoughtful men. It seems to me that we better establish the truth of Christianity, by showing that its ideas are so eternal and

universal, lie so deep in the nature of man, that they have always been recognized.

The early Christian writers were fond of tracing the parallels and anticipations of Christian doctrines in the Greek philosophers. Even Augustine thought that Christianity had always existed, though without the name. The earliest Christian writer of all quoted from certain Greek poets the thought of God's Fatherhood as involved in man's sonship; believed that in all nations men might reverence God and work righteousness, and so be accepted by Him: taught that God had never left Himself without a witness, and that those who knew not the Hebrew law had His law written in their hearts.

But I am less anxious to vindicate Christianity against exaggerated eulogies, than I am to vindicate the justice and goodness of God from the implied charge that He left so large a part of his children without any revelation of Himself, his truth, his law, without any sure knowledge of that which is essential to man's true life and happiness here and hereafter. And when we consider that this ignorance, is in the creeds of most who teach it, punished with everlasting agony, we see that the prevalent doctrine of Christian churches in this subject ascribe to God inexpressible cruelty, as well as injustice. It is in truth a wellnigh atheistic doctrine; it shows as much want of faith in God, as of faith in man. And as I have shown, it is rebuked by the facts.

We are Christians by birth and inheritance. We have grown up in the line of that succession. We are grateful, we surely have reason to be that we are heirs of a form of religion so simple and so pure; though Christianity itself is not free from its admixture of mythology. But we ought to be grateful, too, and glad, that the grace of God is not shut up to our Christian church. We ought to rejoice to know that other men, other churches, have received the same great truths which we hold so dear, through other sources, in other lines of transmission. We are Christian by birth and inheritance. But religious is a higher and broader word than Christian. Jewish, Brahmin, Buddhist, Parsee, Mohammedan, Barbarian, these, too, as well as the Christian, are churches of the One Living God, the Father of all. With advancing light, thoughtful men in all of them will come out of what is peculiar and special in each, and so local and temporary, into the "large place" of universal spiritual Religion, which is Piety, Righteousness, Humanity: that belief in God and in man which is the creed of all creeds.

1 The passage quoted by Paul on Mars Hill "for we also are His offspring," is found in a poem of Aratus, called "Phenomena,” and in the Hymn to Zeus of Cleanthes.

Through and above all these churches exists that universal church of the race, man in his religious relations, from whose scriptures we have been reading. This is the Church Catholic, this the Broad Church, which not only stretches beyond barriers of sects, Romanist or Protestant, but reaches as wide as the world of man. It is as ancient as it is broad. It has a Past which far ante-dates that from which we are so frequently warned or entreated not to sever ourselves. Its antiquity does not stop with Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but reaches centuries beyond. This is the birth-right Church of man. It is founded on the rock of man's spiritual nature, "normally and forever God's Revealer." Its common thought is in that ground-idea of God which lies back of all the various conceptions of God. Its common life is in that mysterious disposition, that native and irrepressible tendency toward the invisible and the infinite, that universal sentiment of reverence and of dependence upon a superior Power and Goodness, which make man to be, by force of his nature, in all time and place, a religious being. Overarching all like the universal sky, encompassing and inspiring all like the universal air, vitalizing and informing all like the universal electric force, binding and drawing all like the universal attraction and gravitation, this idea of God, of His love and His law, this religious consciousness unites earth's millions in the humilities and aspirations of prayer; it moves them to deeds of benevolence and justice; it charms them ever with the ideal of a better world, a perfected society, a kingdom of God upon earth, a heaven of immortality beyond. It creates always its prophets and preachers, men of keener conscience, intenser enthu siasm for truth and right; always its saints, men of tenderer piety, deeper inward life, profounder spirituality; always its reformers seeking to awaken men from dead forms to living faith and righteousness; always its martyrs bearing the reproach of truth and the cross of suffering humanity; always its heretics questioning all traditions, demanding light and liberty; always its radicals protesting against superstitions and mythologies, and breaking down idols, in behalf of the One Living God. "Before these vast facts of God and Providence," says an English writer, "the difference between man and man dwarfs into nothing. These are no discoveries of our own with which we can meddle, but revelations of the Infinite, which, like the sunlight, shed themselves on all people alike, wise and unwise, good or evil; and they claim and permit no other acknowledgment from us than the simple obedience of our lives and the plainest confession of our lips."

There are times, perhaps, when the independence of our individualism seems isolation. There may be moments when we are almost

ready to envy the Churchman his sense of membership in a great body of brave and consecrated men and women, whose lips have uttered for centuries the same sacramental words. But then the better thought comes to us, that we are indeed, if we will, members of this and of a yet grander company, from whom the Churchman cuts himself off. For he, after all, is the schismatic. Look beneath names and words and feel the life of the invisible spiritual host of ALL righteous, true, heroic, saintly souls, made ours, if we are in sympathy with them, not by any external organization, but by a spiritual law. Its sacramental words are God, Duty, Love, Immortality. These, written in many tongues upon its banner have given vigor to more hearts and met more eyes lifted unfaltering in death, than any one church or one religion can count within its pale. This is the Eternal Gospel: this the true Church Catholic; the Church not of Rome, nor of England; the Church not of Moses, nor even of Christ, but of the Living God. SAMUEL LONGFELLOW.

NOTE.

In some of the tracts in the volume on Buddhism, quoted on p. 437, the existence of a Supreme Being is denied. There is probably a difference of belief among Buddhists, on this point. But Schlagintweit confirms Huc's statement. In his "Buddhism in Thibet," (p. 108), he says, "In face of all these gods, the Lamas emphatically maintain monotheism to be the real character of Buddhism." And again (pp. 50. 52) he speaks of a chief Buddha, Adi Buddha, called "Supreme Buddha," "the Being without beginning or end," "the Supreme Intelligence, God above all." So that evidently the statement of The Westminster Review, quoted in THE RADICAL for February, (p. 358), "that a third of the human race have lived and died without a belief in God" is altogether too strong.

I have confined my extracts mainly to writers before Christianity. Those from whom I have quoted of a later date are still outside of Christianity. What Winnefeld says of one of them, I believe true of all: "Epictetus stands on specifically heathen ground: his masters are Zeno, Socrates and Chysippus, but certainly not Christ." For the reader's convenience I append a few dates :

Before the Christian Era: The Bhavagad-Gita 2000; The Rig-Veda 1000; Homeric Poems 900; Thales born 630; Zoroaster 589; Pythagoras 580; Confucius 960; Xenophanes 540; Sophocles 495; Socrates 470; Plato 430; Menander 442; Zeno 250; Cicero 106; Virgil 70; Horace 65; Ovid 43; Philo 27. — After the Christian Era: Seneca 3; Quintilian 40; Plutarch fl. 50; Epictetus b. 90; Marcus Aurelius 161; Maximus Tyrius 180. The Talmud was composed in its present form in the Vth century, but out of ancient materials. The Vishnu Purana was compiled in the Xth century, also out of ancient materials.