e world, and has read little in
the records of pious ages even, who does not know that even in the
Church it is needful to sift truth from falsehood, dead from living
truth.

"If, however, a claim be advanced which forbids such a use of reason as
we make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing them
historically with reference to their constant service to mankind and
their particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was the
case with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the Church
proclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of which
it would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices,
reserved in Puritan thought to God only,--then does it not usurp the
function of the soul itself, suppress the personal revelation of the
divine by taking from the soul the seals of original sovereignty, remove
God to the first year of our era, relying on his mediate revelation in
time, and thus take from common man the evidence of religion and
therewith its certainty, and in general substitute faith in things for
the vital faith? If the voice of the Church is to find only its own echo
in the inner voice of life, if its evidences of religion involve more
than is near and present to every soul by virtue of its birth, if its
rites have any other reality than that of the heart which expresses
itself in them and so gives them life and significance, then its
authority is external wholly and has nothing in common with that
authority which free men erect over themselves because it is themselves
embodied in an outward principle. If personality has any place in the
soul, if the soul has any original office, then the authority that
religion as an organic social form may take on must lie within limits
that reserve to the soul its privacy with God, to truth an un-borrowed
radiance, and to all men its possession, simple or learned, lay or
cleric, through their common experience and ordinary faculties in the
normal course of life. Otherwise, it seems to me, personal experience
cannot be the beginning of Christian conviction, the true available test
of it, the underlying basis of it as we build the temple of God's
presence within us, and, as I have called it, the vitality of the whole
matter.

"Within these limits, then, imposed by the earlier argument, what, under
such reserves of the great principles of liberty, democracy, and justice
in which we are bred and which are forms of the cardina