to a Spiritual Being, underlies our poetry, our science, our social aspirations, our politics, our philosophy, our religious movements; it is surely the fundamental motive of the day, operating even where it is quite unsuspected.

To illustrate my meaning with any degree of completeness would require many sermons; but, happily, many illustrations are not needed in addressing this audience. You will fill up my scanty paragraphs. First as to poetry. It is God's Fatherhood of the world and of ourselves, it is our kinship to nature which is the source of our indescribable love for it. There is no deeper depth in us than our love of flowers, and sunny slopes, and sea, and sky, and our fellow creatures. Look at a child with flowers, or with its pet animals. How it loves them! I say its love is a consequence as it is an unconscious acknowledgment of kinship. We love nature because we are of it, and from it, and in it. And the poet feels this kinship with a finer sense than others, and can express it for us. We may think we love nature, and learn from nature. It is that we are loving God, and learning from Him and from His works. This is the thought, the revelation, often unexpressed, that lies below Wordsworth's interpreting love of nature. Every one will recall the lines which express this most precisely:

"I have felt

A Presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows, and the woods,

The Presence to Wordsworth was not always, as here, indefinite, unnamed, he knew that "of God-of God they are;" it was the

Eternal Father of all that inspired him, as it inspired Milton, with this pure love

"These are Thy works, Parent of Good!

Almighty. Thine this universal frame,
Thus wondrous fair."

We can at present, perhaps, but faintly and unconsciously enter into this rich companionship, but we all share it: our eyes and our senses may be too dimmed and too blurred to perceive the Presence; but that is the secret of our love of Nature. It is an acknowledgement of the universal Fatherhood of God; an acknowledgement deeper than words, not the less divine in origin, even where unsuspected or unexpressed.

Precisely the same truth is taught us by the very different processes of science, science, which is sometimes regarded as the antagonist of poetry. For science, especially in its modern and most fascinating developments, is full of the grand thought of relationship and continuity; it is revealing a foundation in fact, for the prophetic fancies of the poet. The unity of Nature is now not only a magnificent poetical conception, it is almost a demonstrated theorem as well.

And if we turn to our social aspirations and our politics, we find that they, too, are penetrated with this idea of the brotherhood of man, which is so closely akin to the Fatherhood of God. The great democratic movements everywhere; the passion for liberty; the socialistic organizations; the numerous societies and associations; the schemes of practical philanthropy; the marvellous brotherly kindness of the poor to one another; the thrill of response that true brotherliness evokes; the verdict, spoken or felt, that is passed on all unbrotherliness, and especially on the unbrotherliness of parties and sects of Christians; the sickening horror that we feel as we read of the failure of civilization in our great cities; the passionate impulse to be up and doing,-all directly and plainly arise from this instinct of brotherhood. The University is responsive to this impulse in many forms. It is at present an instinct rather than a creed. But our hearts are responsive to it, as the drops in the ocean are responsive to the far off unseen attraction. Some day it may become a creed.

But, you may say, supposing this analysis were true: supposing that this idea of the unity of nature and brotherhood of man really is the common thread that runs through our poetry, our science, our social aspirations; supposing that it is the idea of the century; is it as a religious impulse that we ought to regard it? What has it to do with Christianity?

What is Christianity, I reply, without it? Surely it is no less fundamental a thought in Christianity than it is in poetry or science. When Christ taught us to pray to "Our Father in Heaven," He gave us the very climax of His revelation of God. The two great commandments in which He summed up the law may be restated thus: "Realize the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man."

