We may tell them how the whole history of mankind has been permeated and filled with spiritual things. We may show how mankind has always done the best in intellectual regions when it has been filled full of spiritual influence. We may scatter such a foolish belief as exists in men's minds today with regard to the possible extension of the Christian faith around the world-the superficial objectors to foreign missions, who are ready to believe, without any just comparison, that there is a religion on the face of the earth today that can for a moment compare with the religion of Jesus Christ in all its conceptions or forms, taken as one great whole. We may show how the history of the Christian church is a necessary part of the intelligence of humanity to-day. These are but a part of the simple information, the mere instruction, which the Christian minister can give.

Then just one thing more. It is his place to elevate the tone of life everywhere, to bring it into contact with those sublime principles which are essential to humanity, which are struggling to the surface of human life everywhere, and have come to their best manifestations in Christianity-patience, long-suffering, large charity, and, above all things, hopefulness. The perpetual tendency of the world to lose its hopefulness is one of the great things which the Christian minister, by every power in his life, is bound to resist. I can understand a Christian minister denying almost the essentials. of the Christian faith, I can understand a minister teaching things from a Christian pulpit which I feel to be untrue; but I do not see how a man can take the place of a Christian minister unless he is inspired by a spirit of deep hopefulness in regard to the human race, always believing that man is the child of God, that his fortunes are fastened to the

deep fortunes of the world, and, unless the whole is rotten, unless there is nothing which has an assured future to it, man, bound by the conditions of his life, being a child of God, must be a creature of perpetual hope.

Now, when one says to me that I have lost much that the Christian minister in other times used to have, when one says to me that I am not able to speak with the authority with which a Christian minister used to speak, so that my life is gone and my function is useless, I turn to these three things. It is my place to awaken and to make active the spiritual sense of men; to tell men everything that I have found with regard to spiritual truth; and to make men hope with every possible assertion of their relation to the highest and divinest which it is in my power to make. Is not that something to fill a man's life in the Christian ministry - each man fulfilling it in his own way, but every man doing those three things, and so becoming a protest against the lowest and a continual assertion of the highest in humanity?

Before I leave this first part of my subject, I can not help it that, after all, I myself feel that the relation to his people is not the deepest relation which the minister holds. Almost all the errors of the Christian ministry, almost all the heresies of the Christian church, if we really retain that word in its true meaning, have come from supposing that man's relation to his fellow man may be superior to his loyalty to the truth. It is the reversal of that order again and again in Christian history that has led to the worst things that have happened to the Christian church. There was a time when men believed that they must assert certain doctrines which they only half held, because they thought that, if those doctrines were not asserted, men would go to ruin. Largely under that sense of duty and

impulse and belief was the doctrine of the necessarily everlasting punishment of certain souls asserted year after year. You went to a man and said, "What is the ground upon which you preach the necessarily everlasting perdition of certain souls?" "What was the answer? "Because, if you do not preach it, men will sin; because, if you do not believe that that is true "-for I may not charge men with simple, blank hypocrisy "if you do not believe that that is true, sinners have no sufficient motive to repent." I say that any man who rightly perceives the relation which mankind sustains to truth knows that this is an argument which had no place there. My business is to seek and find the truth, and to leave it to God to guard that it shall not ruin the lives of men.

Does not the same error appear also to-day upon the other side? When any man makes to-day less exacting, less earnest or imperative, any one of the statements of truth or divine justice and righteousness, in order that his fellow men may be induced to do the less because he thinks that they will not be induced to do the greater; when any man pares down doctrine or truth in order that men may be induced to believe that which alone he thinks they are fitted to believe-then it is sacrificing the love of truth for the sake of men. No man has any right to make that which he believes to be the truth of God any less exacting, less sharp or clear, because he thinks his fellow men will not accept it if he states it in its blanker and balder form. I read an inI read an incident in a newspaper the other day that seems to illustrate this point. A tired and dusty traveler was leaning against a lamp-post in the city of Rochester, and he turned and looked around him and said, "How far is it to Farmington?" and a boy in the crowd said, "Eight miles." "Do you think

it is so far as that?" said the poor, tired traveler. "Well, seeing that you are so tired, I will call it seven miles." The boy, with his heart overflowing with the milk of human kindness, pitied the exhausted traveler and chose to call it seven miles. I know I have seen statements of truth that have dictated the same answer. Never make the road from Rochester to Farmington seven miles when you know it is eight. Do not do a wrong to truth out of regard for men.

