from. Why go to church! exclaims the Protestant. Because it is the place where the gospel is preached to sinful, dying men; the gospel of redemption; the only gospel by which we are saved. "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved. But how shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?" So it is written: To support the preaching of the gospel is a duty laid down in the Bible, which we dare not neglect if we would. It is not for us to pass judgment on the gospel, but to welcome it. The message is for our benefit; the terms of acceptance are simple. It better becomes beneficiaries such as we are to take gratefully what is offered them, than to turn sulkily away because the boon might have been presented in a shape more attractive to their carnal reason. To those who reason thus I have noth ing here to say.

But the people whom I have in mind reason differently. If they go to church it is because it is the custom, or because it is social, or because they see their friends there, or because the preacher is eloquent, or because they find a commercial interest in it, or, perhaps, because they have nothing better to do. It is easier for them to tell why they do not go. They do not go because the Church

is to them a human institution like any other, which is good to them that find it useful; because the preaching of the gospel is not, in their view, necessary to salvation; because they discredit the gospel itself; because the question of salvation in another world, from flames of hell, does not interest them; because they do not believe in future perdition, perhaps do not believe in any future after death; because what is called religion has dropped out of their list of practical concerns. The ceremonies seem to them idle; the sermons dull; the devotional exercises unmeaning. The priest has but the ghost of a function; the preacher but the shadow of an authority; the pas tor but the tradition of an office. With sacraments and a creed, the Church, they say, stands for something to those who revere the sacrament and accept the creed; but to those who do neither it is a simulacrum, a spectre, a ghost of things departed, the reminiscence of a tradition.

This is the state of mind I would address; not with remonstrance, certainly, or rebuke, or pleading, or appeal, but with a quiet statement of reasons in justi fication of the religious service we continue.

The aim of our religious service, let me say in a word, is to stimulate the mind and move the feelings in the direction of ideal—that is, of intellectual as distinguished from sensible things. It is a means

of culture; its function is that of art; it belongs to those agencies by which men and women are refined in sentiment and desire. For this purpose it employs means which immemorial usage has adopted, and universal experience has decided to be best adapted to the object in view.

The first is music. Religion in every age of mankind, among all races of mankind, has employed music as a means of expressing and arousing emotion; and for very good reasons: music is the full voice of the human cry in its every mood and modulation; the cry of penitence, sadness, bitterness, complaint; the cry of longing, aspiration, petition; the cry of thanksgiving, praise, joy; the cry for pardon, the cry for rest. It voices them all, and voices them perfectly for it commands all instruments; it touches all keys; it has control of all styles of composition. Music, moreover, not being concerned with relations between local, accidental, or visible objects, not being associated with living forms, but being incorporeal, as it were, is completely adapted to express floating sentiments, bodiless, dreamy emotions, unlimited desires, hopes and aspirations that reach out into boundless spheres, the airy, nameless feelings which we call spiritual. It is this peculiarity that makes music a universal voice, of no tribe or sect, simply human. Hence religion, which also is uni

versal and human, has adopted it, and has done more for its development as an art than everything else has done. Religion has called into existence the noblest of instruments, the organ, and has created the grandest of compositions, the mass, the oratorio, the symphony. There have been times when religion almost monopolized music, and there have been epochs of history when music was more effectual than any other means in rousing the religious sense. The Romish Church is as eminent for its musical as for its architectural creations. Its masters in composition are famous over the world for their expressive harmonies. The Protestant faith, through its immortal artists, beginning with Bach and Handel, has laid the modern mind under a spell of music more powerful than its strange spell of doctrine. Luther's songs were as potent as his sermons. In fact, it is difficult to think of religion without music, as it is difficult to think of music wholly apart from some phase of religion. For this reason we also cultivate music: the music of the organ and the trained choir; not begrudging its cost, but wishing we could afford to make it nobler than it is: more rich, various, and pure, more worthy of its beautiful office of expressing and stimulating the finest human feeling. In the religious services of the future music will hold the same place it has held in the past; its expression will change

as the new faith becomes clear and articulate; it will utter new emotions; it will touch new chords; it will catch the glow of a new spirit; but its office will be no less prominent, and its influence no less mighty on the heart.

Another means of performing our task is the reading of Scriptures, which contain the antique wisdom of the race; not the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures only, but the Scriptures of old Asia, India, Egypt, China, of Persian sages and Greek bards, whose voices utter the solemn convictions of their ages and peoples. Time has sanctified these deep words; centuries have polished and set them; they are round and smooth as stones which the eternal ocean has wrought into perfect shapes on the sandy beaches. Sentences as wise and weighty might be collected from living writers: from Shakespeare, Bacon, Goethe, Emerson; but the best of these are chaste and venerable; all associations with personal weakness, with infirmities of character and accidents of fortune have been rubbed out; they bear no private mark of individual, of age, or of nation, but are interchangeable all over the world. To read them calls up the thinking, feeling, hoping, suffering, aspiring generations, gives a strong background to our trembling thought, fortifies with the attestation of departed centuries the attemp's we make to steady our minds amid the currents of speculation and emotion.