his grave business to-day,
as indeed it is the real and practical end of all true religion. This is
your sacrament urn, your soldier's oath. You salute and give your fealty
to the coming Kingdom of God. And upon that I would have you fix your
minds to the exclusion of much that, I know only too well, has been
narrow and evil and sectarian in your preparation for this solemn rite.
God is like a precious jewel found among much rubble; you must cast the
rubble from you. The crowning triumph of the human mind is simplicity;
the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and universality. The
God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the
God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown God of many a
righteous unbeliever. He is not the God of those felted theologies and
inexplicable doctrines with which your teachers may have confused your
minds. I would have it very clear in your minds that having drunken the
draught you should not reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has
brought it to your lips. I should be falling short of my duty if I did
not make that and everything I mean by that altogether plain to you."

He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked before, sitting
now with a startled interest in his eyes. The bishop leant over the desk
before him, and continued in the persuasive tone of a man who speaks of
things too manifest for laboured argument.

"In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded creative
men, and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the hands
of intense and conservative men. These last--narrow, fearful, and
suspicious--have sought in every age to save the precious gift of
religion by putting it into a prison of formulae and asseverations. Bear
that in mind when you are pressed to definition. It is as if you made a
box hermetically sealed to save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the
sea. But they have sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations
of the plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing,
to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though it
would otherwise corrupt. So they have lost God and fallen into endless
differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about insignificant
things. They have divided religion between this creed and teacher and
that. The corruption of the best is the worst, said Aristotle; and the
great religions of the world, and especially this Christianity o