There is another point, if one may speak out of his own ministry and from observations of the ministry of others: men do not dread to believe-men long to believe. The one thing we do not have to do is to pare down the truth for man's capacity to believe. Give them all the truth; you can not make it too exacting. The whole of Christian history has been full of testimony that you may claim your fellow men by virtue of the very imperiousness and absoluteness of that which they have been called upon to believe. The old Credo quia impossibile of Tertullian has philosophy in it. Men long to believe; and, while ultimately every healthy human faculty will reject that which is not congenial to it, you can not help men better than by laying before them all that which is true, even in its blankest and most uncompromising form. Just as there are many men whom you can not get to go down the street for you, but who would go half the way round the world for you if you needed it, so there are men who would not accept the truth which they felt had been pared down for them; but when you put before them God in His eternity and infinitude, and the soul in its vastness and mystery, then the power of belief, stirred to its greatest task, lifts itself up and does its work.

II. I pass now to something subordinate and inferior to the point in re

gard to the intelligence of men-the relation of the Christian minister to the property of those to whom he ministers. Many seem to think that he has the property of a large part of the community at his disposal, certainly of all that part of the community that is associated with him. If I were to do half the things with other people's money that I am asked to do every year, I should impoverish the city of Boston.

It seems to me that the minister is simply called upon to count his people as stewards of the Highest-not to be the distributor or almoner of other people's goods, but to make other men such, by the spiritual things which I have been trying to describe, that they shall enter into the privilege of doing that which has been entrusted to them in the highest use to which it can be employed. No man deals properly with a man until he accounts him more than his property. "I seek not yours, but you," said Paul. The spiritual life, the good of men, the good of the soul-that is the thing that the Christian minister is to seek. The result of having something to do with that will be that sordid coppers will flow forth and bless the world. It is the old story of Sir Launfal:

"Who gives himself with his alms feeds three

Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me.”

Give yourself with your gift. Something is gained if you get a man's five hundred dollars here and there, but it is not the work of the Christian minister. Let other people go and beg for money without the slightest regard of the way in which it is bestowed; but it is for the Christian minister to make a man know himself capable of consecration, and then to make him consecrate himself, which must include the property which he possesses. This, it

seems to me, is the only definition which we can give of the relation of the Christian minister to the property of those to whom he ministers. He must work through the characters and natures of his people. Again and again a man has lost the power to do that work by the way in which he has been appealing to the individual. I will stand before my congregation and tell them of the glory of charity; I will tell them what a grand thing it is to give for God; then let them do the good for themselves, and go forth and give of their means. But I will not go to a man in any way that can possibly involve my personality, knowing that he will give out of friendship to me, and extort one dollar or five hundred from him for the best of objects.

And here, it seems to me, comes in one great function of the Christian minister that I hope all of you will not forget—which is that you must have such a large interest in great human necessities that you shall be able to inform those that are able to give how to bestow their goods. The Christian minister has no right to shut himself up in ecclesiastical interests. He is bound to consider everything that relates to humanity, and to consider that a dollar which is given to the sufferers in Louisville is as consecrated a dollar as that which is given for an altar or a fair. The minister stands in a position in which he can bring information to men that they might not have otherwise. To bring that information by the powers which he can wield over the spiritual life, and to make men feel called to give just as soon as they see that they should give-that is all, it seems to me, that the Christian minister has to do with the property of the community.

And if one can bear testimony out of his own experience, I can say that there is a wonderful readiness to give. It seems to me that the one great thing

we lack is sufficient information in regard to the things which money can be devoted to. The advocate of every great cause is apt to be dishonest-unconsciously dishonest-and to represent his cause as greater in proportion than others around it. That is the way in which the minister can stand between his people and such advocates, and show them the comparative importance of objects brought before them.

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III. And now I pass to consider the relation of the Christian minister to the conscience of the community. The conscience of the community is nothing but the aggregate conscience of individuals. When we speak of that, we open a large and sometimes a dark page of human history. We talk of the abuses of the priesthood in other times. think we have no idea of the clamor that was made then upon the priests to guide other people's consciences. The Christian minister is not so much bound to refrain from asserting a claim upon the consciences of men as he is bound not to allow himself to be the master of their consciences. It is one of the embarrassments of the intelligent, spiritual minister that people are so ready to put their consciences under the control of others. I am sure, if we could go back into the ages which we abuse most, the time when the priesthood set themselves over the consciences of men, we should find that the real trouble came from men and women who were seeking to be thus guided. It is the education of the great mass of the people, so that they have felt themselves called upon to accept the great responsibility of the guidance of their own consciences, that has released the clergy, rather than the disposition of the clergy themselves.

