bodiment of mercy and compassion was gradually obscured, the idea of him as a stern judge taking its place. And what was the result? Why, the human soul could not give up the worship of these divine qualities, and the Virgin Mary was endowed with them, and made the object of the people's adoration. She is represented in paintings of that period as the pure, tender, loving woman, interceding before her Son, just the same as Christ had been before the Father, for the welfare of our lost race. She is now adored in all Roman Catholic countries equally with the Father, Son, and Spirit; is really a fourth person of the Godhead. It is worship which arose in precisely the same way, and on the same grounds, as that of Christ. The only reason why it was not transferred to Protestantism, along with the doctrine of the Trinity, is, that the necessities of Protestant theology have restored Christ to his original place as the embodiment of grace and mercy. It shows how inevitably the soul must have these qualities somehow in its conception of Deity, and is a most striking confirmation that this is, indeed, a vital thing in the doctrine of the Trinity.

Another truth which underlies it is the immediate presence of God in the world and with the soul. It matters not how exalted and pure and immaterial we consider him to be, how far removed from men in the grandeur and holiness of his character, there is one part of his personality, the Holy Spirit, not a dim influence but God himself, that is taught as pervading the world, and dwelling most intimately in the human heart. It is a most glorious truth. There was never any thing in the polytheistic conception of religion, with all the earthly locality which it assigned its gods, no lares or penates presiding over the household, no idol in its shrine, no image carried on the breast, which brought the divine so near, so immediate to the world, as the Church doctrine of the Spirit. We ourselves are his temple. He warns, directs, convinces, comforts. His breath is our inspiration. Our joy is in his touch. And through him we mount up, ever and ever, to the higher life. It is impossible to estimate too highly what the value of this truth has been through all the Christian ages. It has been the connecting link between the Father, removed far off in dim eternity, and his children here on earth; the only way in which the faith, if not the heart, of the Church could have had a present God. And the intellectual fiction of a divided personality, by which it has been accomplished, has been a slight matter in comparison with the greatness and worth of the truth which has been within it.

It is these facts about the Trinity which suggest the true method of doing our Unitarian work. Two tendencies, each of them towards the unity of God, are now in operation with the Christian Church. One is the concentrating of all the divine attributes in the person of Christ; the words of one of the most popular Orthodox teachers, that the Father is only a dim and shadowy effluence rising up far away behind the deity of the Son, being true very largely of the common heart. The other tendency is to the oneness of the entire godhead in the person of the Father. And it is between these two issues, -not between the authority of Christ and the intuitions of the soul, which is merely a preliminary skirmish, that we believe is to be fought the great battle of the future. It is in the line of this faith, the conception of God the Father as all in all, that our work lies. And there is only a single way in which it can be done. All past experience shows, that to attack the Trinity, - or what is now becoming the chief point in the doctrine, the deity of Christ, - on its logical side, is utterly in vain. It is clung to in face of the clearest demonstrations of its untruth. It somehow feeds the soul, gives it the fulness of the Divine nature; and what avails it to prove by argument that food is dust and ashes when millions of beings are using it every day, and finding it give them grandest health and strength? The only way is to make sure, that all the truth which is in their doctrine is furnished likewise in ours. There is nothing in the logical form of the Trinity which its believers care for. There are thousands of them who cannot repeat its terms, and scarcely any two, even of its scholars, who define it the same way. It is the underlying truth which makes them hold it. We need

VOL. LXXXII. -NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. I.

5

to show, that all the divine attributes, all which the soul craves for of God, inhere and must inhere in the one person of the Father; and to insist that the whole of that one person is here on the earth, is ready to dwell in the humblest soul, as truly as in the heavens. We want to show, not by demonstration merely, but actually, experimentally, that our faith can afford as much of Deity and the Divine nature, and bring men as truly into communion with the Eternal Spirit, as that of the Trinity. It is only so far as we can do this, only so far as we can show that all which is vital in their system belongs just the same to ours, that they ought to take it, that the world will really be the better for their having it. And, when we have accomplished this work, we shall find without argument, without one thrust of logic, its intellectual form, like a body without life, will shrivel up and waste away. We might learn a most important lesson in this respect from our Universalist brethren. When they started as a denomination, instead of asserting directly the doctrine of the Divine Unity, the exigencies of their cause led them rather to insist on those attributes of the Father's character which had been obscured, or ascribed only to Christ, - his mercy, goodness, love, and grace. The result is, that not only is the whole denomination itself Unitarian in theology, but it has done a work in this way, with the world at large, which is more significant even than that of extending its own original doctrine.

