education make peaceful progress possible. We have made wonderful advancement in the past, even the churches are awakening, great leaders are arising, and among poets, philosophers, statesmen and all people the conviction is growing of a great and prosperous future for the race. As Frances E. Willard said, "Only the Golden Rule of Christ can bring the Golden Age for man."

MR. F. STEVENS of Philadelphia: It is true the single tax people are, in a way, between the Anarchists and the Socialists. We go part way with the Anarchist when he believes the individual too good for law, yet,though men have the goodness of angels there will still be need for government.

We single-taxers say the land and the use of it belongs to the whole people.

Socialism stands for better kinship among men, and this we heartily endorse. It believes in the govermental ownership of capital and business, and against this we protest. The great obstacle is the Eighth Commandment, "Thou Shalt not Steal." Capital belongs to him who earns it and when government interferes to manage things it is disastrous. The postal system is a good thing but is it not an injustice to charge a man two cents for sending a letter around the corner while for the same amount his neighbor sends a letter to the farthest corner of Alaska? The control of land, we hold, should be in common, but governmental interference with individual effort we deem unjust.

B. FAY MILIS:-The feeling for or against the justice of the postal system depends on one's primal conception of society. Does society consist merely of so many separate individuals, like the sands on the seashore, or is it one organic body, individuals related by organic union, as my finger is related to my body? If the latter, I might as well speak of favoring my right hand at the expense of my left as to call it injustice to the man around the corner that the same charge is made for bringing his letter to him as for sending to his neighbor in farthest Alaska. I claim we are socially an organic body dependent each upon the other.

I believe in single tax, so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Socialism believes in communism only so far as relates to capital in the business, not to the earnings of men. HENRY S. KENT:-The solidarity of the human race is a grand thought. Man in solitude is a savage. We can well afford to pay for benefits to others; to send our neighbor's letters to Alaska and to help educate all the children. We ought to grow into the idea that we cannot hurt anybody, without hurting ourselves nor truly help another without benefitting ourselves.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON: As a Single-Taxer I am much in accord with Mr. Stevens. I think the instances Mr. Mills gives of government control are based upon land values. State Socialism goes farther and controls capital. For the State to control capital is to stifle individual effort. It monopolizes the industries. Suppose a select committee of wise men decide how much beef, mutton, eggs, etc., go into New York in a week. Inside that week there would be a famine or a glut. Left to itself it regulates itself and there is neither too much nor too little.

I deny the assertion that men do not make capital. I have title to what I earn by individual effort. It was meant for the individual to manage for himself in freedom; and I think the best interests of all are best served thereby.

The proceedings of Seventh-day closed with a lady's trio, from the choir,-"Lift Thine Eyes," followed with a chorus by the choir,-"How lovely are the Messengers who bring us Glad Tidings of Peace;" after which the Presiding Clerk said: I am sure that the whole of thought and feeling expressed here, from the beginning of our sessions yesterday morning to this moment, has been in accordance with and prompted by the aspiration,-Lift thine eyes to the Ideal! and may we so live that we shall help to bring to our own country and to all the world the Glad Tidings of Peace.

With such impulses uppermost in our minds and hearts it only remains for me to declare this Forty-Seventh Annual Gathering at an end, and, to bid you good bye!

Address of BENJAMIN FAY MILLS, at Longwood, First-day morning, eleventh of Sixth-month, Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-nine.

THE MODERN THOUGHT IN RELATION TO THE

BIBLE.

It is an easy thing, seemingly, for some people to worship the Bible. It seems impossible for some individuals to detect anything but good in it or about it. And, on the other hand it seems easy for some of us to condemn the Bible, to find noth ing good in it.

