a religious panic is impending over the Christian churches." Turning from pastors

to their flocks, the prospect is scarcely more cheering. The moral attitude of the bulk of the members of the different churches is as doubting as that of their pastors. And not alone are they doubtful; but they are also filled with strong discontent about the doings and qualifications of their pastors, the objects and methods of evangelization, the evils attending schools conducted according to Christian principles, the manners of the younger numbers of the churches, the interference of foreign missionaries, rivalry between the different sects, and countless other circumstances. Such being the state of things within the church at the present moment, the author thinks that the time has fully come to take decisive steps for its rescue from so unfortunate a condition. The best plan, in his opinion, is to banish all dissimulation and establish a sound and healthy church of Christ in Japan.

In Section IV., allusion is made to the progress of the study of Christianity in recent times. We read that Christianity is capable of progress and development; that it has been constantly growing during the past eighteen hundred years, and that in its growth it has taken nutrition, not only from the Bible, but from numerous other sources. The storm, we are told, now impending over the Japanese churches is but part of a general storm destined soon to descend upon the whole Christian community throughout the civilized world. In Europe and America there is, in the author's opinion, a tendency to the creation of an impassable gulf between men of learning and ordinary believers in Christianity. In Berlin men of higher education, unwilling to attend the services in the church, prefer to stay at home on Sundays. Even in America, according to our author's information, a similar tendency is noticeable in many instances. This state of affairs is owing primarily to the progress of the different branches of science, especially the science of religion. A critical study of the different systems of religion has revealed the fact that Christianity, hitherto considered the only true religion in the world, is not entitled to a monopoly of reverence, and that, so far as their nature is concerned, there is not much to distinguish between the differ

Recent prog

ent types of religious beliefs. ress in the critical study of the Bible has also tended to modify the estimate in which that work has hitherto been held. Another circumstance instrumental in placing Christianity and the Bible in their true positions is the advance of general historical researches, enabling men to view in its true light the origin and development of the Jewish religion. Thus one vast revolutionary movement is now agitating the Christian church all over the world. But it finds here a condition of things far more favorable to its development than in Europe and America. In the Occident the notions of the old theology of Christianity have entered into the social fabric so deeply that it is now extremely difficult to revolutionize the church. But here in Japan no such condition exists. The leaders of Christian thought have a unique opportunity to establish a new church according to the latest ideas of science and religion and in conformity with the special requirements of the nation.

The second chapter consists of seven sections, and gives the author's opinions about the Bible. He loves and respects the Bible, and hopes that it may soon become the comforter and guide of his nationals. But he does not wish to have it worshipped by his countrymen. He states that nobody who has made a critical study of the Bible can consent to believe in that remnant of Jewish superstition which gives God's authority to every word contained in the book. Some, while discarding such extreme superstition, still cling to the notion that the Bible contains the only revelation of God, thus distinguishing it from all other canons of religion. These persons are equally in the wrong with thinkers who try to defend the divine origin of the Bible by recourse to various other sophistries.

The third chapter in six sections treats of "The Divinity of Christ." In Section I., general observations are made on the subject. Mr. Kanamori believes himself not to be behind any Christian in his love of Christ, but he cannot accept the doctrine of the divine nature of Christ. Christ was born, lived, and died, like every other human being; and what positive evidence is there to prove his divine nature? Most Christians believe in the doctrine of the

divinity of Christ by sheer force of habit and prescription, the idea having been imperceptibly planted in their mind's infancy. Such people are at a loss to assign any intelligent reason for their belief. The author subsequently examines some of the reasons put forth by the more thoughtful portion of Christians.

In the fifth chapter we have a definition of the term "Christian." A Christian, we read, is one who loves Christ; that is to say, it is not necessary to believe in the divinity of Christ in order to be called a Christian. It was natural and excusable in the early Christians to believe Christ to be God, for they were unable to account for his wonderful sayings and actions by any other hypothesis. But men of the present age owe it to the advanced stage of their civilization to make a right use of their reasoning powers so as to form a true estimate of Christ.

He concludes his pamphlet with the following words: "I regret to say that there are religious people who imitate the retrogressive policy of China. It is my sincere hope that the age of religious perfection may be placed not in the past, but in the future. However grand and noble a personage may appear hereafter in the religious field, he cannot but be an imperfect man. Consequently, it is not an historical personage whom we may accept as our Saviour, but the idealistic Christ, embodying the perfection of the human species and symbolizing the communion of God and man."

