Morning journal and courier., 1891-05-22
THE NEW CHRIsTIANITY.

What Does 1t Meanl-The Views of
 Phillips Brooks, MT. Gladstone,
 John Bright, HI. w. Beecher, MT.
 FrOude, pr. Rowland Williams,
 MT. w. R. Grey, pr. nartincau, R.
 w. Dale, Rev. Jshn E. Todd and
 Canon Freemantle fin Support of
 the New Departure.
 To the Editor of the JOURNAL AND COURIER:
 The allegation of Dr. Phillips Brooks, in the pulpit of the College chapel, that new Christianity is coming, which is yet the old and the true Christianity, but in form deeper and more vital than the old, justifes inquiry what this means. Dr. Brooks insists strongly that the Biblical dogmatic theologies must go; that they no longer bind preachers or people; and that when they are gone true Christianity, as all good Christians have inwardly had it, will be disclosed as never before. In a notable address to Oongregationalists in Boston, some years since, Dr. Brooks ex- pressed his view in these words:
 ''The great beauty of religious thought in these days, it seems to me, is that men have been so deeply in earnest that they have taken their most precious things, the most precious forms and statements, the most precious dogmss in which their fath- CTS have rejoiced, and cast them into the fiery furnace of deep, earnest conviction and faithful thought, and allowed them to enter into new combinations, believing that they are certain to come out in forms more precious and useful for the days to come.
 "Out of this great turmoil and distress | of faith there has come a sincere love for ! truth and truthfulness, a simple, earnest l intention-nay, a passionate determina- tion, to get at the truth with regard to things, to get at the deepest truth with regard to the most sacred things. You are free to preach and think, and your people are free to listen, as was not the case twenty years ago. Many bond has been broken and to-day there is no bond upon the conscience of the Christian man
 except the obligation to seek for truth ir the fear and love of God) And there hal come deeper and more intimate sense ot God than there ever was before. The new
 idea-not new, but more nobly prominent
 more largely comprehensible to the though
 of men-to-day is the certainty that Goo is not simply the maker and governor O
 this universe, but that he is the soul O
 manence of deity, moving everywher
 throughout world in which there is n
 life except as he lives in it. Ant
 in addition there has come also an earnes
 bending of the Christian world down t it's Christian work. When
 therefore, I look into the fiery furnace o
 these days, into which there have beel
 lavishly cast things that were dear to ou
 fathers and dear to us-statements an
 forms of dogma, creeds and definitions c
 truth, which we loved and which "
 thought we were living by, and withou which we thought we could not live at a and see there the deeper love of simpl
 truth, the larger sense of the perpetus and the union among all noble souls whic comes of consecrated work, I say it well that these things were cast in there. . The forms thus prophesisd by Dl , Brooks are Q) rationalism of deep and po tive spiritual character; @ pure theisn or natural undogmatic consciousness ( l God, given in spiritual reason, not depe1 dent on textual scripture, but write within, the open secret of nature and (
 human nature; and (9 humanitarianisn
 in the deeper spiritual sense illustrate
 Christ, or the spirit of love, and histor
 cally organic in churches of many name , in human society also without reference . churches, and in the religions of tt world, not merely the Christian, but otl CTS as we'll, to the extent that they ha, r sought the good of man. A Unitaria @ preacher of Boston, the present successt
 of Charming, pointed in tho same dire tion as Dr. Brooks when he said: "Ti '- best life, even in the most skeptical ell }. ments of America, is unconscious Chrl e tianity; an unconscious Christianity pc
 vades all the better thoughts which mt = imagine new" The unconscious Chr n tianity, behind the outward and formal, o all schools and sects, is in the same ", n the real Mir. Gladstone has said in SC
 tence of one of his replies to Profess
 Huxley, that it may be that the outwa
 and formal Christianity will prove only l. scaffoiding to be taken away. MT. Jol ,x Bright, in a speech in Parliament, Mar , IA, 1868, having dealt with the territ
 vexed question of the Irish Anglic as church, began noble peroration wi to these words:
 It We are, after all, or ono reuSlon. ,t accept the belief in grand passage, whi ne once met with in the writings of the ed lustrious founder of the colony of Per he sylvania. He says that The humt II. meek, merciful, just, .pious and devt as souls are everywhere of one religion, 2 ue when death has taken of the mask u 'e- will know one another, though the dive he liveries they wear here make them str ,b. eers,' imagine that there will come |. time in the history of the world VI mo men will be astonished that Catholics , he Protestants have had so much animof
 against and suspicion of each other"
 When Professionalism began, it's is notes were in the direction of the sin ,al- ethical divine humanism of Christ, .e though both Luther and Calvin terri o1 overiaid Christ's pure truth with dogm om wrappings of Jewish and heathen ori hot which, as Gosthe said, hava incalcull