, public opinion. Every
man, even to-day,

"Who each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are,"
has a grain of this salt of divine independence in him. To-day, even
as in the days of Pericles: "It is ever from the greatest hazards that
the greatest honors are gained," and the greatest hazard of all is to
shut your visor and couch your lance and have at your task with a
whispered: God and my Right! It is well to remember that under no
government, whether democratic or aristocratic, has the individual
ever been given any rights. He has always everywhere been pointed to
his duties; his rights he must conquer for himself.

The liberal in theology, as the liberal in politics, has perhaps
leaned too far toward softness. The democratization of religion has
gone on with the rest, and in our rebound from Calvin, and John Knox,
and Jonathan Edwards, we have left all discipline and authority out of
account. We have preached so persistently of the fatherhood of God, of
his nearness to us, of his profound pity for us, that we have lost
sight of his justice and his power. This nearness has become a sort of
innocuous neighborliness, and God is looked upon not as a ruler, but
as a vaporish good fellow whose chief business it is to forgive. We
have substituted a feverish-handed charity for a sinewy faith, and are
excusing our divorce from divinely imposed duties, by a cheerful but
illicit intercourse with chance acquaintances, all of whom are dubbed
social service.

This Cashmere-shawl theology is as idle an interpretation of man's
relation to the universe, and far more debilitating, than any that has
gone before. When we come to measure rulers who make divine claims for
their duties, from any such coign of flabbiness as this, no wonder we
stand dumb. I am willing to concede that perhaps even an emperor has
been baptized with the blood of the martyrs, and feels himself to be
in all sincerity the instrument of God; if we are to understand this
one, we must admit so much.

In certain departments of life, we not only grant, but we demand, that
our wives and mothers should look upon their special duties and
peculiar functions as divinely imparted, and as beyond argument, and
as above coercion. This assumption, therefore, of inalienable rights
is not so strange to us; on the contrary, it is an every-day affair in
most of our lives. This particular man