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I am He, ye shall die in your sins." "He that believeth is not condemned, but he that believeth not is condemned already; because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God." No tempting lawyer is referred to the commandment; no young ruler is bidden to overcome his love of money, and is allowed, though all ready to become an enthusiastic disciple, is allowed to go away sorrowful.

This inconsistency is decisive; it introduces us to irreconcilable spheres of thought, to theories respecting the spiritual laws which are mutually confounding, and to conclusions touching the conditions of blessedness which utterly exclude each other. It is impossible that the same individual should deal in theologies so fatally discrepant.

But has not the Christ a great deal to say about love? Does not the word "love" drop from his lips much oftener than from the lips of Jesus? Does it not give a character to the gospel? Certainly it does, and precisely the character we have assigned to it. No word shows more conclusively the unlikeness between Christ and Jesus, than that word, Love. It widens the gulf instead of closing it up; for while the love of Jesus is a human quality, the love of Christ is a theological grace. That is a beautiful saying, "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another: by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one toward another." But as we examine the text more closely, we perceive very significant limitations. The virtue commended is, "Love one towards another," love among the brethren, love of the believer for the believer, here within the household of faith, love that marks them as separated from the rest of mankind. It is not man's love for his fellow-man, but Christian's love for his fellow-Christian. It is not beneficence towards the objects of beneficence; kindness to all of our kind; sunshine and dew for the evil and the good, for the just and the unjust; the Samaritan's goodness to the Jew, it is not that. Broader than nation, or tribe, or race, it may be, but it is not broader than a profession of belief. The Jesus of Matthew addresses his commandment to all who may hear him. The Christ of John accosts particularly the small company of his friends. The charity of Jesus would make men liberal, generous, diffusive; forgetful of all distinctions in the common humanity. The love of the Christ would make men exclusive, illiberal, unsympathetic. The charity of Jesus runs at once into beneficent deeds. The love of the Christ runs to sentiment, and the more intense it is the more it is unreal. It is such love as persecutors and bigots have been animated by

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Christianity" to show that breach of natural order is proof of His voiceful presence. God, then, can reveal Himself only by interrupting the evidence of his being !'

LUTHER affirms a revealed Scripture, but denies a revealed interpretation. But what is the use of light without eyes? If spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and the "carnal understanding" be the whole of man's natural intelligence, the "right of private judg ment" is the right of a paralytic to walk.

A PROBABLE God- think of it! I never heard that a probable dinner would satisfy hunger. Probabilities and contingencies do well enough on the surface of things; but at the centre one must know what to depend upon. Could the earth revolve upon an uncertain axis?

Has not modern theology made a mistake by abolishing the devil? We work only by means of that which is opposed to our intent. Gravitation, that would prevent walking, enables us to walk. "My Father worketh hitherto." How work, if there is nothing to resist him, and which by that fact can take an impression? The substratum of the created universe I take to be Devil! Spiritual growth is an incessant redemption. So the plant takes the elements it uses away from themselves wrests them from their own law, and compels them to the service of a higher. In the tree Igdrasil, the tree of life, is it not the same?

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Is it not the highest suggestion of history that God implicates himself, not by mere choice, but by the divine necessity of Spirit, in the sorrow, suffering, defeat of humanity, with us enduring the cross, but despising the shame, and making glory break out of storm and darkness? A God who should sit above, and look down untouched upon a world such as this, is too Epicurean a deity for me. Zeus and Prometheus in one, if you please!

I CONFESS myself much of a Christian, but also much of a pagan. I am theist, pantheist, polytheist - everything but a pantatheist, like an American philosopher that I wot of. My Pan is Fact: an amorphous sort of deity, whom I feel under no obligation to love, and whose love I neither confide in nor desire, but whom I accept," as Margaret Fuller said of the universe. I am a polytheist when I read epics-"Paradise Lost," for example. I am a theist when I say, as sometimes,

Thine be the helm, O heart! Steer as thou wilt;

Steer sovereign by thine own eternal stars :

True to thy bidding do I trim the sail.

