We, too, have grown lax, material, and compromising. With our own spiritual home full of familiar riches, we have come to look over our neighbors' fences, and sigh for their magnificence of structure and amplitude of front. Nor is it any wonder that amid such falsity to self we have fallen upon distraction and discontent.

Profoundly dissatisfied with our preaching, as in God's name we ought to be, we have resorted to the cowardly alternative of underrating its possibilities as an instrument for good. Too often of late we have joined issue with the formalists, half unconsciously echoing their appeal,—“ Less and less of the sermon; more and more of the people in prepared responses." And yet what but preaching has ever made or saved any Church, from the days of the Fathers down to those of Luther, Whitefield, Robertson, Channing, and Parker? What else but preaching has popu larized even those denominations which claim to rely least upon the sermon? The work accomplished by Phillips Brooks in Boston is a tribute not to the efficacy of forms, but to the power of a human voice in direct, spontaneous utterance, which has helped to float a service too often otherwise without meaning and effect. The prayer-book in the hands of the great preacher is no more and no better than in those of the merest chancel parrotizer of sounding phrases. It is the presence of the consummate pulpit genius, unfortunately seldom found in this connection, which dignifies and reconciles us to the resource, even while we recognize its poverty. We could never so well do without the repetitions as now, when we have real operation of the spirit. It is a wise sanity of indifference on our part, which is liable at any moment to become a positive awakening.

The same despondency, too, has been expressed in regard to our prayers. In the wide-spread doubt of the spirit, which sometimes seems to be settling down upon us like a paralysis, we question if we had not better go back to the plain literary perfections of a book. We feel so sure of them, these manufactured, these elaborated petitions; so

uncertain lest our improvisations may offend men's ears. Far more likelihood is there that they may offend that Higher Hearing which remains anything else but literary in its divine demand. It is just because we are too fatally sure of them that these written prayers must ever fail to satisfy the need we were delegated to serve. Churches may conquer by this sign as churches; but prayer eternally consists in something different, however far short of the ideal we may fall. We are here, at least, to stand for the real thing; and on all sides we are warned that for us it can never be found by looking in a table of contents.

If, in presence of this necessity, we confess that we are unequal to the situation,- if we are conscious that the springs of our earlier inspiration are dry at the fount,there seems little further need of saying anything.

Surely, we shall never flourish as a weak copy of those organizations whose external foundations are far deeper and broader than ours can ever hope to be. It is to be doubted if Unitarianism can ever excel on the side of outward results. It has never dreamed of an organic triumph; and having taken its stand on a life principle which is simple, human, direct in its expression or nothing, it succeeds or fails by a subtler incarnation. If it has lost power to quicken in its representatives the consecration and compelling zeal which alone can keep any religious movement alive, it is indeed doomed. In a measure, it came into existence as a relief from the evils of organization; and, much as it may need more effective working machinery, it needs something else infinitely more. Too much mechanism might dull its finer insistences, even while it added weight and force to the coarser engineries of conviction.

Why, in reality, do we ever fall back upon a ritual? Is it not simply the confession of our own inward inadequacy and want? We cannot walk, and dare not trust ourselves to go alone, so we invite in the convenient support. We find it easier to be content with a lower level rather than hold ourselves up to a higher. Worst of all, when we give ourselves to these makeshifts and expedients, we are teaching our

