is to find God in the soul; to worship him in spirit,
by a pure conscience, a loyal will, a heart full of devotion to God's
righteousness and love to all our kind. This is to worship God in
truth. And what have Calvin's five points, or the composite origin of
the Pentateuch, or the virgin birth of Christ to do with such
worship? If a man likes to believe them, very well. But if he cannot
honestly credit them, why should we shut the doors of the church
against him and threaten him with excommunication? Were these the
requirements that Jesus Christ laid on his disciples? Not at all. Look
all through the Sermon on the Mount, study the Golden Rule, and the
Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the conditions Jesus lays down in
his picture of the last judgment as the conditions of approval by the
heavenly Judge, and see if you find anything there about the
infallibility of Scripture, or the Apostolic succession, or the Deity
of Christ, or any other of the dogmas on account of which the
ecclesiastical disciplinarians would drive out the men whom they are
pursuing as heretics. How grimly we may fancy Satan (if there be any
Satan) smiling to himself as he sees great Christian denominations
wrought up to a white heat over such dogmas and definitions, while the
practical atheism, and pauperism, and immorality of our great
metropolis is passed over with indifference.

Sunday after Sunday, the Christian pulpit complains that the great
masses of the people keep away from their communion tables and do not
even darken their doors.

Does not the fault really lie in the folly--I may almost say sin,--of
demanding of men to believe so many things that neither reason nor
enlightened moral sense can accept, and making of these dogmas
five-barred gates through which alone there is any admission to
heaven?

If we wish the Church to regain its hold on thinking men it must
simplify and curtail its creeds; it must recognize that the love of
God is not measured by the narrowness of human prejudice, and that
God's arms are open to receive every honest searcher after truth. Let
him come with all his doubts, provided he comes with a pure heart and
brings forth the fruits of righteousness. Let us no longer pretend
that it is necessary for a Christian life to know all the mysteries of
God. Let it no longer be thought a mark of wickedness for a man
honestly to hold a conviction different from the conventional
standard; but let us respect one another's