BLUFFTON: A Story of To-day.

THE MINISTER'S HAND-BOOK. For Christenings, Weddings,

and Funerals. Cloth.

SACRED SONGS FOR PUBLIC WORSHIP. A Hymn and
Tune Book. Edited by M. J. Savage and Howard M. Dow.
Cloth,

1.00

-75

1.00

Leather,

For sale by GEO. H. ELLIS,
Publisher,

141 FRANKLIN STREET, BOSTON, MASS.

1.50

RELIGIOUS UNREST;

OR

PARADISE LOST AND REGAINED.

"And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.... And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."-GEN. ii., 16, 17; iii., 22-24.

"But now they desire a better country."— HEB. xi., 16.

"And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God;... and it had twelve gates: ... on the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. . . . And the gates of it shall not be shut at all.... And they shall bring the glory and honor of the nations into it."- REV. xxi., 10-13, 25, 26.

It seems that for once, at any rate, "the serpent" told the truth, even if afterward he did become "the father of lies." In his famous conversation with Eve, she had told him that they were not allowed to touch the fruit of the tree of knowledge on pain of death. And he had replied, "Ye shall not surely die "; for the gods know that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like them, knowing good and evil. And the outcome seemed to justify his statement; for the Elohim appear to have talked the matter over, saying, "Behold, the man is become as one

of us, to know good and evil.” And the expulsion at last has about it a flavor of jealousy,-"lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forHe had already become like them, except in the matter of immortality, which they possessed and he did not; and, to prevent his gaining this also, they drove him out of the garden.

Before I go any further, I want you to notice the significance of my unusually long text. The first part of it shows us a lost Eden. In the middle, we see humanity out on a journey. Having left one country, they desire a better one, and are travelling in search of it. An unsettled, restless life is a journey, looking forward to a land to be attained. And the last part of the text shows us an ideal city, full of glory and peace, open on all sides, the common home of all nations. This has all the good of the lost Eden, together with knowledge and immortality, which the other one lacked. We need not trouble ourselves this morning with the strange and curious way in which these myths have grown. Neither need we trouble ourselves with the distorted, unjust, and cruel meanings which traditional orthodoxy has extracted from them. I have quite another end in view. Whatever the writers meant, or have been supposed to mean, we have here a beautiful poem or parable of human life.

All of us have been in Eden. All of us who are old enough to have tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge have been driven out of it. All of us, who have not lost heart and hope, look forward to the possible attainment, in this world or some other, of another Eden,- a place or state of peace and rest once more.

The great mass of intelligent and thoughtful men and women in the modern world are, mentally and religiously, living in tents; they are en route, on a journey; they have "no abiding city." They are unsettled in their opinions: concerning some of the greatest questions of the world, they do not know what to believe. The teachers themselves are unsettled; and where must the pupils be? And this

state of transition is an unpleasant one. Except for a vacation, people do not like to live in their trunks, sleeping every night in a new place, always amid unfamiliar surroundings, with no spot to call home. For a while, they may enjoy this, particularly if they are looking forward to rest

and home at the end. But to be permanently a man or a woman "without a country," - this is unbearable.

There is a story that, during the time of the crusades of the Middle Ages, a great army of children left their homes and started out on an enthusiastic pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and in their youthful fancy, every time that the spires of a new city rose to view, they supposed they were at their journey's end, and they cried out, "Is this Jerusalem?" And each time their hearts sank within them as they found it was only some common town, and again they must take up their weary journey. So, in the mental and spiritual journey of the modern world, the people are very weary, and are almost ready to believe that any muddy town where they may sit down and rest is the golden-streeted city. But no believing ever so hard cannot turn a wayside inn into the eternal home of the soul. We are out of Eden: there is no use in disguising it; and now we must seek after the "better country."

:

But, now, whose fault is it that we have lost our Eden of mental and religious peace? When a bird is disturbed and driven out of a cosey nest, she will flutter about wildly, scolding and screaming at the intruder, even though he may be a friend warning her and frightening her away from an impending danger. She does not know of the danger: she only knows that she does not like to be disturbed. So men and women cry out in anger at those who bring the unwelcome news that their Eden of cosey ignorance is no longer a safe place of abode. They are angry, as though men wilfully and maliciously created the truth which they only announce. All they care about at first is the uncomfortable fact that they are being disturbed, and must move. As though a person, asleep in the middle of the night, should

resent being waked up and told that the house is on fire, and he cannot stay in it any longer.

If you listen to a large part of the discussion in orthodox reviews and newspapers, you would suppose that Herbert Spencer and Darwin and Huxley and such men were alone responsible for the unrest of the modern world; that men and women might have lived on forever in the quiet Eden of the old faith, and that it would have still remained true, if they had said nothing about it. So, sometimes, you will hear a conservative and timid Unitarian talking as though everything would be all lovely and quiet, if only the radicals would not talk out loud in meeting. But what is it that these men have done? They have not made the new ideas true nor the old ones untrue. Copernicus did not make the Ptolemaic theory of the universe false, and so wilfully disturb the Old World: he only saw for the first time, and told people what had always been true. Modern science did not destroy the truth of the origin of man in Eden and create another truth of the antiquity of the race, so upsetting another truth,-on which the whole theological scheme of Christendom has rested, the fall of man. It only found out that the modern view had always been true, and that the older ideas had always been false. Darwin did not create the fact that man has descended from the animal world. It has always been a fact he only discovered and told it. So modern Unitarianism did not create the fact that Jesus was a man like other men, killing a god in the process. It did not create the fact that the Bible is not infallible, and that hell is a hideous dream. It did not create the fact that this is a universe of law, not to be interfered with by the whims of men, even though those whims took the form of prayers. All these things are only discoveries of eternal truths. If people are to resent them, and be angry about them, surely the persons who have only found them out are not the ones to be angry with. The resentment should be directed against the Power that made them as they are.