fection of an unselfish culture with the light of devotion to humanity. It lies with you to confess that you have not been strong enough to assimilate your privileges; or to prove that you are able to use all that you have learned for the end for which it was intended. I believe the difference in the results depends very much less upon the educational system than it does upon the personal quality of the teachers and the men. Richard Porson was a university man, and he seemed to live chiefly to drink port and read Greek. Thomas Guthrie was a university man, and he proved that he meant what he said: "I live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the heaven that bends above me, And the good that I can do." III. It remains only to speak briefly, in the third place, of the part which religion ought to play in the purifying, preserving and sweetening of society. Hitherto I have spoken to you simply as men of intelligence and men of principle. But the loftiest reach of reason and the strongest inspiration of morality is religious faith. I know there are some thoughtful men, upright men, unselfish and useful men, who say that they have no such faith. But they are very few. And the reason of their rarity is because it is immensely difficult to be unselfish and useful and thoughtful, without a conscious faith in God, and the divine law, and the gospel of salvation, and the future life. I trust that none of you are going to try that desperate experiment. I trust that all of you have religion to guide and sustain you in life's hard and perilous adventure. If you have, I beg you to make sure that it is the right kind of religion. The name makes little difference. The outward form makes little difference. The test of its reality is its power to cleanse life and make it worth living; to save the things that are most precious in our existence from corruption and decay; to lend a new luster to our ideals and to feed our hopes with inextinguishable light; to produce characters which shall fulfil Christ's word and be "the salt of the earth." Religion is something which a man cannot invent for himself, nor keep to himself. If it does not show in his conduct, it does not exist in his heart. If he has just barely enough of it to save himself alone, it is doubtful whether he has even enough for that. Religion ought to hring out and intensify the flavor of all that is best in manhood, and make it fit, to use Wordsworth's noble phrase, "For human nature's daily food." Good citizens, honest workmen, cheerful comrades, true friends, gentlemen-that is what the product of religion should be. And the power that produces such men is the great antiseptic of society, to preserve it from decay. Decay begins in discord. It is the loss of balance in an organism. One part of the system gets too much nourishment, another part too little. Morbid processes are established. Tissues break down. In their débris all sorts of malignant growths take root. Ruin follows. Now this is precisely the danger to which the social organism is exposed. From this danger, religion is meant to preserve us. Certainly there can be no true Christianity which does not aim at this result. It should be a balancing, compensating, regulating power. It should keep the relations between man and man, between class and class, normal and healthful and mutually beneficent. It should humble the pride of the rich and moderate the envy of the poor. It should soften and ameliorate the unavoidable inequalities of life, and transform them from causes of jealous hatred into opportunities of loving and generous service. If it fails to do this, it is salt without savor, and when a social revolution comes, as the consequence of social corruption, men will cast out the unsalted religion and tread it under foot. Was not that what happened in the French Revolution? What did men care for the religion that had failed to curb sensuality and pride. and cruelty under the oppression of the old régime, the religion that had forgotten to deal bread to the hungry, to comfort the afflicted, to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free? What did they care for the religion that had done little or nothing to make men understand and love and help one another? Nothing. It was the first thing that they threw away in the madness of their revolt and trampled in the mire of their contempt. But was the world any better off without that false kind of religion than with it? Did the French Revolution really accomplish anything for the purification and preservation of society? No, it only turned things upside down, and brought the elements that had been at the bottom to the top. It did not really change those elements, or sweeten life, or arrest the processes of decay. The only thing that can do this is the true kind of religion, which brings men closer to one another by bringing them all near to God. Some people say that another revolution is coming in our own age and our own country. It is possible. There are signs of it. There has been a tremendous increase of luxury among the rich in the present generation. There has been a great increase of suffering among the poor in certain sections of our coantry. It was a startling fact that nearly six millions of people in 1896 cast a vote of practical discontent with the present social and commercial order. It may be that we are on the eve of a great overturning. I do not know. I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet. But I know that there is one thing that can make a revolution needless, one thing that is infinitely better than any revolution; and that is a real revival of religion-the religion that has already founded the hospital and the asylum and the free school, the religion that has broken the fetters of the slave, and lifted womanhood out of bondage and degradation, and put the arm of its protection around the helplessness and innocence of childhood, the religion that proves its faith by its works, and links the preaching of the fatherhood of God to the practice of the brotherhood of man. That religion is true Christianity, with plenty of salt in it which has not lost its savor. I believe that we are even now in the beginning of a renaissance of such religion, greater than the world has seen since the days of the