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Show morn trivial nnd unsatisfying. Indeed, In-deed, Christian theology can not be said to have oven touched the future. Its plcturo of the celestial city, Us portrayal of a judgment clay, of a heaven patterned very largely on the model of other oriental Imaginings of the same thing, nnd its utter failure to suggest any destiny for man save the torments of an unmerited hell, on the one side, and the inane occu-pnilons occu-pnilons of a monotonous Paradise of endless adoration, on the other, ought to be sufficient alone to mark it as utterly Inadequate to the need and aspiration and Intelligence of today nnd tomorrow. And that Is exactly the case. No other result could be expected, ex-pected, because of what man Is. And here Is sufficient reason for the expectation, nay, the demand, for, that larger, fuller, completer religion which all rational faith would lead men to expect, and to which the voice of Whitman, or tho voice of modern knowledge and need, now summon us. Wo can see, can we not, that a man becomes religious exactly as he gains i true consciousness of himself, what human life is in relation to all else la tho world. We understand, too, how fcr the first time sacredness has reality real-ity and power when men and women ceaso to attach, or try to attach, a sense of sacredness to tilings wholly external to themselves, nnd begin to find their own llvorf the very embodiment embodi-ment of all sacredness. We can understand un-derstand how God can become a living liv-ing reality in our llfo only when we have ceased to imagine him far off in space and learn to feel his life in the beat of our own hearts, in all tho aspiration of our souls, in all the illimitable il-limitable possibilities of our nature. And we can understand how utterly meaningless Sundays and churches oud church going become as an expression ex-pression of religion, when once we know that it takes all the days or one's life and all the occupations of one's days and all tho business and effort In which body or mind or aoul is enlisted, adequately or eatlsfylngly to express our worship, our nope, cur faith, our religion. ' or so hence will seo that we owe quite as much to Greece and Home and even to races which "thus far havo notbeen reckoned Into tho account (for religion) re-ligion) as we do to Israel. From no single rnco more than another has religion re-ligion come. ' " The service which Whitman would perform, the only service his writings can perform, is to help' release religion, reli-gion, in, the minds of people, from all dependence upon races or classes or alleged revelations, nnd show it to be, as it Is, the native growth of human life itself. We begin to see the depth ond vastness and value of Whitman's thought when we face me fact that the time has come in the development of the human mind when Christianity itstlf can not and does not satisfy. Not only is it true that the cosmology of the Christian religion. Its explanation explana-tion of things, is outgrown and dissolved dis-solved for all thinking minds, so that it is literally true that all the schools of the world are today teaching our children as truth the very things which make the basis of the Christian Chris-tian church a fairy talc, but it is also true that Christianity does not and can not offer to the world an adequate rc-ligfon. rc-ligfon. It does not possess and never has possessed a religion for the whole num. The so-called religious tools and frymbols and machinery which we have today ln connection with the Christian church are not only an inheritance from an age as different from this in all its social and political life as can bo imagined, but they are tho creation of a conception of religion which is as completely dissolved by science as the Ptolemaic astronomy Is. It Is but simple truth, then, that Whitman Whit-man utters when ho says: "The time has certainly come to begin to discharge dis-charge the idea of religion in the United States from mere ecclesiast' asm, and from Sundays and church-going, church-going, and to assign It to that general pobltlon, chlefcst and' most indispeng- sble, most exhilarating, to which the 1 others are to be adjusted, inside of all character and education and affairs. af-fairs. The people, especially tho 1 youne men and youne women of WHITMAN THEME OF LECTURE REV. W. T. BROWN GIVES INITIAL NUMBER OF SERIES Resume of Whitman, His Life and Purpose of Writing Entertainingly Entertain-ingly Set Forth. At the Carnegie hall Inst evening Rev. William Thurston Drown delivered deliv-ered a lecture upon Walt W'hltmau to an appreciative audience. Rev. Brown said, In part: There is, If ou think about it, a wonderfully complete resume of the whole historv of man's attempt to find an express religion in this statement which Whitman