Just as soon as we talk of the relation of the church to the conscience of mankind, I suppose we are called upon to make that division which must always

be made when we talk about sinfulness. There are two classes of wrongdoing, two classes of sin. One comprises those sins which have no intrinsic good, which are always wrong whenever they are done; the other comprises those things which are harmful to the individual soul, or are harmful to the other people, and are therefore not right to be done. There are certain things which no man, under any circumstances or in any age, should ever consider right to be done. There are some things of which, if a man should ask me why I do not do them, I should say: "They are absolutely wrong." Of other things I should say: "I know if I did it I should be a less upright, less holy man, and I know that I have no right to do it." "Do you pronounce it to be absolutely wrong?" "No." Some things are wrong in the eighteenth century which are not wrong in the nineteenth. Complications of certain conditions may be harmful to the spiritual life-I mean, to the best life of man. I do not use these words in an official sense. There are such things as the spiritual life of man, as the consecration of the man's powers to spiritual things; and, when anything becomes harmful to them, no man living has a right to do it.

Now let us consider what the church and the minister have to do in regard to these sins. In the first place, there are some things which, as already said, are absolutely wrong. Slavery, for instance, is absolutely wrong; it is to be rooted out. On the other hand, when the minister comes to deal with a sin which has an individual and personal character, there can be no such absolute statement, and the one great, sublime function of the Christian minister is the awakening of the individual conscience to examine its own obligations, to recognize its own sins. I think it is not good that any man should accept a duty

simply or solely upon the word of another man. Duty is something never done unless it is done out of a man's own conscience. For me to go to the slaveholder and say, "It is wrong to hold any man in bondage," and to have him answer, "I can not think so, but since you think so I will let my slaves go free"-how absolutely unsatisfactory that is! There are always such experiences in the life of the minister, when he feels that the man's own conscience has not come to have the fuller light and to work in the most legitimate and healthful way. The danger of the minister and the church is that they should be satisfied with that-that they should be satisfied with something or other short of the absolute persuasion of the man's own conscience.

That is the position, then, of the clergy and of the church with regard to those things which are absolute or intrinsic in their moral character.

With regard to those other sins that have grown out of the special complications of life, the work is not so clear. It is not so satisfactorily recognizable, but it is just as truly the work of the minister. Let me persuade the conscience of my fellow man so that it works truly, so that he has really tried to do right, and I have done my total duty for that man. And when he comes to a different judgment from me, altho I can not see how he can do it, yet as a minister I may rest absolutely satisfied. When I have given him all the light I can, and put all the impulse in him I can, then I rest satisfied with the true independent judgment of his own life.

Now is there not left here a function for the minister? If our Christian church as a whole could do that for our community and nation to-day, could call upon them and persuade them to cast away those sins which are absolutely and certainly wrong, and,

with regard to all doubtful questions, to enter into a searching examination of them all and to act according to its best lights, then the Christian minister would have regenerated our land. I do not believe that the Christian minister has a right to abdicate his function as the director of the human conscience; but it is important that he shall know that it is a living thing, and shall direct it as a living thing. Just as you put every power of growth into a tree, and then let it grow according to its nature, so with the conscience-we shall not bend it according to our conceptions of the right; we shall simply inspire it with a passion of righteousness, and then let it develop in its own true way. Here is a relation to the conscience which is quite enough to occupy your thoughts, your earnest anxiety, and your time so long as you are ministers.

One thing more. Everything I have said to-night rests upon one great assumption, which we are anxious to have asserted in our country; and that is that the people, not the ministers, are the church. We quarrel with the phrase used in the old country, tho not entirely unknown here. They speak of a young man as "gone into the church," meaning thereby that he has become a minister; but ministers are nothing but the servants of the church. Every one of these points of which I have been speaking to-night finds its real solution in the fact that the people are the church, and the clergy are nothing but their agents in doing the work which the church has to do.

That was the good thing accomplished by our Puritan ancestors. New England would have been dominated and oppressed by its clergy years ago if it had not been that every one of those stiff, starched Puritans really felt that he belonged to the church, that the minister was nothing but the servant,