At present, however, I am much disposed to oscillate between Zoroaster and Buddha; inclining to the former when I am cheerful, and to the latter when wearied with the empty turmoil of the world.

For the moment I am best consoled, not by great and grave considerations, but by such as are trivial, even ridiculous. Being of a very domestic and social disposition, and finding myself for some days alone in the house, I say, when wearied, unable further to work or read, and longing for the loved faces, "Luckily there is only one of us here to feel himself alone!" It brightens me up wonderfully.

WHEN Spirit begins to blend itself with Thing, and to enter upon its grand, eternal work of rescue or redemption, its force is, as it were, wrested away from itself: Thing, by the aid of these resources, intensifies itself, and arrives at malignity.

"A little grain of conscience made him sour."

I suppose Tennyson speaks of the scorpion or the cobra. Venom is virtue alienated from itself. Ice would not be cold if there were not heat in it.

Ormuzd had fashioned glorious Lives, about
His face to shine; but Ahriman, his foe,
With shapes of Death these counterfeited so,
That 'mid the blessed his disguised rout
Mingled, and e'en the eye divine had doubt
Which were the true Immortals. Then made he

A sphere and kingdom of mortality,

And said, "Behold my Earth! Go, journey out."
Then quick was doubt dissolved, and clearness bred;
For fell the false lives all, and grovelled prone,
Enchanted with attraction of their own,

And eager from Death's tables to be fed ;

While 'mid the gloom Life reared a radiant head,
And, flying homeward, far through æther shone.

THE grand, prophetic souls are not shrewd and sharp-sighted, but go on, as it were, in a divine blindness, moving, like the planets, not by sight, but by cosmical attraction and impulse. The sun, I take it, does not see the worlds he shines on; his own luminance hides them. So these men look out from an intense shine of Spirit, which

casts the world of mere things into shadow. In history one sees these high stepping men, glorious as stars; but, like stars, journeying in a celestial blindness, more sure and seeing than sight. "Pshaw! mere enthusiasts!" says Ferret-eyes.

WITHOUT the shell, the chick could not come into existence; but kept within the shell, it cannot continue in existence. So without the old forms of belief, the new faith had never been born into the world; but the old vessels, because they are useful, must be broken.

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A BUMPTIOUS Worldling, who had never known a genial imagination in his life, accosted a poet one day, on seeing him gaze at a gorgeous sunset with silently moving lips, and began jeering at him. "What do you gain," said he, "by all this staring and mooning? not get rich by it. Why, my tax is more than your revenue. I used often to fear that I myself might become a dreamer; but I took pains to nip all that nonsense in the bud, otherwise I might now be a poor devil, like you, with never fifty dollars in my pocket." He pursued this strain some minutes, speaking very rudely.

At length the poet said, "I must tell you of something very extraordinary which happened the other day. An ass was observed by one of his kindred to stand a long while in a state of melancholy abstraction.

"What ails thee, brother?' said his friend, sympathetically.

"I was thinking," answered the other, 'what if I should one day become a man, and have to totter about on my hind legs only, while the other two, which now enable me to stand so steadily, and to run so fast, should merely dangle from my shoulders. However,' he continued more cheerfully, 'I shall guard against that.' So saying, he planted his fore legs firmly, as if to assure himself of them; and as a maiden chanced just then to be singing almost divinely under the lindens a little way off, he listened a minute, and then braying lustily, remarked with much pleasure that his voice seemed no less superior to hers than he had observed it to be formerly. "The change has not begun yet,' he said, with great content; and hereafter I will not so much as rear on my hind legs for a moment, lest I should encourage any tendency that way.'

"It will occur to you that the good creature was not, perhaps, in so much danger as he supposed himself to be."

So saying, he walked away, leaving the other no whit enlightened, and more than ever amazed at his perversity.

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