Into memory.

Look at it from the other side. See how God takes the years of our friends' lives, and what he does with them; how he translates them so that they may not see death,— translates them into memory and hope and good resolve. How beautiful these daily resurrections are! the comings back to us of our friends in the quiet places of our minds and hearts, their words, their tones, their sweet forgiveness when we had done them wrong, their noble expectation that could not be discouraged by our fault, their tender blame, the great moments of our life with them, the dawn of love, the perfect recognition, the spoken vows, the wedding bells, the miracle of birth, the cradle-song, the anxious watchings over the restless or too quiet bed, the greetings morn and eve,- only such things, and yet enough to stir the deepest founts of gratitude and tears. Into hope: for not to hope for glad reunion with the friends whom we have lost, that is impossible, except for those who never loved at all. George Eliot's insistence that our finest hope is finest memory has not another proof and illustration that is so good and sweet as this, though it is one she would not have allowed. And our finest memory is our finest hope. Our sweetest memory is our sweetest hope. Our noblest memory is our noblest hope. Let the memory be altogether fine and sweet and noble, and it will be very strange if the hope does not attain unto the greatness of that faith which is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But God's translation of our beautiful past years into memory and hope is not the best that he can do, that he and we can do together. He can translate them, we can translate them, into good resolve. What would they have us do? our noble dead we ask ourselves; and straightway everything is plain. We see the way that we should go, and we are strengthened for the climb. And then it is that we attain to the beatitude of those who can be thankful for the things they miss.

It is not only the years of our friends' lives that are translated into the substance of our own. It is equally, nay, in

fuller measure, our own lives. If they have been strong and brave, if they have been pure and true, if they have been kind and sweet, then have they a beautiful fatality for us, compelling us to more of strength and bravery, more of purity and truth, more of kindness and sweetness. If they have been quite the opposite of these virtuous things, then such fatality as they have is thrown upon the side of evil inclination, and sometimes with such force that it speaks and acts for us, while, as the poet of these things has said, we stand by and wonder at our baseness. But too much can easily be made of this fatality of an evil past. It is not as if it acted in a vacuum or with unrelated force. operation is qualified by our conscious memory of evil courses which makes them dreadful in our eyes, by the memory of heights of noble purpose and of valiant conquest which we have sometimes attained, and by the memory of those whose eyes, too pure to look upon uncleanness, regard us from the solemn stillness of the eternal years. It must be a monstrous and incalculable bulk of evil doings, organically assimilated in our lives, that can outweigh such energies for good as these which I have named.

"No good is ever lost we once have seen,

Its unconscious

We always may be what we might have been,"

or something just as excellent and sweet and fair: it may be something better for the fault which we have put away. And now how naturally, to end the parable, and to end the year, the words of Emerson present themselves to heart and mind: "That which becomes us, embosomed in wonder and beauty as we are, is cheerfulness and courage and the endeavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which has received so much trust the power by which it lives? May it not quit other leadings, and listen to the Soul that has guided it so gently and taught it so much, secure that the future will be worthy of the past?"

THE UNKNOWN GOD.

RECENTLY I have had in hand a book which will, I trust, have a wide circulation; for it is calculated to do much good in a direction where there is need of help. Its title is the title of my sermon at this present time, "The Unknown God." Its author and compiler is Charles Loring Brace, who is best known to you as the efficient head of the Children's Aid Society in New York. But, while he is a man who lays upon himself, as Milton did, the lowliest duties, he is also one who has availed himself, as Milton did, of frequent opportunities for "beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies." A few years ago, he published a book called "Gesta Christi," the works or deeds of Christ, which was an eloquent enlargement on the beneficence of the Christian centuries, and much too confidently, it seemed to me, claimed for Christianity the credit of all this beneficence. There was little or no allowance for the influence of nationality or race, and we were allowed to imagine that Christianity in India would have been the same as Christianity in Europe if it had been planted there. I doubt it very much. Noting the different shades that Christianity has taken on in Teutonic and in Latin Europe, and what a worthless matter it was for centuries in the Eastern Empire and is to-day in Armenia and Abyssinia, it does not seem improbable that a Hindu Christianity would have been very much like what Hindu Brahmanism is now, and that a European Brahmanism or Buddhism would have been very much what European Christianity has been and is. But Mr. Brace's "Unknown God" is a much more catholic performance than his former work. It is even

