and Revolution, accomplished results which must endure to
all time; they marked the great stages in humanity's onward march.
To-day, when systems and schemes of religion are going to pieces like
the dust of the dead, when mystery and miracle are becoming unthinkable
things in a world where all is law; when the most imposing pretensions
are subjected to so minute and pitiless an analysis; when every dogma
of council or creed can be tracked and traced with an unerring
precision to root ideas which govern the human mind in its undeveloped
stages; to-day, when, in spite of the destructive work being done, a
reverence and a true zeal for truth reigns as it never did before in
this world's history, when the sense of the responsibility and
solemnity of life weighs upon men so profoundly, there must, I say, be
some goal towards which humanity is moving, there must be some
synthesis which shall reconcile for them their aspirations and their
knowledge, some harmony which shall resolve the discordant notes of
life--in a word, there must be some

Far-off, Divine event
Towards which the whole creation moves.

What is that event? Unless a man is prepared to say that the present
chaotic condition of religious thought is to perpetuate itself, or that
we are to revert to the ideal of mediaevalism--a world iron-bound by
the dogmatism of self-appointed representatives of "all truth,"--or
unless we are to expect a mental paralysis consequent upon a universal
scepticism, there must be some definite bourne for which the forces now
at work in humanity are making. We are not able to believe in the
perpetuity of an unstable equilibrium in the world of mind any more
than in the universe of matter, nor does history show any warrant for
the expectation that the world will return to the discarded ideal of a
mediaeval theocracy, nor does the language of modern agnosticism, with
its hesitations and falterings, encourage one to believe that therein
is a solution, complete and final, of those obstinate questionings
which beset us. No; we believe with Kant in the indestructibility of
the religious sentiment. We hold that if the soul of man have not
whereon to feed, it will feed upon itself to its own destruction. We
are persuaded that the Infinite which is necessary to _explain_ the
finite, is alone adequate to satisfy its desires. Our faith is in a
"religion within the boundaries of mere reason".

In the first place, its beliefs ar