tters of
this sort, saying, in effect: What difference does it make? What is
involved that is of any importance? Why not let everybody worship and
believe as he pleases? A writer in the New York Times? I think perhaps
more than one, but one specially I have in mind has said substantially
the same thing. It does not make any difference. Let people worship as
they please, let them believe as they please, let them go their own
way. What difference does it make?

Friends, it makes no difference at all, provided there is no such thing
in the world as religious truth. If there is, it makes all difference.
Let us take this "Don't care" and "No matter" theory for a moment, and
in the light of it consider a few of the grandest lives of the world.

If it makes no difference what a man believes in religion or how he
worships or what he tries to do, how does it happen that we Unitarians,
for example, glorify Theodore Parker, and count him a great moral and
intellectual hero? Why should he have made himself so unpopular as to
be cast out even of the Unitarian fellowship? Was he contending for
nothing? Was he a fool? was he making himself uncomfortable over
imaginary distinctions? Perhaps; but, then, why are we foolish enough
to honor him?

Why is it that we glorify Channing, who at an earlier period was cast
out of the best religious society of the world for what he believed to
be a great principle? Why is it to-day that we lift John Wesley on such
a lofty pedestal of admiration? He left the Church of England, or was
cast out of it, went among the poor, preached a great religious reform,
led a magnificent crusade, teaching a higher and grander spiritual
religion, a religion of heart, of life, of character, against the mere
formalism of the Church of his time. Was he contending about airy
nothings without local habitation or a name? If so, why are we so
foolish as to admire him?

Go back further to Martin Luther, putting himself in danger of his
life, standing against banded Europe, and saying, "Here I stand: God
help me, I can do no otherwise!" What is the use? What did he do it
for? If it made no difference whether a man worshipped God
intelligently or according to the things Luther thought all wrong, what
was the difference? What was he contending about, and why does the
world bow down to him with reverence and honor?

Why are we fools enough to honor the men who were burned at Oxford? Why
do we honor to-day the line of sain