people a false dependence. We are educating the young away from the inward resource, the strength and sufficiency of the spiritual principle, and into the habit of leaning upon some external prop. So natural and insidious is this tendency to fall back upon something, instead of bringing ourself up to the emergency, that we need all the time to fight it in the best of men. But when we deliberately range ourselves alongside of it, and invite a beginning in this direction, we know not how far the forces set in motion may carry us. We do know that many people so educated have not been easily satisfied in this matter of forms. On the other hand, those who have been accustomed to think them necessary, and to complain of the coldness of a service without them, have been known to feel perfectly at home where the real spiritual element has been present to supply the place of forms. It is for this spiritual element that any service is designed; and if we will not excuse the clergyman, insisting that this is what he is there for, we need not fear that we shall be tested by any lower demand. He is there because he has this element in his own character and experience, and to create out of that equipment and fitness of his own the spiritual atmosphere for his people. To say that so many do not come up to the standard is to give no reason for lowering the ideal. To begin that course of compromise is to invite in a process of deterioration whose ultimate results one does not like to contemplate. This is precisely what all the other churches have done. This is what Christianity did when it first crystallized into an institution, after the original impulse of Jesus had spent its force. Men could no longer rise to the spiritual occasion, and so they fell back on the instrument as a saving resource. Again and again within the Church has this spirit reacted, asserting that men have forgotten the real way which Jesus pointed out. Again and again has it been born in Bethlehem, in humble, unconventional places of protest and inspiration, to die again upon the world's unending Calvary. Always it comes as a man, and dies as an institution. Always it speaks as a live and first-hand communication, and becomes silent.

amidst the intonations of form. It is only by reason of the perpetual coming of the man that the institution has been able to survive at all.

We should hardly be willing to accept a ritual that came short of the best, and here the best is not to be expected. Rituals are not made in a day or manufactured out of the ripened subtilties of reason and criticism. Every great ritual is a growth, a product of centuries, the half of whose power lies in the age and association. On the whole, a more perfect service of form will probably never be devised than those in use in the Roman and Anglican communions. Nothing, then, would be left us, if we cannot hope to create, but to copy, a step not exactly in keeping with the genius. of our undertaking. Cold and feeble imitations do but induce an appetite for more perfect things in their own kind; and it is only when we for the moment forget that there are other ways of approach, no less certain to be effective among men, that we wish to abandon the other ground of advantage which belongs especially to us.

Undoubtedly there is need of more definite and concerted action among our liberal churches. Above all is the creation of a spirit of zeal and devotion to be desired. The work of our congregations may well be strengthened, systematized, and amplified. They should get nearer together; they should look more widely abroad beyond the narrow circle of home interests, at the same time that they bring every local means of efficiency to bear. The awakening of the Spirit among themselves would tend more than anything else to awaken and convict the world. So much of organization we should seek to cultivate. But our bond of union should be living, not technical and arbitrary; organic as life is, by reason of a subtile, inward principle, rather than as mechanism is, by virtue of its external parts. And, as we were in the beginning, so let us still be afraid of the day of great things, and anxious to be delivered from the body of all deaths. It may be doubted if we are ever to become a great Church, but we may be such a vitalizing movement in life and religion that no church will be without its testi

mony to the worth of our existence. It is well not to deceive ourselves here. The task we have undertaken is no

easy one. The high ideal things are never anything but difficult, and the work we were set to do is one more arduous than the creation of institutions externally splendid and complete. Enough for us to know that it is not impossible to consecrated effort. Shame alone to those who because of difficulty accept a lower, doubtful good in place of the lofty purpose of their youth!

EDWARD F. HAYWARD.

THE EASTERN QUESTION.

BY PROF. BOROS, OF THE COLLEGE AT KOLOZSVÁR, TRANSYLVANIA.

The dismissal of the first Prince of Little Bulgaria, on the 20th of last August, was an insignificant event; yet it powerfully stirred all Europe, since it was the signal of the reawakening of the Eastern Question.

What is the Eastern Question? It is the question of the partition of the Turkish Empire. All the States of Europe would like to share in this rich inheritance; but no one dares to begin the work of division. Russia has attempted it three times during this century. She did not succeed,partly on account of the vital energy of the Turkish Empire, which has always shown itself strong in time of danger; partly on account of the jealousy of the European powers. Neither can this question be solved in one day and by one act. Like other great political fabrics, so too the Turkish will wear away only by a process of slow decay.

From the Noric Alps to the mouths of the Danube,over a considerable territory, therefore, we find a mixture of various nationalities, which, though of the Slavic race, so differ in habits, language, and morals that they can form a powerful State neither separately nor in combination. They have always needed a Ruler who might keep trem in control and defend them against one another. After Pyrrhus, this task fell to the hands of Rome; after the decine