dness--has produced a very much wider and deeper
effect than I could have hoped it would do. That was a sermon preached
in a Christian church to a congregation, which, at least, professed and
called itself Christian. To-night I am going to ask you to listen to a
secular sermon preached from the same text. It will be very brief,
because I know that you have a custom, and a very good one, of following
discourses with discussion, and as I am going to raise a few distinctly
controversial subjects, I want to leave plenty of our available time
over for the discussion.

"The theme of my sermon last Sunday at St. Chrysostom's may be summed up
in one word--Honesty. The essence of the Sermon on the Mount is just
honesty. I suppose everyone here has read it, and therefore you will
remember that from beginning to end there is not a word of dogma in it.
In other words it is absolutely untheological. Perhaps this fact, a very
important one, has never struck some of you before. When the Master
preached that sermon, he, as I believe, deliberately left out every
reference to dogma or doctrine, creed or church, so that men, whatever
their belief, their nation or their race, could equally accept it as a
universal rule of life and conduct.

"Some of us here believe in miracles, some do not. I do, and, so
believing, I think that the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest of all
miracles. It is a greater thing to preach a doctrine to which all honest
men, coming whithersoever they may from the ends of the earth, will and
must subscribe if they _are_ honest--a doctrine which is true for all
time and for all men, than to cleanse the leper or to raise the dead to
life.

"I will ask you to let me put this point in another way, and in a
certainly more attractive form. Let me read you the expression of this
universal truth in the words of two English poets separated from each
other by more than two hundred years of time and many mountain ridges
and deep valleys of changing thought and opinion:

"Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

"Thou great First Cause, least understood,
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art good,
And that myself am blind.

"Yet gave me, in this dark estate,
To see the good from ill;
And, binding nature fast in fate,
Left free the human will.

"Those line