they can possibly be made. If such idealizing of the real appears to you a little matter, hardly deserving of the fullgrown energy of a man or woman in the enjoyment of both physical and mental health, I would suggest that you should give it a fair trial for one year, or one month, or one week, or even for one day. "Rejoice in the Lord always; and again I say unto you, Rejoice!" Now, "the Lord" of Paul's rejoicing was not the God of heaven and earth. He was Jesus of Nazareth, or at least the ideal personality whom Paul had evolved from his own inner consciousness, and called by that beloved name. It is one of the great misfortunes of Biblical nomenclature that the Old Testament title for Jehovah and the New Testament title for Jesus, Kurios, are both translated Lord. It is a pure coincidence. The Old Testament Lord and the New Testament Lord have no common meaning whatsoever. But this coincidence has been immensely fruitful of misconception in the Christian world. It has gone far to make the opinion prevail that the Lord (Master) Jesus was the Lord (Ruler) God. All this is by the way. When Paul cried to the Philippians, "Rejoice in the Lord!" he was, as I have said, thinking of Jesus, not of the Almighty. But generally, when we quote his words, we think of the Almighty. Take it whichever way you will, the injunction is for you not less than for those to whom Paul wrote his letter eighteen hundred and twenty-seven years ago. To rejoice in Jesus of Nazareth is still possible, even for those who have recurred to the humanitarian conception of his life which was antecedent to the vast theological idealization and distortion which, for nearly the whole course of Christian history, has concealed from men the aspect of their brother man. should we not rejoice in one whose moral greatness, whose immense compassion, whose filial trust, and whose fraternal love give such expansion to our sense of spiritual things as comes to us from no other personality in all the range of human excellence! But Paul's sense of the personality of Jesus was extremely weak. He had never seen his face. How He had never listened with the twelve or with the multitude to those lovely parables which proclaim Jesus first among the poets of Judea, as he was first among her prophets and her saints. It was the spirit of Jesus in which he rejoiced, the spirit of compassion, trust, and love. And it is not as if Jesus had exhausted this spirit, as if he could. "Whene'er a noble deed is wrought, Whene'er is spoken a noble thought, To higher levels rise." And there is something here that will enable us, when things go hard with us, to rise above our disappointments and our sufferings and rebuffs into an atmosphere of peace and joy. The literature of pessimism, of contempt for human nature, of the worthlessness of life, was never so abundant as at the present time; and there are many who rejoice in it for what it is. But there is other literature; and, if we are wise, we shall rejoice in that, and, doing so, we shall rejoice in the Lord, in the Master, as his disciples called him; as you called your teacher in the village school,-alas, how long ago! we shall rejoice in him with as distinct reality as if we rejoiced in some word or deed recorded of him in the New Testament. For we cannot read of any nobleness of speech or act, however imaginative the form, and not know that equal nobleness is possible for breathing men, and has been actual a thousand times. But it is not as if we were confined to the literature of imagination. I count myself happy in no mean or paltry fashion that I have always loved to read the biographies of great and influential men, and even of those not great or influential. There is but one better way to fortify the heart against the scepticism of the many who are crying, "Who will show us any good?" Say to them, "Here, here, and here." Here in this life of Channing, here in this life of Parker, here in this life of Darwin, in this life of Garrison, in this life of Gannett, in this life of Lucretia Mott, in this life of Dorothea Dix, in this life of Mrs. Somerville, or George Eliot, or Lydia Maria Child! Oh, but there are hundreds of these books! Only one better way, I said, of fortifying ourselves against the pessimism that is coming in upon us like a flood; and that is, to remind ourselves what good and truth, what tenderness, what compassion, what fidelity, we ourselves have known, and then that everywhere there are men and women who can rejoice, as we do in our own, in men and women to whom all things are possible, all things that make for righteousness and truth and love. Love is the Lord of Life. It is the same love that was in Judea, is now, and ever shall be. that always; and again I say unto you, Rejoice! Rejoice in FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE.* ONE of the happiest fortunes of my life has been to enjoy. the friendship of several of the most venerable of our Unitarian ministers, the most venerated, too,- Dewey and Furness and Bellows and Bartol and Hedge. I must be careful how I speak, or I shall be allowing myself old; for, when I came to Brooklyn, Dr. Bellows was exactly of my present age, Dr. Furness was sixty-two, Dr. Bartol fifty-one, Dr. Hedge fifty-nine. Dr. Dewey was born in the same year with his friend William Cullen Bryant (1794); and he was already seventy when I met him for the first time, right here, as full of tremulous anxiety at the prospect of his morning service as if it were to be his first attempt,— no sign of age, for he told Dr. Bellows that his knees always smote each other when he entered the pulpit. There is among you one who was an habitual hearer of his preaching seventy years ago, in Gloucester, when he was wavering in his Orthodoxy, which shortly after he abjured. In his society, I seem to be in touch with the beginnings of Unitarianism in America; for it was only six or seven years after the outbreak of the Unitarian controversy that he was (informally) invited to be Channing's colleague, but declined, perhaps because with Dr. Channing in the pulpit it was impossible to realize the * At the request of friends, I allow this discourse to be printed in my sermon series, not without hesitation, lest its undrest, familiar style, especially in the former part, should seem below the dignity of my theme. It must be understood that it was prepared as a confidential talk with my own people. To eliminate the matter personal to them and myself would require such recasting of the whole as I have neither time nor courage to attempt. I cannot "mar my work, though vain." This discourse was preached October 5, and I have since been confirmed in some of its judgments by those of Mr. Allen in his admirable article on Dr. Hedge in the October Unitarian Review. No one had better opportunity than Mr. Allen to know Dr. Hedge's mind and life, and after him I speak with bated breath. ideal of the apostle,—“forgetting the things that are behind." If I had enjoyed no personal relationship with Dr. Hedge, I should have felt it right to speak to you, some time, of his life and work; for he was one of our leaders, one of our greatest men, one of the principal actors in a great drama of progressive thought. But, had he been the least of the apostles, I must still have thrown my pebble on his cairn, because he sent me here in 1864, with the assurance to your committee that I was the man you wanted for your minister, your noble Staples being dead. I have often told you he had never heard me preach, and hence, perhaps, his hearty commendation. But, as my Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the Divinity School, I had read to him essays on Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Saint Bernard, and Calvin; and it was my passionate interest in biographical studies that first. won for me his warm regard, as it was his magnificent portrayal of the great men of Christian History that first won my boundless admiration. I am very certain that the proudest day of my whole life—I do not say the happiest that in my second year, when he asked me for my essay on Tertullian for the Christian Examiner, of which he was then editor. I sat in my pleasant room, where Theodore Parker had "toiled terribly" for two years in his young manhood, and received the homage of my fellow-students, and recalled the saying of the dying emperor, "I feel myself becoming a god." Not long ago I tried to read that essay; but my powers of comprehension were not equal to the task. was At the time of my graduation, he preached a sermon to my class, and it proved to be the most provoking of discussion and dissent of any sermon he had ever preached. Since Theodore Parker's "Transient and Permanent," in 1841, only Dr. Bellows's "Suspense of Faith," five or six years before Dr. Hedge's, had made such a sensation. There was a war of articles and pamphlets over it; and Mr. Longfellow, at my ordination six months later, made it the object of distinct animadversion. To my dismay, it was a vigorous |