I do not believe that the destructive passion in itself is a noble one. All the men of all ages might have been able to tear down some of our mountains and bring forth the great treasures of gold and silver and precious stones, but all of us put together, so far, have not been able to rear one mountain, and no alchemy has been discovered that can make one grain of gold. A child may tear a flower in pieces and trample. it underneath his feet, but all the wise men and powerful that have lived, thus far, have never been able to make a flower and tint it with its beauty and store it with its perfume. And while it may be necessary to pull down the mountains in order that we may reach the treasure, and whlle it may be desirable to destroy some flowers, for good purposes, I, for one, refuse either to worship the Bible or to attempt to destroy it.

There have been many theories, and many are held today, concerning the bible. Our subject, at this time, concerns only the modern thought in relation to this Book, or collection of books.

There are those living to-day who believe that every portion of the Bible is inspired by God; that the original writers and the copyists, and the custodians, and the translators and the printers and any one who has had anything to do with preserving and bringing the Bible to us in its present shape, has been directly inspired by the Holy Spirit to give us an absolutely perfect and authoritative Book. There are others, like the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church, for example,

who hold the view that the original manuscripts were inspired and that what errors occurred in connection with our present Bible are errors that have been made at a later time when men had lost the inspiration.

I do not see that this is a very inspiring theory, for the oldest manuscript of the Old Testament that we have is only a thousand years old, and the oldest we have of the New Testament was produced somewhere in the fourth century. There are others who hold that the Bible itself is not inspired and is not identical with the word of God; that it was given, not to teach science or philosophy but to tell man what he needed to know concerning the great spiritual problems of the present and the hereafter. As a Catholic divine expressed it, the Bible was given, not to tell how the heavens go but how to go to Heaven.

There are also those who believe the Bible is not specially inspired, that is, that it is not uniquely inspired, and yet that it is practically so, because nothing to this time has begun to equal it. In other words that compared with other literature it differs not in kind but only in degree. There are others who believe that the Bible is a purely human book, of more or less. doubtful value; and there are others who believe that the Bible at present is one of the greatest enemies of human progress. This view was held by the great English historian Froude. If the Bible is accepted as authoritative, as a master, I would agree with Mr. Froude. A belief of two thousand years ago being regarded as an authority to day would stand squarely across the path of human progress. The Christian world needs to discover the true source of inspiration. The only excuse for leaving the Bible in the place of reverence is the challenge of its defenders: -"What genuine inspiration to a righteous life and righteous society will you put in the place of it?" But that is a sense in which even Orthodoxy is out growing the old ideas of the Bible. It is now the divider of the church. They say, "Let us unite upon the Bible." There is nothing on which the different denominations could not better unite to-day than the Bible. Once the Bible authenticated religion.

Now it required ecclesiasticism to authenticate it, and it calls. on its devotees no longer to be aggressive advocates but, rather, defenders and apologists.

The Bible was never investigated until a hundred years ago. The question was not seriously asked "What is the Bible?" until fifty years ago. It was looked upon as a thing too sacred and apart and beyond the common life and possibilities of men to even be investigated by them. It is not so very long since a man would have been judicially murdered in the combined name of justice and religion, and even in the name of the gentle Jesus, for venturing to intimate that Moses did not state of himself that he was "the meekest man," or that he used names that were not coined until scores of years after he had left the flesh, or, that since his own time there had never been a prophet like unto himself, or that he recorded events that happened long after his decease,even writing down, by inspired prediction, the circumstances of his own death and burial.

We now see that the Bible teaches religion, not in the old sense of a once for all authority on theology or on religious practice but as an unconscious record of the development of the religious idea.

When we speak of the Bible being given to teach religion it becomes a natural question to ask what religion it teaches. The fact is one cannot mention the Bible without practically referring to forty different kinds of religion. To say the word "Bible," this collection of nearly seventy books, is to speak of almost every religion that has been known to man. There is only one principle of unity in this collection of books, which is, that they were probably all written by Jews and that they they all record something of the progress of that race, when compared with one another, and that they are bound together in such a fashion as to show the foolishness of almost every doctrine that has been derived from them.

There are seven distinct kinds of religions taught by the Bible. The earliest religion that we find inculcated therein is nature-worship. If we had been reading the Bible without