is it likely to forget. All the old reverences and loves and trusts
and inspirations and hopes and tendernesses are here intermingled. They
are in the highest and noblest people; and they are being carried on
and refined and purified and glorified as the world goes on.

And now let me suggest one thought more that may be of comfort to some.
A great many people have been accustomed to associate so much of their
religion with the forms of their religious expression that they fancy
that the world's outgrowing these means that religion is being
outgrown. I said, you remember, when touching upon government as an
illustration of the working of the law of evolution, that governmental
forms were being outgrown just as fast as the world was becoming
civilized. If this world ever becomes perfect, government will cease to
be, in the sense of these external forms, simply because there will be
no need of it; just as you take down a staging when you have completed
a house. So I look forward to less and less care for the external forms
of the religious life. I believe they will remain, and they ought to
remain, just as long as they are any practical help to anybody; but,
because a person ceases to need them, you must not think that he has
ceased to be religious. When the world gets to be perfectly religious,
there will be no need of any churches, there will be no need any more
of preachers, there will be no need of any of the external ceremony of
religion.

You remember what the old seer says in the book of Revelation, as he
looks forward to the perfect condition of things. He is picturing that
ideal city which he saw in his vision coming down from God out of
heaven. This was his poetical way of setting forth his idea of the
perfected condition of humanity; and he said, speaking of that city,
"And I saw no temple therein, for the Lord God was the temple of it."

The external forms pass away when the life needs them no more. Take,
for example, the condition of things when Jesus came to Jerusalem. You
know how they put him to death. And what did they put him to death for?
They put him to death because he preached of a time when there would be
no need of any temple, no need of any priesthood, no need of any of the
external things that they regarded as essential to religious life. They
thought he was blaspheming, they thought he was an enemy of God and of
his fellowmen, because he talked that way. He said to the woman of
Samaria, You t