has given of tho purpose pur-pose of his writing. Think for a moment mo-ment what the history of man's religious relig-ious quest has been. To begin with, primitive man had no religion. He had onlv In himself and in surroundlnK nature and in the events and experiences exper-iences of his existence the element oi religion. There is no difference of opinion among tho best students of religion re-ligion today ns to the fact tnat religion, re-ligion, like eerythlng else that marks the life of man. had a perfectly natural origin. No scientific student of religion re-ligion in fact, no man who accepts the results of science or its great fundamental fun-damental principles, believes that religion re-ligion ever came or ever can come by what is called "revelation." Religion is rooted In humnn life, has arisen naturally nat-urally out of human experience, as surely as a tree or a blade of grass grows cut of the soil. And it should be noted, too. that what Whitman is seeking is not so much a theology or an explanation of religion, as ho is seeking the thing itself. If you think of tho first beginnings of the Christian religion as appearing In Jesus, even on the basis of the fragmentary frag-mentary record which wo have of his life so fragmentary and mixed with legend, as to make it an almost in possible task to separate fact from legend ln it even on that basis, one cannot escape the feeling that in the mind of Jesus religion was supreme and theology could hardly be said to exist. Of course, Jesus must have had some creed or belief, hov.eer simple, but It Is certain that this creed or belief was to his mind subordinate to life, to his own sense of duty, his own consciousness of loving purpose and heroic aim. If, now, you compare the simplicity of the life and purpose of Jeaus with tho complex system of doctrine and dogma, of church and council, of temporal tem-poral and spiritual power, which within with-in a few centuries after his death marked the whole great organization called the Christian church, you must seo between the two the widest contrast con-trast you can imagine.' You must see, too, that this vast organization interpenetrating inter-penetrating the Roman Empire and finally taking up the reins of power wheu that empire collapsed, ruling from the city on the Tiber almost as Pagan Rome Itself had done, Indeed, in some respects eclipsing the older empire by the assertion and exercise of a power over kings and kingdoms such as the empire of the Caesars had never held you mu6t see that this vast ecclesiasticlsm which for twelve centuries or more completely dominated dominat-ed the minds and bodies of Europe, ! burning at the stafce or otherwise destroying de-stroying most of the brightest minds of those centuries and permitting to live only such mediocre minds as accepted ac-cepted its sway, creating the- one period of history to which men have given, whether rightly or wrongly, the title of "Dark Ages'1 you must see, I say. that this vast organization did America, must begin to learn that religion (like poetry) is something far, far different from what they supposed. sup-posed. It is, Indeed, too important to the power and perpetuity of the new world to be consigned any longer to the churches, old or new, Catholic or Protestant, saint this or saint that. It must be consigned henceforth to democracy, en masse, and to literature. litera-ture. It must enter into the poems of the nation. It must make the nation. na-tion. It was inevitable that Christianity, as a religion, should have some notion of" tho universo as the background against which the nature and the destiny des-tiny of man might be portrayed. This Is what any religion must do; what all religions have done. Every thought, every theory of things, every principle and precept, gains meaning only as it stands against some sort of background. And for all the teaching teach-ing of the Christian religion there has been, as there had to be, a background back-ground conceptfon of tho universe. Most of us are fairly familiar with the Christian conception of the universe. uni-verse. Taking form as It did hi' a diftant age, when the knowledge .'of the world as to the facts of astronomy and the other sciences was almost nothing, It was Inevitable that the Christian cosmology would be pitifully, pitiful-ly, almost ludicrously, inadequate. That cosmology contemplated the world as about four thousand years old, and man as the creature of a. divine di-vine person, brought Into being by a mere flat. And If the past seemed to the Christian mind bo small, it must be remembered that the future seemed even less. The expectation which underlies un-derlies the gospels and permeates "much of the other writing of the New Testament scriptures is of a speedy culmination of the earth drama. Most of the first apostles and