before the advent of their noble ruler. We must be able to say to every opposition, We are doing a great work,' and cannot leave it.

WE ARE DOING A GREAT WORK.

We are a CHURCH. We are conscious that man is the religious creature. We know that the Supreme Being has placed a witness of himself in humanity, and that, in all ages, under all conditions, man has endeavored to obey its promptings. Tradition brings to us, from a remote past, the evidence of this presence. It is shown in the rites of savageism, and in the imaginings and incantations of fetichism. History, dawning on the night of tradition, records the constant upward endeavor of the religious nature. It is revealed in the aspirations and terrors of polytheism, and in the piety and philanthropy which appeared when the shining summit was reached, and man stood in the light of an omnipotent and all-wise Unity. We have seen that, from the earliest and most infantile human consciousness, to the latest and most exalted Christianity, humanity has been guided by a witness of the Supreme Being. Each period of this development has culminated in a faith and an organized worship. This faith and worship is the Church. It is the shrine each generation makes for its most sacred thoughts and deeds. It is the testimony of each era to the indwelling of God in the soul. It builds temples, asserts creeds, and performs duties. It is the deepest and holiest impress man makes on nature. We are, therefore, a Church.

But, because our religious life has been shown its best manifestation in Jesus Christ, the prophet of Nazareth, we are a CHRISTIAN CHURCH. We believe, while God is present in humanity, and religion is a human thing, that Jesus Christ is the medium of God's best revelation of himself to us, and that Christianity is the highest form of religion. We confess ourselves to be the disciples of Jesus Christ, striving to realize his spirit, that we may be the approved children of God, and striving to bring our fellowcreatures into the same discipleship, that there may be established over the sin of the world the kingdom of holi

ness. We endeavor, through Christ, to love God supremely as our Monarch and Father; and mankind, the subjects of our Ruler and children of our Father, as ourselves. Every truth which reveals to us the Majesty and Fatherhood of God, every inducement which shows to us the Brotherhood of Man, we profess to receive and attempt to realize. We are, therefore, a Christian Church.

And we are a UNITARIAN CHRISTIAN CHURCH. While we believe that the religion of Jesus Christ is the highest form of religion, while we are convinced that it is the source of the piety and philanthropy which is the boast of the civilization of the past eighteen centuries, we in no measure accept the theology which has been associated with Christianity. The dogma of the Trinity, which had its origin in the mysticism that the Christian Church received in some of its early converts, and the many other articles of belief connected with it, are so antagonistic to our judgments of truth, that we have separated from them altogether. Our religious life, in common with that of the rest of Christendom, accepts Jesus Christ as its light and life, and in his spirit it worships the Father and loves mankind. Our intellectual life believes the Father to be the one God, the omnipotent, all-wise Creator, and mankind, which is endowed with reason, freedom, and responsibility, to be individually responsible for its beliefs.

Being a Church, we are answering, as religious creatures, the voice of God within us; as a Christian Church, we are endeavoring, as the disciples of Jesus Christ, to fill the earth with holiness and love; as a Unitarian Christian Church, we are trying to lift off ignorance and superstition from the minds of our fellow-creatures, by teaching the gospel of God's omnipotent, all-wise Unity, and that of the other faiths our free thought has taught us.

We are thus doing a great work; a work which demands our most earnest energies and devout consecration.

Let us, therefore, endeavor to realize fully the purpose for which we have been united as pastor and church. Unitarian Christianity is the Jerusalem whose walls we are to rear as the walls of salvation, and whose gates we are to swing as the gates of praise; and each of us should

be like Nehemiah, as earnest, as unswerving in the determination of our purpose, and as consecrated to our work.

Let us believe, firmly, that God is the ONE all-powerful, all-wise Being Let us do every possible thing to make those whom we influence receive this faith. As advocates of this belief, we should insist that, because God is omnipotent, he never was, nor can he ever be, defeated; that human nature was not ruined against the divine will, and that the physical world is not under the divine curse. And we should insist that because God is all-wise, he has, in his wisdom, made all things, and will guide and dispose of all things by his wisdom forever. When Calvary is represented as a place where Divine anger was appeased by the shedding of Divine blood, when it is asserted that, on the cross, as a victim of God's justice, "God, the mighty Maker, died," let us be true to a better faith, and oppose the thought which imagines God to be so fond of dramatic display as to occupy Himself with a tragedy so unnecessary to omnipotence, and so prversive of every knowledge we have of wisdom, as that which is pictured in the Trinitarian description of the death of Christ. When salvation is preached as a deliverance from an eternal, physical hell, let us be true to a better faith, by denying the existence of any such hell, and proclaiming in its stead a salvation from sin and its natural penalties, and a redemption found in an endless change from the image of the earthly into the image of the heavenly. Heaven is not the celestial idleness the soul is thought by many to receive at the death of the body, but is an eternal revealing of the spirit of God in us in holiness and truth, and an eternal manifestation of the life of God from us in beauty and love.

When Trinitarianism declares Jesus Christ to be "very God of very God," of the same essence with the Father, let us be true to a better faith, denying the declaration by science and intuition and the words we have direct from the lips of Jesus and his disciples. Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life of the soul. As such, we should receive him faithfully; but we should deny for him and with him always the glory which shines around Deity. And when a misguided reverence produces some