THE CHAIRMAN. I am sure we cannot do better than to take up this thought by singing the second of the hymns which have been selected for this afternoon, "Life of Ages, richly poured." Inspiration. LIFE of Ages, richly poured, Never was to chosen race The unstinted tide confined; Thine is every time and place, Fountain sweet of heart and mind! Breathing in the thinker's creed, Pulsing in the hero's blood, Consecrating art and song, Holy book and pilgrim track, From the sacred limits back, Life of Ages, richly poured, Love of God, unspent and free, SAMUEL JOHNSON. THE CHAIRMAN (referring to the unaccustomed tune just used for the hymn). In that Church-State of the future which I prophesied so confidently, where Dr. Hosmer and Mrs. Howe edit and look after the hymnology, the habit of having different familiar tunes hitched up to the same words in different hymn-books will be a capital offence. That kind of hymnological bigamy will not be allowed, and we shall sing a great deal better than we do now. Our next speaker is a gentleman who was formerly connected with I do not know whether he is yet thoroughly disconnected from-the great Episcopal Church. He has had the advantage of knowing that great organization from the inside; and he has had the advantage as a student and observer of knowing other organizations. He can bring us a great deal of helpful, practical, first-hand information. Practically, one representative after another of the great religious organizations comes to our meetings and tells us that everything is all right. They have all got religion; they have got a progressive religion; they have got all that is needed, and they are just going to move on some of them. And as I listen to one after another I wonder how it can all be perfectly true, and how it seems to some of the people who have been inside. However, I am not going to prescribe in the least Mr. Cox's subject; I am simply reminding you and reminding him that in a general way our theme is this great question of where we are and what we are coming to, so far as the church of the future is concerned. I have very great pleasure in presenting to you the Rev. George Clarke Cox, formerly of Cincinnati. [Applause.] REMARKS BY REV. GEORGE CLARKE COX. I am afraid that the Chairman does not read the Boston papers with the care that he should, otherwise he would have seen, with some of the rest of you, I am sure, that I had the great misfortune to be deposed from the Episcopal ministry on the twenty-third of April. MR. COX. It was, however, my own act which caused it, as I had withdrawn from that ministry in a formal letter to my bishop. I had not proposed to trouble you with my own affairs in this connection, except in so far as they bear upon yours, upon this Association, and its meaning. I did belong to the Episcopal church all my life; I was a minister of it for almost twenty years, and I love it as I have ever loved it and as I always expect to love it. It was not with any disrespect, but with the profoundest regret, that I found myself forced to take such a stand, and to face the theological situation in such a manner that by and by I came to the conclusion that there was not any hope for me in the Episcopal church. That is simply because I have been profoundly convinced that when one has to choose between a religion of authority and there are many of them—and the religion of the spirit, there is simply one thing for him to do. That one thing I have chosen to do. At this moment I stand outside of any religious organization. Although such opinions as I now hold, if I had come to them many years ago, would have made me instantly and without hesitation with whatever regret renounce any orthodox ministry whatever, yet I agree deeply, profoundly, not only with the religious faith of my fathers in the Episcopal church, but with the religious faith of those earlier fathers who belonged to the Jewish church. I agree with the faith of those collateral ancestors of mine who lived in India, and with those aboriginal ancestors who lived in North America, and with any other people, on this continent or any other, or in the starry heavens. Whatever any man has tried to do in the way of formulating his attitude toward the universe and his consequent attitude toward man with that I feel a profound sympathy. I shall never renounce that, any more These are the roots of than I would renounce my mother. my being. I cannot renounce the universe. The universe may be evil. That it is largely evil I believe. my own being? I recognize the relationship! And when that is the case, one may well feel as Huxley has so well expressed it in his essay on "Ethics and Evolution" that the fact that we have come to the consciousness that the thing is largely evil and that we do not mean to stand it, that we are going to make it better, that we are going to make it different, that we are going to make it perfect if we can, is neither a denial of one's kinship with the past nor a denial of any of those religious faiths in which we may have been nurtured. Yet it does mean, I think, that when we are talking about the church of to-day we should face things in a much more radical fashion than I am in the habit of finding people face them, even here in the Free Religious Association if I may be pardoned for saying this the first time I speak before you. (I hope it may not be the last time.) There are, it seems to me, very few people who face the real idea involved in the expression, "The Kingdom of Heaven." The great majority talk very much as if it were like one of those Platonic ideas which exist away off somewhere or other in a beautiful region which nothing ever troubled; as if, either by hypnotizing one's self, or by having faith either in God or in "something," it did not much matter what, you could suddenly realize it all. There is a great deal of modern thinking, it seems to me, which tends in that direction to saying that if we only had faith enough our eyes would be opened and we should see the Kingdom of God. Well, I believe that, too, but I believe it in a dynamic sense, not at all in a static sense. I believe that the very first thing we have to do, in order to realize what the church of to-day, or the church of to-morrow, is to be, is to realize that there is no such static Kingdom of Heaven anywhere in this universe. It is our business to bring about the Kingdom of Heaven. Now, you may have some conception of God which is utterly different from mine. I do not propose to say what mine is, to-day, except to hint at it in this way—that I sympathize with all that God is trying to do for the betterment of the universe which He has made. I sympathize with His failures for there are failures, and lots of them. I hope He sympathizes with me when I see the things which perhaps He could not do—which at any rate He did not do. And I say, 66 'I don't know whether God intended this to be that way or not, and I don't much care-I am going to change it if I I am going to make it better." [Applause.] Now, I very much fancy that this is heresy. can. MR. JAMES H. WEST.No; it is the truth! MR. COX. Well, I think it is true. heresies in the past have been proven true. A good many THE CHAIRMAN. Let us think it is heresy if we can; it is more interesting. MR. COX. Well, that is not the question with me. The whole thing comes to this: When we are thinking about what the church of to-day is going to be, what it ought to be, I think we want to wipe out just about ninety-nine per cent. of all the ideas of self-gratulation that we have about what the church is; and this without any disparagement of the joy and the comfort and the peace that it has been to any one of us, and which I am sure it has been to me. Will you allow me to tell you a story? I will abbreviate it, though I hate to do so. I wish I had the book here and that you had the time to listen to Robert Louis Stevenson's fable entitled "Faith, Half-Faith, and No Faith at all." If you have not read it I hope you will read it. I will give the outline rapidly. He says there were three men who went on a pilgrimage to Odin; one was a priest, another was a virtuous person (I hope you see the distinction), and the third was an old rover |