beauty and persuasion on our mortal state! I have not begun to tell what I have felt and known of this in favored hours, what you have felt and known. But, if I have not wholly failed to put in words what sometimes fills the spaces of my heart with an unutterable joy, I have made some things clear, some things that will grow clearer to you as you take them home and think of them in that deep inward silence where the voice of God is ever heard most clearly, as if he walked our garden with us in the coolness of the day. God grant that this idea and this hope and this assurance may be so real to us, so genuine, so true, a fact so perfectly substantial and inexpugnable in our lives, that it shall be for each and every one of us a power of intellectual prophecy, of comfort in our sorrow, of moral consecration that shall lift our lives up to a higher level and a clearer light, making all present things more beautiful, and from our thought of death removing every fear.

"Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell

When I embark.

"Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me;

And may there be no moaning of the bar

When I put out to sea,

"But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home."

WHY I AM A UNITARIAN.*

As a matter of fact, it is very possible that I am a Unitarian because I was to the Unitarian manner born and reared, my parents attending the Unitarian church in the old sea-girt town of Marblehead, and I following their example. But I am bound to say that, though two better people never lived, for all their simple trust in the eternal goodness and their absolute fidelity in every calling to which they were called, they had "no religion, to speak of." They were not formally religious, not church members. They held no definite creed, and they took no pains to fashion one for me. But, as a boy and youth, I went to the Unitarian church, and heard the exposition of its doctrinal position, but for which it is possible my opinions may have taken another turn; for the unconscious influences of youth are powerful both for evil and for good. If it was the environment of my boyhood and my youth that made me a Unitarian, then I am more glad than I can say that it was a Unitarian environment; for the principles and beliefs of Unitarians are now so precious to my mind, and its traditions are so inspiring to my heart, that I am compelled to feel that without them my life would have been far less joyous and serene and satisfactory than it has been so far.

But what is wanted of me in this series of confessions is

*Although this number of our series preserves the usual form upon the title-page, it is not a sermon, as the reader will easily discover. It is an article that appeared in the New York Press of Dec. 21, 1890, one of a series by different preachers, giving reasons for the faith that is in them. It is reprinted here, with the permission of the publishers to whom it belongs, by the advice of friends, who think its close resemblance to my Unity Tract, "What do Unitarians believe?" will not prevent its serving a good

turn.

not, I suspect, the historical genesis of my Unitarian belief, but the conscious and deliberate reasons that I give myself and others for holding it so confidently and contentedly as I do. These reasons are such that it seems to me that, if I had been born a Mohammedan or a Buddhist, an Episcopalian or Presbyterian, I should have been as convinced a Unitarian as I am. For, in my conscious and deliberate thinking, I am a Unitarian because its principles and its beliefs commend themselves to me as the most rational that I am able to conceive, with the help of all the creeds of Christendom and those beyond, and the most satisfactory imaginable to my mind and heart. I know that there are those who will imagine that I thus confess a fatal error at the start,

the making of reason, and not revelation, the basis of my belief. But, in doing this frankly and openly, I only do what others are obliged to do secretly and clandestinely. They reckon ill who think they can leave reason out or assign to it a less than fundamental place. Without this theirs is the fabled world which rested on an elephant, and the elephant on four tortoises, and so on. Must not the Protestant who accepts the Bible as an authoritative revelation have a reason for accepting it as such? and must not the Roman Catholic who accepts the Church as the treasury of tradition and the interpreter of the Bible, and hence the source of his authoritative revelation, have a reason for accepting it as such? Thus fundamentally, in my reliance upon reason, I am conditioned precisely as my Presbyterian or Roman Catholic friend. The difference is that they do not feel at liberty to question the contents of Church or Bible, while I do. But does it not stand to reason there is no avoiding this appeal that, if reason is sufficient to settle the claims of a revelation to be considered such, it is also equal to the rational criticism of its contents. And, however it may have been in past times, it is certain that in our own the Roman Catholic and orthodox Protestant alike endeavor to establish the reasonableness not only of their general claim, but of the contents of their revelation of the Church

or Book. Cardinal Manning says that, when doctrines are approved by reason, they cease to be doctrines of revelation, and that the first step toward infidelity is to attempt to rationalize dogma. If this be so, then Cardinal Newman took many steps that way, and did his best to deprive the doctrines of the Church of their character of revelation, because he did his best to give them a reasonable appearance and win for them a rational assent.

I am a Unitarian because I am rationally convinced of the soundness of those principles for which Unitarianism stands, and those beliefs which have been pre-eminently characteristic of its development. Its principles are three, and they are: (1) The right and duty of every man to exercise his freest thought upon the highest themes; (2) The right and duty of making reasonableness, or rationality, the final test of truth; (3) The superiority of character to creed, of conduct to belief. Concerning these principles there is among Unitarians entire agreement, though not always perfect courage in their application to practical exigencies that arise in our denominational life. An obvious corollary of the first of these three principles is the right of every man to fashion his own creed. From first to last there have been various small attempts to overrule this right, and formulate a creed which should be used as a limitation or test of fellowship. Such an attempt was made in 1865, when our National Conference was organized, and again a few years later. But the attempt, whenever made and seconded by whatever earnestness or ability, has always failed, or the creed devised has straightway lapsed into "innocuous desuetude." Even when the creed-making clique has deceived itself and a few others with the assurance that what it wanted was not a creed, but "a statement of purpose," but little headway has been made. Moreover, no creed, however unanimously accepted by a general Unitarian body, would have any authority for our Unitarian churches. The system of these churches is without exception purely Congregational. Not one of them acknowledges in any least degree the authority of any central