not all one Father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother? Respecting "the supremacy of practical morality in all the relations of life," who has pleaded on behalf of the moral verities and realities of religion with the power of Micah? — "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?" I wished, some time ago, when Washington Gladden made his appeal to the Committee on Expediency—I mean, the "Prudential Committee," that he might have asked, in obvious allusion to a giver of gifts which could not bear close scrutiny, "Shall I come before Him with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?" "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" To do justice, to love mercy, is to walk humbly with God.

I rejoice forasmuch as the meeting of to-day is held in a place of high associations, a place that is sacred to the memory of him whom we ought to hold in gratitude as perhaps the greatest single religious influence in the western world, one of the great religious liberators of his age, stern as Savanarola, brave as Luther, uncompromising as Calvin, learned as Erasmus, -Theodore Parker [applause], one of the truly prophetic figures of the last century.

Forty years' gain in religion! Forty years do not always signify gain in religion; centuries sometimes have passed leaving behind them only loss and retrogression. But the last forty Much of the gain

years have witnessed a real gain in religion. that has been wrought in the world of religion during the last half century is the fruit of the toil of the seers who have dwelt among you, the heavenly-minded Channing, the evil-smiting Theodore Parker, and that light-bringing soul from on high, Emerson, whose word of forty years ago was not alone protest against the past but prophecy of the future. [Applause.]

Remember that although you have journeyed forty years,

you have not so much come to the land of promise as to the promise of land. Canaan is like Boston-it is not a place, but an aspiration, a tendency, a point of departure, if you will. When my fathers came to Canaan they had not finished their journeying; they had merely begun their march through the ages. After forty soul-searching, strength-testing years, their work began. Thank God that in the world of the spirit there are no fixed goals, that the goal of the religious pioneer ever advances as he progresses toward the realization of his ideal. This is alike the beauty and the reward of spiritual pioneering. If it be true that in the world of religious pioneering man never is but always to be blest in his pursuit of the goal, doubly true is it of the Free Religious Association, seeing that you are committed and consecrated to the cause of freedom. Freedom is not an act; freedom is not a step; freedom is a process. It were devoutly to be wished that freedom be a consummation, but it is not. Freedom is ever becoming; freedom is ever to be. Though in hearty agreement with the presidential message of Mr. Mead, I venture to disagree with Mr. Mead himself— not, however, I fancy, without his partial approval to the extent of urging that there is as much need for the work of the Free Religious Association to-day as there was forty years ago; yea, more need. The need is greater because our vision is clearer, our aims are higher, our sense of fellowship is more outreaching.

I am disposed to congratulate you upon the circumstance that you have succeeded in avoiding the peril of institutionalizing yourselves; that the Free Religious Association has not become an institution. Happily for the cause of religious freedom and fellowship, you have remained a movement, an influence, a tide. Alas that it be true that an ideal when embodied in stone and brick often becomes all body, with the spirit flown. Great is the danger that ideals petrify as they attain unto not realization, but institutionalization. Shall it be said that the free church which Octavius Brooks Frothingham founded in New York failed, because it does not exist to-day? Though the free church movement led by Frothingham failed to incorporate itself in an enduring institution, it lives in the ethical

movement of which he may rightly be said to have been the forerunner. He foretold the glad tidings of the ethico-religious movement of our generation. If the Ethical Culture Society of our day and and its great leader, Felix Adler, should pass from the scene of life, the ethical movement would continue to abide in large part in the re-ethicized and spiritually regenerated churches of the land. The best part of its life will persist in the greater church, in the freer synagogue. The aim of the Free Religious Association, I take it, is not so much to establish new churches, though this last be one of the objects named by your Preamble, as to re-establish the old churches upon the eternal bases of "free, spiritual, and universal religion." [Applause.]

