alarms. They are easily misled as to the real condition of things. They demand information. (3) There is a recurring restlessness in our body which resents the old familiar statement that Unitarianism has acted as an influence, as leaven. It is called a tame and inadequate conclusion. It is claimed that we must discard it, and that our progress depends on adopting a new standpoint of organization and denominational growth. I agree that we ought to organize more, solidify more, unite more; but I shall make my statements a defense of the familiar figure, and point out the dangers of repudiating our old methods.

In the present article I shall ask and try to answer the question, What did Unitarianism originally set out to do? In two articles which are to follow, the questions will be considered, What has it accomplished? and What is its future?

1. WHAT DID UNITARIANISM IN NEW ENGLAND SET OUT TO DO?

It is only after a lapse of time that we can measure and explain a movement, even as to what seemed at first the clear motives and plan of the originators. There is a Providential and unconscious element in the beginnings of great causes not fully seen by the participants. The Unitarian movement had, in its inception, the appearance of a protest, a revolt against Calvinism. It argued the unity of God against the Trinity, the spirit of the Bible against the letter, love against fear. The controversies and divisions seemed to be purely theological. But that was only secondary. The doctrinal battle was but a part of the unrolling campaign. We see now that there were, in 1815 and 1820, a large number of Christians in the churches of New England who found their lives unfed by the prevalent teaching and spirit. Certain doctrines then heard every Sunday were hostile to their reason, to their instincts, to the surrounding civil institutions. The spirit of religion was not encouraging to that large, loving, fraternal life, which, as disciples of Christ, they had a desire to realize. You must remem

ber that the most of what we call modern theory and thought had not appeared at that time. These first Unitarians did not love theological discussions in and for themselves. Nor has it ever been the desire of Unitarianism to dwell in the region of controversy. In this we are constantly misreported. All our teaching and preaching of belief has been to provide space for growth, incentives to action; freedom, not simply to think, but to think for humanity's welfare; not solely to have truth, but to use it for the glory of God and the good of man. Whether right or wrong, the fathers believed that they could not get life, and that more abundantly, from a system of doctrine constructed after the pattern of Calvinism; so they rose and attempted to "go forward" by a better way. We have never had a platform, or a formulated policy, or a denominational creed. From the start, down to our day, the union has been one of independent societies facing the same way, and working under the guidance of these three principles: 1. The love of truth; 2. Enthusiasm for humanity; 3. The spirit of Christ. These essentials were not distinctly seen at first, but no one can deny now that they were the roots and deciding sources of the movement. Unitarianism did not set out, primarily, to create a Church. It had one,-its polity congregational,

and it kept possession of a majority of the meeting-houses in this vicinity at the time of the exciting divisions. Historically, we are the Liberal branch of the old Congregational body which founded the colonies. Spiritually, we go back to the Apostolic days when churches were formed among the early disciples, with freedom and independence, and simple tests of membership. Unitarianism did not set out to produce an elaborate and final theology; its efforts in this direction were to simplify, to return; to trace again the lost lineaments of Jesus; to affirm the Fatherhood and Brotherhood, above all, to ring that text from shore to shore, "By their fruits ye shall know them." Its yearning was for unity of belief in the essentials of faith, and unity of action

in the building of God's kingdom on earth.

It was a positive aim. One that took no delight in needless attack or ruthless demolition. In brief, Unitarianism was an advance in theology and in practical religion. It aimed to stand for reason in religion and the rights of the intel. lect; but it waged a stronger contest for good works, for philanthropy, for character as God's test, for a life based on the two great commandments of love to God and love to man. In the glowing language of Dr. Bellows, "it affirmed the brotherhood of men, of races, of humanity; it called men to repentance and newness of life by a grander unfolding of the divine gift of life, of the wonders and glories that surround us in the natural world; it displayed the gracious opportunities of glorifying God in the love and service of our day and generation. It spoke for the poor, the wronged, the ignorant, and unfortunate. It sought to arouse the human soul to a sense of its latent capacity, to haunt it with thoughts of God, to make its immortality a thing felt and known by the thrill of its aspirations. To light by light; to God by godly ways; with Christ, in Christ's spirit; and righteousness earned, not borrowed,-earned by genuine service of God in the interest of humanity."

I do not find, in the history of our body, that any calm leader ever expected to sweep the land and to build up a great sect. Our watchwords and methods are against it. It was against all precedent to expect denominational splendor. Liberalism in religion never was and never will be a code of belief, or an ecclesiastical structure: it is a babit of soul, an atmosphere, a spirit. It rallies by broad unifying truths; it vitalizes literature and business; it makes religion an everyday concern; it tries to bring profession and practice into greater harmony; it touches secular affairs with uplifting sympathy, and makes a sanctuary in God's temples of nature and history. It is a wise judgment, a loving hope, and a tender charity,-"life and love," as Dr. Gannett was wont to say, "life and love,"

JEAN FRANCOIS MILLET.

