Patton's position was correct, although this position makes the reasoning of past centuries absolutely final in matters of theology, and cuts off all possibility of growth, progress or development, regarding the most vital question pertaining to human life.

The decision of Prof. Swing to sever his relations with his chosen denomination was for him the beginning of a fuller and freer life. He bore no feeling of bitterness towards his former associates, but held them ever in cherished and loving remembrance. He felt, however, that disputes upon questions of doctrine were worse than a waste of time and brain; were, as a rule, regarding questions outside the domain of human knowledge, and tended to keep apart millions of the good and pure who should work in harmony for the salvation of men.

From the broad platform of the Central Church thenceforth doctrinal dogma and the religion of despair were banished, and

a faith was taught full of love, and gentleness, and charity; full of a serene and tranquil belief that the history of man is ever the history of progress; that goodness and virtue will ever rise triumphant in the end.

From his pulpit, too, he reached the widest audience yet accorded to any American preacher. His Sunday's discourse was printed in full the following Monday in one or more of our most widely circulated journals, was copied wholly or in part into other newspapers in every part of the country, and his weekly audience was thus numbered by the hundreds of thousands. The effect of these discourses cannot be overestimated. The thinking world was ripe for the modification of the earlier and sterner tenets of theology, as it emerged more and more into the light of modern civilization; was hungry for the teaching of one who should dwell more upon the love and less upon the rigid justice of the Supreme Father of

us all; of one who should bring us more into touch with the life of the world in which we live, and less into the discussions of those abstract, dogmatical questions which have been debated from the dawn of the historic period, and which, from this very fact, are seen to be incapable of solution by the human intellect, or they would have been settled long ago.

All persons who have reached middle life realize the marvelous change which has come over the teachings of our pulpits within the last thirty years, the most notable change since the Reformation; see the broader charity in matters of abstract belief, the wider recognition of the fact that all the great religious faiths of the world are based upon certain common fundamental principles, but which, by long processes of growth and evolution, are specially adapted to the varied needs of the widely separated and differently constituted peoples. No one in our country has done more to promote this kindly

change than Prof. Swing. No one so grandly paved the way for the great Parliament of Religions, which met in our city in 1893-a gathering which would have been impossible a generation ago-and the beneficent consequences of which will be more and more appreciated as the years go by. He was ever ready and eager to recognize the truth wherever found. Early he had realized fully, as Whittier phrases. it, that

"In Vedic verse, in dull Koran,
Are messages of good to man.
The prophets of the elder day,
The slant-eyed sages of Cathay,
Read not the riddle all amiss

Of higher life evolved from this.

"Wherever through the ages rise
The altars of self-sacrifice,

Where love its arms has opened wide,
Or man for man has calmly died,
I see the same white wings outspread
That hovered o'er the Master's head."

Born in the Presbyterian Church, his work bore the abiding fruits of wisdom, of a gracious and tolerant spirit, and a beautiful and intellectual life in all the

Churches. He was a herald of the dawn, and to him all men were brothers, who aided in ways however diverse in the bringing of the better day.

In the great movement of the religious thought of the nation, in the direction of charity and toleration toward those who see not the truth as we see it, the quiet and unassuming preacher of the Central Church, utterly devoid of the graces of oratory, but with a heart full of love and tenderness, with the poet's grasp and the prophet's vision, and with his glowing sentences, which linger in our memories like an exquisite melody, was perhaps the most potent factor.

His sermons abound in paragraphs, epigrammatic in their concentrated wit and wisdom, pure and sparkling gems of thought, from which some loving hand will some time compile an anthology rivaling that of Shakespeare, Franklin or Emerson; phrases musical with the majestic resonance of the psalms; pages where