What have been the gains, if any, in religion in the past forty years? For one thing, as a result of the scientific study of ethics and religion on the one hand and of freedom in religion on the other, we have come to behold a new vision touching religion and what we once called the Bible. The scientific study of religion has not only given the Bible back to us again, reconstructed and renewed, but, with the aid of the searchings and the findings of comparative religion, has given us other Bibles. Instead of the Bible we have the Bibles of men. We no longer speak of the faith of men; instead of the faith of men we have the faiths of the world. The new science has proclaimed in accents unforgettable that man is not a fallen being, but a rising being; the new conscience points to the common destiny of rising man, whose common origin science has learned. Since man is a forward-looking, aspiring being, the heretic is not he who denies the actual divinity of Jesus, but he who denies the potential divinity of all men. [Applause.] Verily, there is infinitely much to do compared with the little done in the direction of religious freedom and fellowship, and of magnifying the moral emphasis. As long as in our day and year, 1907, a man can be condemned as a heretic because he speaks the truth that is in his heart, the work of the Free Religious Association is needed. When men shall have come to understand that the heretic is he who conceals truth and not he who reveals truth; that the heretic, in the words of

your own Theodore Parker, is he who does not reveal the truth as fast as God gives him to see the truth; that the heretic is he who fails to say, with Tolstoi, "I covet nothing but the truth," then in the direction of intellectual freedom your work shall have been done.

As for the increase of the spirit of fellowship, I need not remind you that much is yet to be done ere we shall have real and universal fellowship in spirit; ere men shall cease to account it "piety to be doing as I am doing"; ere men shall begin to understand that there may be oneness in spirit despite what John Milton has called men's "brotherly dissimilitudes." As for the emphasis of practical morality, that is, the establishment of the supremacy of morality in all the relations of life, Edward Everett Hale has this morning pointed in striking terms to the magnitude of the task that cries to be done. Is there a child laborer in the land? Is there a little toiler in a northern factory or in a southern mill? If there be, then the Free Religious Association requires to re-emphasize the supremacy of morality in all the relations of life. And I say to you because I am speaking to a group of men and women in New England - that though you may have upon your statute-books the best of laws in restriction of child-labor, if New England capital be invested in child-employing southern mills, blood-guiltiness is upon New England. [Applause.] It was Theodore Parker who said that capital is cowardly, that commerce is always timid. We must find it in our souls to overcome the fearfulness and cowardice of gold, and stand unbendingly for the supremacy of the moral ideal, because of the power of moral compulsion of the church. The church is doomed unless it stand resistlessly for righteousness in the world. Either the church will place all emphasis upon moral supremacy, or the church will cease to be, as it ought to cease to be if it be recreant herein. The church must cease its over-emphasis upon creed, its under-emphasis of deed. The church must build up not itself, but the kingdom of God here and now. The church must not stifle but hearten truthseekers; the church must make for that real fellowship in spirit that shall unite the workers in all the churches of God

and make them as one vast indivisible army in battling for the things of truth and righteousness.

Do you think that my hope for the church is too daring? Do you think that I am speaking harshly, unjustly, concerning the church? Daring is my hope for the church, keen is my vision of the failures of the church, because I love and would serve the church. If it be a sin to covet honor for the church, I am the most offending soul alive. But the honor which I covet for the church is not the honor of place and pride and power, but the honor of service. This is the mighty word spoken by the penitent Kundry in "Parsifal," when asked, "What will you do?" "Dienen! dienen!" Penitently yet undespairingly, the church, too, must cry," Dienen! dienen!"

"I would serve! I would serve!" I would serve the great moral causes of the world and build up the kingdom of God, the kingdom of righteousness, the kingdom of the Fatherhood of God, the republic of the Brotherhood of Man.

This is to be the work of the Free Religious Association, in the doing of which may you continue to have the furtherance of God's blessing! The Free Religious Association will not have done its work until every church in the land shall have become a free religious association. When every church. is free, when every church is religious, when all the churches. together form an association resting upon fellowship in spirit, then you may disband, but not before. [Applause.]

THE PRESIDENT. Rabbi Wise has made the interesting suggestion that in some sort the work represented by Felix Adler in New York may be regarded as the result or the continuation of the work done there by Octavius Frothingham. It is also an interesting fact that Felix Adler was the successor of Mr. Frothingham as President of this Association. He would have been glad to be with us this morning. It is only