Reformation. I believe that there is a rising tide of desire to find the true meaning of Christ's teaching, to feel the true power of Christ's life, to interpret the true significance of Christ's sacrifice, for the redemption of mankind. I believe that never before were there so many young men of culture, of intelligence, of character, passionately in earnest to find the way of making their religion speak, not in word only, but in power. I call you to-day, my brethren, to take your part, not with the idle, the frivolous, the faithless, the selfish, the gilded youth, but with the earnest, the manly, the devout, the devoted, the golden youth. I summon you to do your share in the renaissance of religion, for your own sake, for your fellow men's sake, for your country's sake. On this fair Sunday, when all around us tells of bright hope and glorious promise, let the vision of our country, with her perils, with her opportunities, with her temptations, with her splendid powers, with her threatening sins, rise before our souls. What needs she more, in this hour, than the cleansing, saving, conserving influence of right religion? What better service could we render her than to set our lives to the tune of these words of Christ, and be indeed the salt of our country, and through her growing power, of the whole earth? Ah, bright will be the day, and full of glory, when the bells of every church, of every schoolhouse, of every college, of every university, ring with the music of this mes sage, and find their echo in the hearts of the youth of America. That will be the chime of a new age. "Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; § 87 THE PERFECT MANHOOD By Henry Ward Beecher (Preached in the chapel of the West Point Military Academy, Sunday morning, June 13, 1869, before the graduating class.) "Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man."-EPH. iv. 13. The apostle, in the preceding verses, has been speaking of the variety of instruments employed in the promulgation of the Gospel. "He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers." He then states, generally, the object for which they were given-"For the perfecting of the saints; for the work of the ministry; for the edifying of the body of Christ" the general services of the church. And then, in the passage which I have selected, more particularly he declares, "Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man." All churches, all ordinances, all doctrines, all sorts of moral teachers, are ordained. for the sake of making perfect men; and Christianity may be said to be, in a general way, the art of being whole men, in distinction from partial men, and make-believe men. It is not enough to say that Christianity tends to make men better. It does that; but on the way to something higher. Its aim is to develop a perfect manhood. "Till we all come unto a perfect man." And that manhood can never be reached except in. Christ Jesus. This is not merely saying that men need divine help in all upward striving-which is strictly true; but it is teaching that human HENRY WARD BEECHER. Born at Litchfield, Conn., June 24, 1813; died at Brooklyn N. Y., March 8, 1887; graduated from Amherst College in 1834; studied Theology at Lane Seminary; settled as Presbyterian minister at Lawrenceburg, Ind., 1837; moved shortly thereafter to Indiana, where he preached until 1847; pastor of Plymouth Church (Congregational), Brooklyn, N. Y., 1847 nature, developed perfectly, becomes divine. We hold a nature in common with the divine nature. When we can work out from it the accidental, the transient, the local, that which is left is strictly divine— it is like Christ. No man can be divine in scope and degree; but in kind he may. Every oak-tree in the nursery is like the oak-tree of a hundred years. Not in size, but in nature, it is just as much an oak-tree as the biggest. We are not of the divine magnitude, nor of the divine scope, nor of the divine power; but we are of the divine nature. We have common natures-God and we; and these, not by figure, but really. One must not confound, then, Christianity and religion. Religion is the specific of which Christianity is the generic. The one is simply worship. The other is character. Religion is a partialism—a very noble partialism; but it is the employment of only one part of our nature, namely, that which relates to the divine and the invisible. Christianity, on the other hand, including this, and using it, takes in all the other faculties as well, and seeks, not to make men do right things, this and that, but to create a manhood in men. It would develop perfectly every power of the body, every faculty of the mind, and round out the whole. into a perfect man. Religion did not attempt to do that. It does not attempt to do it. Religion teaches men to pray, to worship, to awe, to venerate, to be obedient: but Christianity teaches men to be men all through, doing this, and doing all the other things besides. Religion would frame a just man. Christ would make a whole man. Religion would save a man. Christ would make him worth saving. The noble religion of the Hebrew trained men for an earthly commonwealth. Christ brought in immortality, and trained men for an earthly commonwealth, in order that they might become inhabitants of a higher, a heavenly commonwealth. It was because the full development of mankind required more room, and new and higher formative influences, that there was a new dispensation superinduced upon the former one. It is to this view of truth that I shall call your attention to-daynamely, the Christian idea of perfect manhood. Consider what the nature of this manhood must be. In some respects, it is already predetermined by the nature of man. It is not manhood that is to lie outside of the faculties with which we are already endowed. 'Grace and the divine Spirit certainly recreate us; but they add nothing to the organic nature of men. Perfect manhood will require the harmonious development of all the parts of the human mind and body, as God has already made them. And so, a perfect character is in some sense predetermined. Nothing is superfluous in man. No part too much; nothing too little. No appetite is infixed in our constitution but is useful; no passion that is superfluous; no force, or faculty, or func |