We believe, then, that, as a whole, the Church dogma of the Trinity has had a most important and providential mission to perform in the religious education of our race. Its error was the partition, not the negation, of truth. There was no doctrine of the Divine Unity possible in that age of the world when it was first developed, which could ever have done its work. It is, perhaps, one of the finest examples in all history, not only of the soul of good in things evil, but of the way in which the Eternal Spirit makes one imperfection play into another, and from the shapeless blocks of falsehood builds up the mighty arch of truth. But, with all the service this doctrine has done in the past, we cannot regard it as a finality, cannot believe it is the absolute verity. The law of its development, like all the rest of God's laws, is running forward into the future not less than coming up from the past. The same forces, acting on the same principles which led to the world's growth out of fetichism and polytheism, are still at work. And the culmination of the process, the final doctrine in which the whole race is evermore to rest, is that of one Person, the Eternal Father, embracing all excellence, immanent in all things, and accessible, without rite or priest or intercessor, directly to all souls.

ART. IV. -ON SOME CONDITIONS OF THE MODERN MINISTRY.

Proceedings of the National Unitarian Conference, in Session at Syracuse. - Report on the Supply of Ministers. By S. H. WINCKLEY.

THE claims and prospects of the Christian ministry have generally been urged, as they are urged here, with a noble disregard to certain material conditions of its existence. It is to the honor of the profession, that this disregard is especially conspicuous in all its own appeals for encouragement, and the inducements it offers to its own recruits. It has left to the literature of romance, such as "The Minister's Wooing" and "Dr. Johns," the statement of its actual relations with the public that maintains it; and to secular journals, like "The Nation" or "The Round Table," the protest against the straitened terms by which it often lives. Among themselves, the members of that profession - whatever their private confessions of difficulty or hardship in their experience - have said little, we might almost say have been unconscious, of what to many has seemed its chief embarrassment, in comparison with that great spiritual want, that great Christian task, to which its services are pledged. And yet there are reasons why the members of that profession should make their own voice heard on a point which has attracted so much public attention. It is well that it should be looked at from their position, and spoken of in counsel with one another, and with the community at large. Curious misunderstandings, and injustice in the zeal for justice, are sure to follow when it is looked at only from a distance. Thus a writer in "The Round Table," commenting indignantly on the scanty ministerial salaries in Connecticut, speaks of three thousand dollars as the least that ought to be paid, charging the prevalent scale of maintenance to a deliberate wrong on the part of the public. We say nothing of the very desirable standard of recompense proposed: would that it were possible! But, as to the charge, we extremely regret that it should have gained ground, and even been echoed from some professional channels. So far from doing wilful injustice to its religious institutions, we consider that, in the older parts of the country at least, they are the pet extravagance of the people, and that the community is taxed to a very unreasonable amount for their support. True, this extravagance consists generally in the multiplication of sects and accumulation of church debts; rarely, though sometimes, in paying salaries unreasonably large. But it ought to be more distinctly seen, that the public is not ungenerous, but unwise, in its expenditure for church purposes; and that the chief ecclesiastical want, financially speaking, is not a greater munificence, but a truer economy, in the appropriation of its means.

There is one fact, at the outset, which it appears to us important to state very explicitly. In plain terms, it is simply this: This profession, along with a cordial welcome, with many social privileges, with as sure and liberal and honorable support as any to the individual who enters it, does not, as things are, provide - and the public does not care that it shall provide - for the maintenance of his family, or the costs of a domestic establishment. We say nothing of the few instances to the contrary that might be pointed out, except to say that they are exceptional. In every case with which we are well enough acquainted to speak with confidence, a preacher who maintains his family respectably, and clear of