The age of oratory has lapsed. The pulpit has suffered as well as the platform. Our preachers cannot be expected to give two sermons a week equal to the highest literature. Nor can it be demanded, in justice, of the people to accept the less valuable at a higher price of time and money. The clergy has tried to readjust its work to the new conditions. But the plain fact is undeniable and irrevocable that preaching is no longer a prime social need to the more intelligent classes. The church must give what the press cannot give, or the people will not assemble. The Catholic church understands this and gives art, music and religious drama. The most serious temporary disadvantage is that the people, once accustomed to be educated by the pulpit, are now contented agnostics. Professor Seelye with great force shows the failure of supernaturalism, and urges that the pulpits that have taught miracles should turn to the teaching of natural law. Meanwhile the church falls largely into the hands of peripatetic agitators, whose influence is hypnotic, where it is not closer akin to the incantations of the medicine man of savage races.

(2) Federalism.-The church of the future must exist under the potent influence of federalism. It has felt the power of democracy, and we can fairly say that the church has become as democratic in spirit as the state. But federal union is a later and grander idea; for it makes democracy coherent and coöperative over a whole continent. Protestantism from the start fell into sects. This seemed to men like Calvin most lamentable, and they struggled by all means to establish unity, uniformity and conformity. In reality, however, each church sect corresponds to a civic state, while each church corresponds to a township. Our danger is not from making too much of sects, each one developing a specific idea to its fullness; but our danger is in the lack of federation of sects. Church and state, the two original evolutions of the human family, have always moved on nearly parallel lines. When the state was feudal, the church was feudal. When the state was monarchical, the state was absolute. Now that the state is federal, the church must and will follow.

I am not sure who first flung out the banner in

scribed, "A World-wide Democratic Church," but I think it was Taylor Innes in 1891. It was soon after the meeting of Pan-Methodist, Pan-Presbyterian, PanCongregationalist and similar conferences. Mr. Innes declared that (1) a union of all the free churches of the world was practicable; that (2) such a union, instead of impairing freedom, might be made a means of advancing it. In fact, as individualism is essential to a perfect society, and as individual states are essential to a perfect nation, so individual churches form compactest sects; and by sects alone can we reach a perfectly free and workable universal church.

But if Christendom can fraternize, why not all upward-lookers and honest strivers the world over? The Parliament at Chicago did not in any sense imply that Buddhism and Jewism and Islamism and Christianism are to move pari passu to a common conquest, but it demonstrated that we have begun to see that, as we are all sects of a common Christianity, so all religions are integers of a sole religion of humanity. It was a rediscovery of the unity of the human family on the religious side.

All efforts at religious union by force of authority having failed, Napoleon planned a fusion of this sort. He said, "I would have held my religious as well as my legislative sessions. My councils would have represented Christendom. The popes would have presided." State Churchism and Church Statism, however, are equally untrue to history and evolution. Federalism is the idea of the age, equally adapted to church and to state.

(3) Education Becomes Secularized. It is not long since our whole curriculum of education was tinctured with religious feeling and our higher schools were the property of the churches. Our colleges before 1850 were almost wholly established to educate ministers. A few exist still that must by charter have preachers for presidents. But the Bible is ejected from the common schools, and our universities are almost wholly secularized. The movement was an unconscious drift. The rise of the exact sciences led to a profound conviction that free investigation constituted the essential spirit of education. Meanwhile a vast network of schools

has covered our continent. The world believes in education as it believes in law. It is a public instinct. State universities share with State capitals in being the center of public life. We only wait now for a national university at Washington, toward which all State universities shall point, as all State legislatures center in Congress.

Religion is not interested in retaining control of secular education. It is advantaged by all right secularism. State and church in their entire course interest and assist each other. All knowledge of truth, all real learning, places the world more directly amenable to religious influence. "The foundation of Science, "says Argyle, "is confidence in the intelligibility of nature." Says Seelye, "Those who study nature study God-a personal God." Goethe says, "He who has science and art has religion." No mind can secure enlightenment without facing the problems of God, immortality and brotherhood.

