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centre was to be at a particular place on earth, and they over-emphasized the ritual until by that very emphasis they almost crushed out the spiritual life of the people. They did not deny that they must be right at heart and in thought; but they said, We must attain this righteousness by a more strict and close obedience to the law. They carried that emphasis so far that Jesus made it one of his great charges against them that they were over-scrupulous to tithe mint and anise and cumin, but they neglected mercy, justice, and truth. He put his finger on one of the weak spots of the system when he said, You give away your property for the service of the temple, calling it Corban, a gift, devoting it to God, and in that way you think to escape the obligation of taking care of your father and mother, and those dependent on you. You make the ceremonial side of your religion of more importance than kindliness, than tenderness of heart, than human help and love, than the spirit of obedience to the inner life.

Then one other defect, one thing that stood more in the way of the larger, broader life, than perhaps all these other — something similar to that which has stood in the way of the broader, freer life of Christendom as well,- was the exaggerated, unreal, untrue estimate which they came to place upon their Scriptures. Instead of saying, These are the traditions of the fathers, these are the highest and best thoughts which our fathers were capable of receiving; but God is alive and speaks to and leads his people now just as much as he did in the olden time,- instead of rising to that grand truth, they came to look upon every word, every letter, every mark of their written Scriptures as being infallible, divine, and incapable of improvement. They bound their spiritual life hand and foot by this devotion to the letter of their Scripture; and it became impossible for them to accept any truth for which they could not find precedent and warrant in their written word. Thus, instead of facing the future, ready to see and greet God in the sunrise, they stood with their faces to the past, reverencing that as peculiarly divine, and fearing to accept anything else.

To this point, then,- and it was a magnificent growth, a growth surpassing that attained by any other nation on the face of the earth,- had Judaism come when the world was waiting for some new voice to bid it to a higher and grander advance.

Father, let us rejoice in and be glad of all the past has attained; but let us stand with our faces looking forward, ready to hear any new word that shall come to us out of the skies. Amen.

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The Minister's Hand-book. For Christenings, Weddings,
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Sacred Songs for Public Worship. A Hymn and Tune
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Unitarian Catechism. With an Introduction by E. A. Horton.
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Mr. Savage's weekly sermons are regularly printed in pamphlet form in "Unity Pulpit." Subscription price, for the season, $1.50; single copies, 5 cents.

GEO. H. ELLIS, Publisher,

141 Franklin St., Boston, Mass.

STRENGTH.

"I bow my knees unto the Father, that ye may be strengthened with power, to the end that ye may be strong."-EPH. iii. 14-18.

I HAD the good fortune to preach lately to a body of intelligent Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists at Lake Mohonk, most of whom had never heard a Unitarian in the pulpit.

I hardly need say that I took for my text the words, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

After the service, as generally happens under such conditions, I had many pleasant private conferences with individuals. They generally wanted to know why their own. religious teachers warned them steadfastly against entering a Unitarian church, or listening to these positive doctrines of life eternal which they had heard proclaimed.

One has a certain diffidence in answering such questions. Thus it is difficult to say to a young Episcopalian minister, who has gone into the pulpit of the Episcopal Church from the Presbyterians, that he knows nothing of the broad traditions of the Church of England, and that he will do well to study them. Again, it seems unkind to say to a consecrated and devout lady that the Westminster Confession involves so much of repression and so much dread of God's wrath that it becomes a negative rather than a positive expression. To all such persons one has to say that by far the larger part of their professional teachers do not seem to know what the word "religion" means. The truth is that the laity of the creed-bound sects are generally far in advance of their religious teachers; that that is the reason why they are, inevitably, glad to hear religion proclaimed by a man who,

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