Year: 1878



 Rev. Doctor H. N. Thomas, of the Gen.

 tinary M. E. Church, Chicago, preached a

 remarkable sermon, on tie 5th of January,

 which is creating quite stir in the reli- gious world. He laid down rules for read ing Scfipiural history, and plainly told his

 hearers that God did not require them to believe only such portions as appeared req

 sonabIe, just as they would read Rollin, Jo-

 sephus, or MscCauiey. He contended that

 it made DO difference to us whether the

 whale swallowed Jonah, or Jonah swallowed

 the whale, or whether any other miracle WAS

 ever wrought or not. Our salvation does

 not depend upon what miraculous things

 God had wrought, but upon our own good

 actions. Most of the Scriptures were writ 1 ten as the result of controversy, and there

 fore in spirit of opposition and competi-

 tion. Nearly every dogma is carried ts the

 extreme limit of selfish triumph Take as

 an example the subject of eternal punish

 ment. A dreamy age, or an age of cruel despotism might accept such dogma even in it's most horrid forms, but ours is an age of realization, men weigh their words and fix meaning to them. The awful pictures of hell in the past ages rise up before the prophetic realization of our minds in our day, and they see the meaning-the terrible fact set forth--and they are not afi3iG .o ask if such thing can be true. There nes time before the reformation. when some latitude was allowed in thinking of hell, but the Romish Church had abused purga- tory, and in a spiri, of controversy the Prot estants made it hotter than ever. Here the speaker opened the furnace doors, as it were, and with great eloquence invited his congregation to gaze in and see what an in formally hot hole they had been fuming, sweating and worrying over all their lives, and intimated that it was fire Of their own starting.

 Another doctrine, that of Election and Reprobation, that consigns unnumbered millions of human beings to all the pains of an eternal tell, without any possibility of escape, no matter how good lives they may lead on Earth. This doctrine, too, was born of controversy. and in the ages of contro- versy might be accepted, but there must come an after thought. reaction. Men will rise up and ask if the Bible teaches such things and if told that it does, they will ask who put them in the Bible and if told that God did, they will ask who is this awful and unjust God and, if still further pressed, they will deny both God and the Bible. There is such thing as asking the mind and heart to go too far in accepting as truth things that do not address them selves to human reason and human con- prehension. The best minds of the age are protesting against such overstatements. They are ready to believe that God is SOW reign and good, but they must not be asked to give up all reason and good sense, in the name of so noly sentiment as religion, for they will not do it, they cannot doit, and they ought not to try to believe that God is an unfceling tyrant and at the same time try to love him. They are ready to believe in punishment for actual sin, both here and hereafter, but they cannot believe in the terrible he'll of Dante and Milton, ideas that could only originate in cold, dark age that robbed the universe of God and all sense of justice or right. am glad they don't believe it, for they would be worse, and not better men and women if they did.

 Nothing is to be gained by standing up in the pulpit and calling men infidels or any other hard names. We cannot, and if we could, we ought not to try to stifie in- vestigation. We should ask, not how all this dou5ting affects this or that Church, but how does if affect pure religion as taught by Jesus Christ in a very few slm- pie beliefs or truths which mankind are generally quite ready to accept without having them forced down their throats. They consist chiefly of "a belief in God, and that He is a rewrader of them that seek Him. in pure life, and love and sympathy and justice. Let us get over the folly of quar- reling and refusing to fellowship with those who differ from us in belief.