first Christians Chris-tians died, as they had lived, In expectation ex-pectation that tho earth was to be destroyed de-stroyed and another and higher ex- not grow out of the simple, gentle, self-sacrificing, self-sacrificing, self-denying spirit of the Nazarene prophet. It was in no sense the propagation of religion that those centuries aud that vast institution were devoted to it was the propagation of a theolgy, a body of doctrine or dogma, a world-embracing institution.'" One may find again and again all down through those centuries beautiful reminders, re-minders, ln individuals, of the spirit of the Nazarene though oftener in indhidauls who were suspected of heresy by the church or even put to death by ltj than in those who wero in grjod standing ln the church but in the organization itself, from the time of Constantino down to and Including In-cluding this very day, you will. look utterly ln vain for any reproduction of the spirit of Jesus. A religious organization or-ganization whose motto was, "not to bo ministered unto, but to minister" a motto finding convincing embodiment in deed and action and program and purpose has not thus far existed on this earth. But nothing can better express ex-press the spirit of the life of Jesus, even on the basis of our fragmentary accounts of that life. The point 1 wish to. bring out, tho point which the history of tho Christian Chris-tian church emphasizes, Is simply this, that the religion which the Christian church has considered itself divinely ordained to establish and teacft is not a religion that has its roots In every human soul and In all the relationship cf man with man, but a religion whoso whole sanction springs out of the alleged al-leged fact of a supernatural revelation. The church has said, as indeed the whole body of Evangelical Christendom, Christen-dom, Protestant and Catholic alike is saying today: 'Were is a revelation which God has made of his will for Isteuce for all believers was immediately immedi-ately to begin. So strong and widespread wide-spread was this belief, and so near at hand did the great event seem to be, that most people seemed to think there would be no more deaths. The ond would come so soon that tho experience ex-perience of death need not be expected by any one. And a considerable part of one or two of the letters of Paul Is devoted to the task of reassuring the wavering faith of many who, bo-cause bo-cause their friends bad died, felt the very foundation of their faith crumbling. crumb-ling. It was, therefore, upon the canvas of this old and meager notion of time and of the cosmos that tho nature and destiny of human beings had to be drawn. Those old notions had to enter en-ter Into it. It goes without saying, therefore, that the portraiture of human hu-man life and destiny would ' be one which the growth of the human mind could not retain.- And that is exactly what has happened. Intluenced : by tradition and custom and accepted authority, au-thority, men have tried to fit their lives and hopes and faiths Into that nf xrow mould, but the effort has been increasingly unsuccessful and unsatisfying, unsat-isfying, until the time has come when It Is utterly impossible for any thinking think-ing soul to do it It is not merely that science has proved the Christian conception of creation aud of the ago of the world and of mnn to be untrue, un-true, disclosing millenniums instead ot centuries as the measure of tho past nnu an origin of man himself never dreamed of In the older cosmology. Tnat in Itself would be deeply significant signifi-cant Dut by far the more significant fact Is that the Christian forecast of the future has been . rendered . even men. We, the church, exist by divine ordalnment to teach that will, to preserve pre-serve this revelation and to make it known to all mankind." The answor Is obvious. This church saw that those alleged facts, all of them, menaced tho stability of the central cen-tral scheme upon which the whole structure of Christianity as a revealed reveal-ed religion rests. Tho ch'urch has seen could not help seeing that the ad vance of natural science means everywhere every-where the dissolving of the very dogmas dog-mas and doctrines and suppositions and claims upon which the structure of organized religion rests. That is the explanation of tjhe world-wide conflict con-flict between what is called religion on the one side and science on the other. We can not any longer accept the idea which many writers have repeated repeat-ed to us, that, while it has been the, function of Greece to give art to tho world, It has been tho peculiar function func-tion of Israel to give religion to the world. ' There is no truth whatever In that idea and it must be laid aside once for all. It Is quite possible, in-' in-' deed, that tho pooplo of a generation |