s
and cheap accomplishments, our belief in the sovereign potency of
machines and measures. We need it to make our lives less unlovely, less
hard, less material; to help us to understand the idolatry of the
worship of steam and electricity, the utter insufficiency of the ideals
of industrialism. But if culture is to become a mighty transforming
influence it must be wedded to religious faith, without which, while it
widens the intellectual view, it weakens the will to act. To take us out
of ourselves and to urge us on to labor with God that we may leave the
world better because we have lived, religion alone has power. It gives
new vigor to the cultivated mind; it takes away the exclusive and
fastidious temper which a purely intellectual habit tends to produce; it
enlarges sympathy; it teaches reverence; it nourishes faith, inspires
hope, exalts the imagination, and keeps alive the fire of love. To lead
a noble, a beautiful, and a useful life, we should accept and follow the
ideals both of religion and of culture. In the midst of the
transformations of many kinds which are taking place in the civilized
world, neither the uneducated nor the irreligious mind can be of help.
Large and tolerant views are necessary; but not less so is the
enthusiasm, the earnestness, the charity of Christian faith. They who
are to be leaders in the great movements upon which we have entered,
must both know and believe. They must understand the age, must
sympathize with whatever is true and beneficent in its aspirations, must
hail with thankfulness whatever help science, and art, and culture can
bring; but they must also know and feel that man is of the race of God,
and that his real and true life is in the unseen, infinite, and eternal
world of thought and love, with which the actual world of the senses
must be brought into ever-increasing harmony. Liberty and equality are
good, wealth is good, and with them we can do much, but not all that
needs to be done. The spirit of Christ is not merely the spirit of
liberty and equality; it is more essentially the spirit of love, of
sympathy, of goodness; and this spirit must breathe upon our social life
until it becomes as different from what it is as is fragrant spring from
cheerless winter. Sympathy must become universal; not merely as a
sentiment prompting to deeds of helpfulness and mercy, but as the
informing principle of society until it attains such perfectness that
whatever is loss or gain for on