Is the church then forever free from the obligation to instruct? Or is the Catholic church right in insisting that there is a specific religious education apart from the secular? Can the common schools teach morals, and if so can they cover the whole field of ethics? My previous sections show that the state does not cover the whole field of morals; that there are morals which the church must teach as its own, and is profoundly sinful if it fails to teach. These ethical principles may be summed up as our relations to God, which in character become piety; our relations to the hereafter, and our human brotherhood as children of God. The state school has its own moral obligations; and these are collateral with those of the church. It should primarily create good citizenship. Were I a Catholic, I would insist on parochial schools for purely religious culture. As I am a Protestant, I protest against the rubbish that with us passes for religious education. The state and the church must each understand its field, and unflinchingly resist the encroachments of the other.

(4) Individualism.—Individualism is comparatively a modern idea. It was asserted in the ancient world only by Jesus and his religious forerunners. But apart

from the earliest churches, Christendom completely lost the idea of human equality. The Reformation of 1500 began a reaction. Its idea was not so much that current doctrines were false as that intellectual and moral bondage is wrong. This idea was soon passed over to the state as democracy. The church still standing for the mass against the man, the eighteenth century wound up by destroying the church and abolishing God. But the state went down with the church. The two came up together with the nineteenth century, as democracy in state and Protestantism in church; individualism well established.

That the religion of the future will be determined by the individualism of the present is beyond gainsay. Shall we find a platform large enough for free individIf so it must omit intellectual conformity and moral conformity and physical conformity. There must be freedom of cult, of character, of creed. Is there a possible union large enough to fellowship those who join no kirk or sect; who keep days, or not, as they choose; who believe in the trinity or reject it?—a church broad enough for Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Sumner, as well as Chalmers, Stanley, Leo XIII. and Archbishop Ireland? The future church will not exclude honorable men who are true to humanity.

It is not possible to stay the movement toward unity in diversity, toward fellowship with freedom. Mazzini said of Carlyle, "He stands between the individual and the infinite with a constant disposition to crush the human being by comparing him with God." But our age has turned sharply away to emphasize the moral worth of man. Henry Jones says of Browning, "He believed the Power for Rightness had revealed himself as man." What the people need is not less selfhood, but more; less turning to the state and legislation, and more valuation of each one's "life rent of God's universe," with the tasks it offers and the tools to do them with. It is not enough to cry, "God is on the throne; all's well with the world," unless that throne be our own individual soul. "God works in you; therefore work out your own salvation."

"When the fight begins within himself,

Man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head;
Satan looks up between his feet-Both tug;

He's left himself i' the middle. The soul awakes
And grows."

"

But individualism invariably refuses to exist for itself alone. There can be no coöperation comparable to that of strong personalities. Hence it has followed that never before was there such eager hunting for fellowship and love as now.

(5) Equality of the Sexes.-It was an inevitable consequence of the increasing individualism which I have noted that woman should be a recipient of its advan tages. It was impossible to differentiate the masses into individuals, and leave women uneducated and disfranchised. In fact it was at once discovered that to breed men we must have mothers. The highest end of the state is to secure the most excellent conditions of motherhood. Said a chief of the Cherokees, "We undertook to civilize by educating our boys; but with heathenish mothers the children invariably lapsed. There was no progress. We were compelled to educate our wom. en." We Aryans have been slower to discover this law of nature, but we have found it out. Asa Mahan opened the doors of Oberlin in 1833 amid a storm of shocked and indignant protests, but the discovery was made, and the sexes were to be placed henceforth on an equality. Not only the schools but the trades and professions have opened to women. There are 250,000 women in the ranks of self-supporters in New York City alone.

Religion has not seldom in the past found it necessary to call woman to its aid as priestess, as vestal, or as prophetess. Christianity could scarcely have existed but for the baptism of woman's love in the cradle hours of its weakness. Its least honorable chapters have been the result of celibacy and monkery. The liberation of woman from the restraints of prejudice is steadily calling her to the front as mother of God. This is no longer profanity; for God in this world is most manifest as man; and woman bears man in her womb. The church naturally is her special care. The love of God is her sublime genius. As preaching