pretations; and the design of creation, the nature of man,
and the destiny of humanity are seen in more alluring colors. The
expectations of the future are no longer made terrible by visions of a
dreadful God; but beneficence and goodness smile through all the
purposes of a loving Father.

All this is gain, is strength, is progress. But what shall we say of
that fierce spirit of religious antagonism, which resulted from the
disruption of the unity of the church? Of that decline in power which
can only exist by consolidation of effort in sympathy of spirit? Of the
loss of that capacity through powerful organization to influence men, to
perform vast deeds of benevolence, superintend the spiritual and
material conditions of the indigent, provide for the comfort of the
poor, check the encroachment of the strong on the weak, and hold
community in respectful awe by the force of its moral and religious
sentiments? The cultivation of the intellectual faculties released the
nations from the domination of a narrow-minded spiritual power; but it
caused men to forget, to a great extent, while in the hot pursuit of
knowledge, that moral culture is equally as essential as mental. To the
intellectual gain, during this period of development, we must add a
corresponding moral or religious loss. We miss, in modern life, the
ever-present, all-pervading, conscious sense of high individual
accountability which directed the thoughts, controlled the feelings, and
overshadowed the lives of the children of the former stage of progress.
The activities of intellectual and material existence absorb the energy
of our era, and leave little inclination and less strength for the
cultivation and expansion of the deeper faculties of man's nature. In
all that side of religious progress which comes from the inculcation of
true ideas concerning God, man, human destiny, and human duty; in all
which belongs to the _intellectual_ side of religion, the side which
enhances our knowledge of what should be done, we have far surpassed the
nations and the people of the past. But in all that pertains to the
emotional, the devotional, and especially to the _moral_ side of
religion, we are far behind them. The animating spirit of life, under
the predominating influence of the religious sentiment, was, as we have
seen, a conscientious endeavor to live, in all ways, a life of purity,
of virtue, and of implicit obedience to the highest dictates of truth,
according to the