The purchase of Millet's "Angelus " with American money, at an almost fabulous cost, and the recent exhibition of the picture in Chicago, have called attention anew to the artist, whose personal history is such an epic of heroism, and whose works are now generally recognized as a part of the world's most precious art treasures.

Alfred Trumble, a writer on Millet, takes pains to point out his picture of "The Sower" as strongly typical of all his productions, and at the same time peculiarly significant of the artist's own life. In this painting we are shown the figure of a sower at his task. This peasant swain is represented as "hardened and roughened by toil, clad in coarse garments, old, defiled by the stains of the humblest labor, and worn at all seasons till their final shreds and patches refuse to hold together. Striding over the ploughed field, where the black mould yields to his foot, the sower scatters seed from a hand calloused and misshapen by the rudest and harshest service. His movement has the expressionless regularity of a machine. His eyes survey space out of a face young with a youth without a to-morrow, and so schooled to its fate that it exhibits neither hopefulness nor despair. Along the crest of the hill a ploughman turns the last furrow with a yoke of oxen. Behind the sower a flock of crows clamor and brawl over the filchings of the grain he scatters. The last glow of the sunset warms the horizon, while the cold veil of twilight commences to descend upon the scene, bringing to labor and poverty their sole compensation, a few hours of rest. To those who are conversant with the material from which this picture is made, it must appeal as a melancholy allegory. It is an epic of labor unrewarded by its fruits. The seed which this sower casts out of his fingers, stif

Plato's test of "the true, the beautiful and the good" applies to this work of art, as paradoxical as it may at first seem. The subject is true because taken from real life. But where is the beautiful? This lies in the fact that the sower possesses attributes of the human soul which alone constitute its lasting beauty: he has a nature which can uncomplainingly make use of the powers allotted him; which can honestly perform the duty lying nearest at hand; which can be diligent in a work benefiting others more than himself. The good is the underlying spirit of the whole creation. The artist has brought us in sympathy with the humblest of the human family and thus has exalted all men. The sower is beset by manifold impediments, yet he is stronger than all of them together and will finally rise above them. His only ben ison at first seems that he may lie down some night and become a part of the mystery of the darkness about him; yet from that mystery will come a good inferior to no man's.

Jean Francois Millet has perhaps embodied in this work as high a conception of life as has been wrought out by man. He is at one with George Eliot, when she says: "There is in man a higher than love of happiness: he can do without happiness and instead thereof find blessedness." He is sounding the same note with Carlyle, who says: "It is not to taste things but to do noble and true things and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God made man, for which the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that and the dullest day drudge kindles into a hero."

The painter of "The Sower," a peasant himself, spent his life amid extreme

Millet's life is easily told: He was born in 1815 in the French village of Gruchy, "lying in the depths of a valley that opens upon the sea of the sav age Norman coast." He was nurtured mainly by his grandmother, for his parents were daily engaged in field labor. A devout old priest of a neighboring parish shaped the child's early training and perhaps gave that religious bent to his mind that afterwards characterized it.

When the lad at length began to show the instincts of an artist stirring in him, he was sent to Cherbourg for study. But poverty at home soon cut off his support and all hope seemed extinguished. The people about him, however, marking the diligence of the pale faced youth, decided at last to send him to Paris on a small annual allowance. Sometimes, while there, weary of the excitement and din of the city, he would make trips home on foot, paying his way by painting portraits and signboards for a few francs each. Among the former he would often sketch a Cherbourg maiden he had once seen and whose face it is said was never absent from his mind.

At last quitting Paris, Millet went back to Cherbourg and there set up a studio in the hope of repaying those to whom he was indebted. About this time he married.

It is related cur

iously enough that in his young wife people recognized the same face that he used to paint for bread as he traveled along the Normandy roads years before.

"His creed for art," says one of his biographers, "was brief. He said 'Go to nature; it is there close at hand that beauty lies; all you find there is proper to be expressed, if only your aim is high enough.' He was never tired of

saying 'the beautiful is the suitable. If I paint a mother I shall try to make her beautiful simply by her look at her child. Beauty is expression.' He would not tamper with a fact. A pure, serious aim undersweeps his work, and comes out in it like a transfiguration. He has been charged with painting ugliness, because he loved nature too well to play tricks with her, for the sake of getting sweet effects or pretty types. Cromwell said to his artist: Paint me as I am; wart, wrinkles and all.' The spirit of Millet was akin to that of the imperious Puritan. While thus loyal to his facts, whether treating the moor by moonlight or the flash of dawn, or a group of peasants, or the lonely shepherd, he invariably suggests more than bare nature reveals that perspective which the whole universe gives to each creature and thing, that light which comes from far and yet is not fictitious or strange, that saturation of the common with the glory of the divine."

It was indeed a fortunate day for the artist when circumstances constrained him to quit the city and to seek those rural haunts among which his genius always drew most inspiration.

