m him. The beliefs and the voice of the laymen, those in
our churches and those out of our churches, must be taken into account
and reckoned with. Jesus is too large and too universal a character to
be longer the sole possession, the property of any organisation.

There is a splendid body of young men and young women numbering into
untold thousands, who are being captured by the personality and the
simple direct message of Jesus. Many of these have caught his spirit and
are going off into other lines of the Master's service. They are doing
effective and telling work there. Remember that when the spirit of the
Christ seizes a man, it is through the channel of present-day forms and
present-day terms, not in those of fifteen hundred, or sixteen hundred,
or even three hundred years ago.

There is a spirit of intellectual honesty that prevents many men and
women from subscribing to anything to which they cannot give their
intellectual assent, as well as their moral and spiritual assent. They
do not object to creeds. They know that a creed is but a statement, a
statement of a man's or a woman's belief, whether it be in connection
with religion, or in connection with anything else. But what they do
object to is dogma, that unholy thing that lives on credulity, that is
therefore destructive of the intellectual and the moral life of every
man and every woman who allows it to lay its paralysing hand upon them,
that can be held to if one is at all honest and given to thought, only
through intellectual chicanery.

We must not forget also that God is still at work, revealing Himself
more fully to mankind through modern prophets, through modern agencies.
His revelation is not closed. It is still going on. The silly
presumption in the statement therefore--"the truth once delivered."

It is well occasionally to call to mind these words by Robert Burns,
singing free and with an untrammelled mind and soul from his
heather-covered hills:

Here's freedom to him that wad read,
Here's freedom to him that wad write;
There's nane ever feared that the truth should be heared
But them that the truth wad indict.

It is essential to remember that we are in possession of knowledge, that
we are face to face with conditions that are different from any in the
previous history of Christendom. The Christian church must be sure that
it moves fast enough so as not to alienate, but to draw into it that
great body of intellectually