THE LIBERAL MINISTRY: ITS

WORK.

The minister of the new Christianity that is coming to the world has four different avenues of influence open before him, all of them important, all of them containing possibilities of the very highest kind of usefulness to his generation.

1. The first is theological.

In some quarters there is a cry against theology. But it is a shallow cry. What a thinking age wants is not no theology, but a true theology. For what is theology? It is simply reason applied to the most weighty and pressing subjects of human thought. Not to be interested in theology, therefore, rightly understood, is not to be rational, —

Well

nay, it is not to be interested in life; for theology is the deeper philosophy of life,life's meaning, life's worth, life's responsibilities and relations, life's consummation and outcome. There are no questions of our time so vital as those of theology. does ex-President Porter of Yale say: "The physicist, the evolutionist, and the agnostic of the present day are all theologians, speculating, affirming, and denying, concerning matter and mind, duty and sin, the mystery of the universe, its origin, its end, and its signification. Is there anything beyond the present? and, if so, what is it? Is there any life besides the life in the body? and, if there is, what is its nature, its evidence, and the conditions of living it well?"

The truth is there never was a time when there was so much theological thinking going on in the world as now. Man must have religion or die,-die bewildered, hopeless, heart-broken. But, if religion is to endure in an age like ours, it must have a rational basis in thought. The old solutions of the great problems of religion furnished to Christendom by Augustine, Anselm, and Calvin, in the light of our modern age have broken down. What is to take their place? What is to prevent a general collapse of religious faith? These are the questions which all Christendom-yes, and many a people outside of Christendom-are asking with an eagerness that is pathetic and startling. Here is where appears the vital character of the work to be done by the liberal Christian minister as a teacher of religion. He sees dawning on the world a religious philosophy which, as he believes, gives evidence of being able to take the place of that which is giving way,-rational, where the old is irrational; ethically pure and high, where the old is often ethically unworthy; spiritual, where the old is often grossly material; broad, open to light, in harmony with science; resting on foundations solid as the rectitude of man's faculties and deep as the nature of things; conserving all the good of the past and open to all the progress of the future; keeping God, and God conceived of more nobly because more rationally than ever before; keeping worship, and worship purified and lifted up into something better than that of the past; keeping the immortal hope, enlarged and ennobled; keeping the Bible, all that is helpful in it, and not fear

ing to accept, either, for religious uses, all other helpful scriptures; keeping Jesus, not, indeed, as an impossible combination of God and man, but better, as an illustration of humanity at its finest and divinest,—an incomparable teacher and leader of men in the things of the spirit; keeping the church loosed from the bonds of ecclesiastical tradition and bidden to rise and do for the world the living work of to-day; keeping a faithnay, rising to a faith-such as the past has known too little of in an all-ruling Wisdom and Righteousness and Love in the universe, guiding worlds and men alike to good.

I say the liberal Christian minister sees dawning on the world a new religious philosophy, which means all this; and his calling is that of herald of that philosophy. To him it is given, amid the darkness and confusion and overturnings and despairs of our time, when so much is giving way upon which men had built their fondest hopes, to go forth to his fellows with the calm, strong, high assurance that all is well: though what was thought to be foundations fail, other foundations appear which are firm; and broader and deeper foundations, too, upon which may be built higher hopes and better faiths for mankind.

This is what I mean when I speak of the importance of the theological work which the liberal Christian minister has to do for the world. Can one think of any work of higher or more enduring usefulness?

2. But, in addition to his theological work, he has also an ethical work of scarcely less moment. The only church that the clearerseeing future is going to have much use for is one which, in addition to being deeply religious, shall be profoundly and tremendously ethical. The liberal Christian minister is to regard himself as very truly a captain in the world's great moral salvation army. The constant aim of his preaching must be, first, to teach ethical truth to his own congregation, and then, beyond that, to enlist them all with him, as soldiers of God, in a practical campaign, long as life, earnest as death, against falsehood and evil in society. For, alas! we are in the midst of a world where dishonesty meets us on every side, where personal impurity looks out from eyes of men and women we encounter in nearly all walks of life, where politics is too often rotten and degrading,

where gambling ruins thousands of young men, where drinking ruins more, where selfishness and greed run riot, where there are class distinctions and castes that are cruel and wicked, where ideals of life are, in not a few quarters, brutal, in others grossly materialistic and selfish, in others frivolous, in all too low.

