December, 1912. SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY IN A FREE CHURCH A Sermon Delivered November 17, 1912 by REV. ALBERT C. DIEFFENBACH in The First Unitarian Congregational Society Of HARTFORD, CONN. Published By SERMONS BY MR. DIEFFENBACH Series of 1912-13 October, 1912 OUR EYES SHALL SEE THINGS WHOLE November, 1912 EUCKEN AND THE SPIRITUAL NATURE December, 1912 SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY IN A FREE CHURCH Copies of these discourses may be had on application to the Sermon Publication Committee. TEXT: Matthew VII 29:- For he taught them as one having authority and not as the Scribes. John VI: 16: My doctrine is not mine but his that sent me. We are sometimes told that, being followers of the religion of the spirit—unhampered, that is to say, by the absolutism of either Pope of Catechism, we are therefore not under authority. As a matter of fact a Unitarian is bound in all essentials by authority as exacting and inexorable as any supliant is by His Holiness in Rome, or any Presbyterian whose religious law is set forth in catechetical order in the Westminster Confession. The authority in our religion is different in kind. The spirit of it is also different. But he must disabuse his mind who has a notion that it is a whimsical or capricious thing to be made, unmade, and remade according to his own good pleasure. It is not a cause for congratulation that many persons have so considered. themselves that is, absolutely final in all matters of faith and practice, and have thereby violated the laws of nature and of the spirit as well as gone far toward the embarrassment of the religion of freemen, and the church which steadfastly strives to serve in the cause of the "glorious liberty of the children of God." I. A Radical Difference in the Churches. Let us for a few moments consider this subject of authority. First, we should see that it has to do not merely with religion, but with every one of the higher forms of human endeavor. It is difficult in this favored day to believe, unless we have kept our history fresh in mind, that there was a time when not only men's religious beliefs, but their scientific new theories and investigations, their philosophical speculations, their artistic yearnings, their political hopes, were all under the suppressing hand of some outside, self-decreed power which spoke anathema and death to those who dared a departure into some expression of their inmost souls. Every variety of intellectual striving and achievement, and every one in the name of art, and of politics, as well as every forward movement in the field of religion, has known its martyrs, for persecution and reaction have gone hand in hand to hinder every variety of progress in the world. I mention this because we have much believed in the Church that martyrdom is a peculiarity attendant upon religious struggle. The effect has been to make religion a thing apart, not quite like an ordinary human and historic institution, where the means employed and the outcome are written down in history in unaffected and understandable terms. It has also been unfortunate that religious persecution has caused many of us to arrogate to ourselves a special unction, which both accepts without any merit of ours the fruit of the martyrs in religion and neglects altogether the tremendous sacrifice and service that our statesmen, our philosophers and scientists have given to mankind. He who reads history aright can see perfectly clearly that without the renaissance we should not have had the reformation; without the reformation we should not have had the French revolution; without the revolution we should not have today the crisis which will issue in the economic restoration. All of these things are indissolubly bound up together intellectual, political, economic and each is, in the last analysis, essentially religious and indispensable to that religious freedom which is under an authority of its own. Now the difference between the authority which |