This thought may seem to you to have little in common with religion, as it ordinarily presents itself. True; but I must beg you, therefore, to distinguish for a moment between religion and revelation. They are not one thing, they are two; more often opposed than co-operating. The opposition may be seen in every age, in every country; pre-eminently it may be seen in the Bible. The Old Testament is the history, not of. a religion, but of the struggle between religious instincts and the higher light, which we must call revelation, that constantly opposed those instincts. The religious instincts, the devotion to cultus and dogma, were strong in the Jews, and took the form of idolatry at one time, of temple worship and ritual at another; but they were always leading them wrong, into superstition, hardness, sacerdotalism and low views of God. The revelation through the prophets was always contending with these lower religious instincts, always dwelling on the elementary virtues, on justice, brotherhood, and love. The Fatherhood of God was being slowly revealed by God to the prophet, and through the prophet to the people. This was the essence of the Old Testament revelation. But the Old Testament closes in gloom with the silence of revelation and the triumph of the lower religious instincts. We see "no prophet any more," and we soon see Pharisees.

When Christ came, He came as one of the prophets; He came to continue, to complete this suspended revelation. He revealed

His Father to man. He brought us straight into God's presence. He called us children of God. He did not found a new religion. It would be truer to say, He shewed the mistake, the obscurantism of religion. In other words, He shewed that the relations of man to God were not expressible by cultus and dogma, but they were expressible by the filial relation to God, and by the brotherly relation to man. He shewed us the type of a perfect brother. Revelation was, therefore, once more in conflict with religion; Christ was in conflict with the Pharisees and Scribes. The religious instincts were mighty, all but universal; they had found their uncompromising foe in the person of Christ, and a few humble followers, and the eternal contest reached its climax in the cry, "Crucify Him, crucify Him."

But the voice of revelation was not silenced; Christ's words are still and for ever true; though for so long, for so many centuries, these great revealed truths, the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, have been overlaid by religion, that is, by cultus and dogma, which do but obscure the truths which they ought to illuminate. These truths have been half hidden by superstition and a terrible theology, but they have lain treasured in the silence of human breasts, and now at length men are beginning to realize them. "We know that we are the sons of God," is our unspoken creed. It is a revealed truth that now shines by its own light; would that it could enter into every individual heart and shine there.

I have used the phrase "revelation" of the truth, because that seems to me the truest way of describing the process by which it has become the property of the human race. For the human race is the manifestation of God's puposes. At any rate, we know of no other manifestation; and, therefore, the great truths that men have mastered are, in whatever way they have come to man, a part and a stage of God's education of the race. But it is equally true to speak of these truths as discovered by man. Some thinkers prefer this expression. "As far as I am concerned," says Darwin, "I think there has been no revelation." But this is not so blank a contradiction of the revelation-theory as it seems. For discovery and revelation are not antagonistic terms. They

are two aspects of the same process. God reveals by man's discoveries; man discovers through God's revelation. There is a point of view from which evolution and revelation are identical. The processes of science are most characteristically described as discovery; the intuitions of the prophet and the poet are more fitly described as revelation. Whether, then, we describe this growing instinct of the Unity of Nature, the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, as God's revelation now more clearly seen, or as the result of human discoveries, a part of a great moral evolution, is not of the first importance. It is the fact, not the theory about the fact, that is essential.

If a few more words may be permitted, I should like to revert to the phrase used above-a "brotherhood bound up in some unspeakable relation to Christ." What is the relation of Christ to this feeling of brotherhood? It will not be expected that this relation which St. Paul strove hard to realize and to illustrate by various metaphors can be defined in a few phrases. Further, it is a relation which is spiritual, not material, and does not need our realization of it in order to become real. It will assume many forms in different minds, and all the forms may be but aspects of the same truth. It is not possible, even if it were desirable, to dogmatize on the nature of this relationship. But if we endeavour to answer the question, "What place has Christ in this feeling of 'brotherhood'?" and if we look to His own teaching, and not to any system, subsequently constructed, for the answer, we shall probably arrive at some such thoughts as these. Christ is the fulfilment of God's purposes in man; He did the will of His Father perfectly. He realized in perfection the sense of God's Fatherhood; His love, obedience, union, and identity with the Father were perfect. He shewed to mankind the perfection of brotherhood; free from all national and sectarian and class and personal prejudices; free alike from selfish aims, and all ostentation of unselfishness: He realized-what we can but dream of-the perfect Brother. He did, therefore, reveal in His own person, as no man could have done, the central truth of religion, the Fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man ; these are seen in Christ.