Thus not only are individual lives ruined, but the very foundations upon which the home, the State, society, civilization itself, rest, are threatened. What must be done?

First of all, we naturally turn to religion. And we do well; for I believe that more and more the wisest men and women are feeling that here is our highest hope. But this is not enough. There is, entirely aside from religion, much work whose influence is directly or indirectly ethical, that needs to be done, for example, direct moral instruction in our public schools, and in all our institutions of learning; temperance instruction in all schools, the indirect influence of which is strongly moral; provision in our schools for industrial education, the indirect influence of which is also found to be moral; elevating lectures for the people; popular classes in practical ethics and all subjects of practical moral and social concern to men and women; mothers' meetings, for friendship and wise counsel and instruction; boys' evening schools and classes and clubs, under good influences; public reading-rooms, amusement-rooms and coffeehouses, to rival the public liquor-drinking places; noble literature in cheap forms systematically placed within the reach of the poor and urged upon their attention; temperance work in all its forms; social purity and "White Cross" work; work, associated and individual, for morally purifying and elevating politics; reforms in our poorhouses to prevent them from becoming hot-beds for the nourishing of pauperism and crime; improvements in our systems of prison management, so as to make prisons and penitentiaries reformatory in their influence instead of merely punitive; better laws and better execution of laws against gambling, bribery, prostitution, monopolies, saloons, and many other evils.

These are some of the hings which our wisest minds are already able to see ought to be done for the moral elevation of society. Here, therefore, lies one important province

of the work of the liberal Christian minister. Not that he is to do all these things himself that would be impossible. But it is his duty to be intelligent about them, and alive to the importance of them, and to be largely influential in setting in operation moral forces which shall result in their accomplishment. Of course, in all this he works largely in line with all the other ministers and churches of the Christian world. But it is with this advantage: that he has never, as they, to half apologize for his ethical work, as if it were apart from God's best service; nor is he hampered in it by his theology, as they are so constantly hampered in the same by low moral ideas and vicious principles of moral judgment imposed on them by the theology of Orthodoxy. On the other hand, too, in all these moral enterprises the liberal minister works exactly in line with the Ethical Culture societies, only he has the advantage of being able to employ, in addition to their motives and sanctions, others still more powerful from religion.

3. We come next to philanthropy. In our day the humanitarian spirit of Christianity is finding a new birth, just as Christianity in other respects is finding a new birth. There never was such an age of philanthropies and charities as ours. It thrills one to look about and see what is being done for the poor, the sick, the suffering, the outcast, the degraded, children, women, the old, even dumb animals, -all classes and conditions of human beings, and beings below human, that need sympathy and help. It is beautiful; no clearer mark of the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth is anywhere to be seen than this.

And yet the work so far is only in its beginning. What has been done is but as a drop in the bucket. Still, suffering and want, wretchedness and misery, are on every side of us, appalling to contemplate. Millions, even in our own land, the most favored land in Christendom, are without proper homes or proper food or proper clothing or proper care or medicine in sickness. Tens and hundreds of thousands of women in our large cities are being driven to the alternative of starvation or sin. Hundreds of thousands of men in city and country are fighting a battle with poverty more tragic than those conflicts where sabres clash and artillery thunders. Millions of children are

growing up without proper care, physical, intellectual, moral, or religious. And so

the voices come, loud, urgent, unceasing, from every side, calling for aid. And aid must be given. The noble beneficences, charities, and reforms that are already in operation must be carried on more wisely and earnestly than ever; and new ones, wiser still, to meet new needs, must be put in operation.

To this humanitarian work liberal Christianity has always been peculiarly alive. Many of the best philanthropies of the modern world it has originated: to all it has given liberal support. Such work is exactly in keeping with its spirit. All these things make it natural that the liberal minister should be a leader here. And what a leadership it is! Can any young man desire a nobler? Where is the young man of generous nature and high aims who does not feel that a life devoted, even in any considerable measure, to such work as this may well be contemplated with eager enthusiasm and joy?