easy to believe he had set out to make some large atonement for the drift of that. At least, he has compiled a very wonderful and beautiful anthology from various ancient Scriptures, Egyptian, Brahmanic, Buddhist, and Iranian,— and from Greek and Roman writers, especially the Stoics, whose writings are not generally classed as Scriptures, but are as deserving of such classification as any of the rest, or any that our own great Bible's spacious lids enfold. What rebuke is here in these golden sentences of spiritual insight and ethical provocation for the old-time classification of religions as true and false, the Jewish and Christian standing alone in the former category, and all the others in the latter!

What rebuke, as well, of the classification which puts the Jewish and Christian religions by themselves as supernatural and all the others by themselves as natural! How many are the sentences of calm and genial wisdom in those others, of flaming indignation against wrong, and glorious enthusiasm for the right, which we would gladly add to the Old Testament or New, though giving twice or thrice their number of the baser sort in fortunate exchange!

The defect of Mr. Brace's book is that he often speaks, from force of habit it would seem, of the Hebrew and Christian religions as if they were different in kind as well as in degree from the other great religions of the world. This is the stranger, as he allows to these a supernatural inspiration, "perhaps not miraculous," he says. But he often speaks of their revelation as being partial as compared with that of Christianity, which is complete, though at the very last his better genius triumphs, and he lifts up a prayer to the Agnostos Theos, the Unknown God, as if the God of Christianity were to be so considered equally with the gods of Egypt and Chaldea and India and Iran and the profound religious thinkers of the Greek and Roman world. That is the only just and fair conclusion of the matter. "The Unknown God" is a misnomer for the God whose awful Oneness flamed forth alike from the polytheism of every great religion of the elder world, unless that designation be

...

applied to the God of Christianity, whether viewed in his New Testament appearance or in his historical development. And in his last, best thought Mr. Brace makes the common application. So runs his prayer: "Thou Unknown God! we thank thee that thou hast made thyself known in all ages, to all men, of every race and tribe.... They have only known thee in part; but who hath known thee wholly? They have given up thought and heart and life to what they conceived thy will. If they have erred, who of us is free from error? They have called thee by various names; but what are names to thee?" In simple truth, the famous text of the Athenian altar, "To an Unknown God," was not a happy one for Mr. Brace's book. It is not the God whom the religionists of olden time ignorantly worshipped whom he declares to be the true and only God. It is the God whom they intelligently worshipped, with the knowledge of their noblest prophets, saints, and seers. The whole drift of his discourse is that they did know God, the one true God. Why, then, "The Unknown God"? "Unknown, and yet well known," is the choral affirmation in which Hamite and Semite, Hindu and Iranian, Christian and Greek and Roman, join with consenting mind and heart and voice. Who can search out the Almighty to perfection? And yet we know him well enough for boundless adoration, trust, and love.

But, in choosing for my subject at the present time “The Unknown God," I did not mean to dwell so long as I have dwelt on Mr. Brace's book and on the line of thought which it suggests. Where he went for his title I would go for a suggestive hint. Upon his title-page there is a picture of an Athenian altar, with the inscription 'Ayváσro few, to the, or to an, Unknown God. We are assured that there were in Athens many such altars, the inscription being generally "to the unknown gods." Here was no reflection upon the current polytheism of the time, only a confession of the incompleteness of the classified catalogue of deities in the crowded pantheon. Here was no suggestion of the One only God declared by Paul in that great sermon on Mars' Hill, with