In 1849 Cherbourg was under revolutionary rule, and to add to the misery a plague set in. Millet, in the hope of saving his family, hastened to Barbi zon, a little village on the border of the forest of Fountainbleau. Here, in a humble cot, during many years of resignation and unflinching devotion to a lofty ideal, lived Millet, the founder of a great school in one of the greatest art epochs of the world, and one of those heroes who, in the face of hunger and privation, conquered the future at the expense of the present and in bold disdain of the false and popular past. Here he died, only to have a trooping public throng his deserted studio, with mock eagerness to buy up his lightest scrap of work. It is the irony of fate that such a picture as "The Gleaners" brought only twelve francs,-that is to say, the price of a fortnight's bread for his family, while to-day it is held at 400,000 francs. "The Angelus," his life

work, yielded but 1,800 francs. It now has its home in America, valued at 580,650 francs. In this picture we naturally take most interest. Perhaps no great picture is more familiar to us all, through etchings and other modes of copying; and many thousands of our people have had the privilege of seeing the original painting.

At twilight two peasants, a man and a woman, are standing in a bare field, across which a church spire is dimly seen in the distance. The evening bell proclaims throughout the land the hour of prayer. They cease work and bow their uncovered heads, while the silvery tones seem to murmur "Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae."

This is all; yet, upon further thought, far from all. Millet was confident that these peasants and their life offered subjects to his easel as full of charm and dignity as the Greeks had for Praxiteles or Phidias.

It is interesting to think that this conception which Millet embodies in his "Angelus" has also been worked out by the great American word-painter, Washington Irving, in his Alhambra. "Presently the deep tones of the Cathe dral bell," writes Irving, 66 came swelling up the defiles, proclaiming the hour of oracion, or prayer. The note was responded to from the belfry of every church, and from the sweet bells of the convents among the mountains. The shepherd paused on the fold of the hill, the muleteer in the midst of the road, each took off his hat and remained motionless for a time, murmuring his evening prayer. There is always something solemn and pleasing in this custom, by which, at a melodious signal, every human being throughout the land recites, at the same moment, a tribute of thanks to God for the mercies of the day. It diffuses a transient sanctity over the land, and the sight of the sun in all his glory, adds not a little to the solemnity of the scene."

It was such a scene as this that moved Millet in his unique creation; as it was also a similar scene that inspired our American poet, Bret Harte, to the production of his beautiful lyric known as

and

Millet's "Angelus" has become the common treasure of the people; the reason is plain, for its simplicity and evident meaning seem almost universally to touch the popular heart.

Its great lesson is reverence and prayer. "The fact is, the whole picture is leavened by these. It is the touch of the Infinite upon the peasant which makes him to rise in stature and pulls him out of his poor environment. We do not think of him simply as the man that opened the furrows there upon the field, that his potato harvest might be gathered. We do not think of the woman merely as his helper in this hard toil. ... They are transfig, ured by something unseen at first. drifts across the horizon; it falls down the silences of the heavens; . . is the fact of the Eternal. They are not to be dissolved in that soil; . . they are destined for otherwhere than the ploughed field with the grain at the end of it. It is the Infinite that has touched them. . . And so we come to the charm of

It

this great master, who teaches by form

and color; and we learn that to his heart man is God's son, woman God's daughter, peasants though they be."

Jackson, Mich.

L. J. RICHARDSON.

THE GOOD AND THE EVIL IN THE TEACHINGS OF MR. MOODY.

A SERMON, BY REV. J. T. SUNDERLAND.

II.

Once, in the series of discourses which he has been delivering in our city, Mr. Moody came very near to genuine breadth: he proposed "love to one's enemies" as the test of Christianity. And even better than that, he went forward to say that the very best test you can make of a man's being a child of God is, "Can you repeat the Lord's Prayer, from the heart? Any one who can do that is a child of God, and a Christian." That was broad; that was Christ-like. But alas! almost in the next breath he had dropped back to the old level, and was insisting again the Bible, the upon everything in stories of Jonah and the whale, the speaking ass, and the rest, all being received as the inspired and the infallible word of God, and upon the acceptance of Christianity according to his theological scheme of salvation, as the only way of becoming a Christian.

A few weeks ago Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the Christian Union, and the successor of Henry Ward Beecher in Plymouth Pulpit, was asked, What is it

to be a Christian? He replied, "To be a Christian is, according to the New Testament phraseology, to be a follower of him, but to appreciate him, love him, Christ, not to think something about try to be like him, and trust in the help that comes through him for accomplishing the work which he gives his follow

ers to do."

dent Eliot of Harvard University, who The same question was put to Presimade this answer: "To my thinking he is a Christian who accepts Jesus Christ as the best moral and spiritual guide the world has seen, and tries in his spirit to love God and man."

Does any one doubt that these are definitions of Christianity which Christ himself would approve if he were on earth? How quickly would such definitions break up sectarianisms! They would not draw simply the Evangelical churches into fellowship, and stop there. They would draw into one great