4. I pass now to the fourth field of usefulness open to the minister of liberal Christianity; namely, that which I may call the spiritual and the personal. This is, per

haps, less easily described than any of the others; but it is not less important. Indeed, I am disposed to think that, if we were to endeavor to point out the one direction in which the minister's work rises to its very best, touches springs of influence that are the very deepest and most vital, we should be compelled to say, It is here.

The Christian minister is not simply a public teacher or lecturer, whose function it is to speak to the people ex cathedra, from above or from outside of their number. His place is among the people. He is a minister, whose work is ever a ministry,- -a service in the things of the heart, the spirit, the deeper life. He is a pastor, to whom is given a flock to lead and to love, to lead by love and by life as much as by spoken words. Relations could not be more close or vital than those which exist between him and the community. Nor is there any class from whose intercourse and confidence he is debarred. The poor are his, the rich are his. So are both the learned and the ignorant. So, too, are the good and the bad. It is his duty and his privilege to be the friend and

helper of all, —a helper in those deep things of the spirit in which all need help, the rich often quite as urgently as the poor, and those wise with this world's wisdom often quite as much as any.

I think there are no friendships, no ties of affection, more strong or sacred than those which bind a minister to his people. And, if the minister is what he ought to be, they are all ennobling in their influence. Patriot soldiers know how deep and strong friendships are which have been formed in the army by sacrifice and danger endured together for a common cause. The common suffering for a common noble end somehow cements and sanctifies the friendship. It is much so with the friendships which grow up between a true minister and his people. They are formed amid the most sacred influences that enter into human life. They are consecrated by common aims, and these of the loftiest kind. They are interwoven with the soul's finest fibre, of longing, aspiration, high thought, visions of the ideal, resolve, prayer; and so it is no wonder if they become peculiarly strong and lasting and dear.

Probably it would not be too strong a statement to say that to no one in all our modern world is it given to come into so close, so tender, so sympathetic, so earnest, and therefore so deeply and enduringly helpful relations to the people, in nearly or quite every rank and class of society, as to the Christian minister. The only one whom we should ever think of comparing with him in this respect is the family physician. But a little consideration will show that the influence of the most trusted physician, as a physician, is on a distinctly lower plane. The physician's ideals are physical: the minister's are moral and spiritual. The physician's function is the promotion of bodily health, a noble function: the minister's is the promotion of mind-health, soulhealth, which few human beings in their sanest moments fail to recognize as higher and better. Moreover, the minister's influence is not intermittent as the physician's must be, confined to times of sickness. It is regular, constant, beginning with earliest childhood, extending through bright days and dark days, through health as well as sickness, ending only with death, and operating all the while steadily for the shaping of character and life. Even when the phy

sician reaches the point where he can do no more, and turns away in despair, the minister finds his own higher ministry not yet ended, but now rising into a service peculiarly beautiful and precious, -that of trimming the lights of faith and trust and peace, to light the path both of him who goes on his unknown journey and of those who remain behind in tears. So high and tender and blessed a thing it is to be a pastor, a friend, a sympathizer, a helper of men in their deepest needs, a lighter of hope's stars in their sky, a comforter, a courage-bringer, a faith-kindler, a lifter-up of ideals, a brother, to take men, lost, sad, weak, despairing, by the hand, and lead them to the Father, with whom are strength, love, joy, new heart, new life! J. T. SUNDERLAND.

A WOMAN'S TRAVEL-NOTES ON

ENGLAND.

I.

After ten months upon the continent it seemed like "getting home" to stand upon English soil, and hear again my own, my native English. I had lived among the old pictures, old churches, old palaces of Italy, until the stirring life and the great social and industrial problems of the nineteenth century seemed no longer a part of my world.

And London, after Siena, Orvieto, Venice, and Pisa, brought to mind another age of the world. There was the same rushing, pushing crowd, with the nervous, keen faces, which characterize a Chicago crowd. Business, energy, and enterprise were in the air. I realized that I was again among Anglo-Saxons, and that "time is money.”

It is very difficult for the stranger, pressed for time, to make any satisfactory study of the educational or charitable work of the continent. There are so many obstacles, so many formalities, in the way. So much valuable time must be spent in interviewing officials and obtaining necessary permits to even enter a school or charitable institution.

Even in Geneva, Switzerland, I was obliged to spend a day in obtaining permission to visit some of the Geneva schools. And, when this dearly bought card of entrance was given, to my surprise, it did not authorize me to visit any and every school in Geneva,