school as that, while there has been a good deal done incidentally? the revised procedure of education yet awaits development and accomplishment; and I think that our profession is in danger, and in great danger, of going under, and of working effectively only among the relatively less informed and intelligent of the community; of being borne with, in a kind of contemptuous charity, or altogether neglected, by the men of culture who have been strongly developed on their moral side—not their moral side as connected with revealed religion, but as connected rather with human knowledge and worldly wisdom. The question, then, comes up, Do men need this intimately practical instruction; and, if so, must there be to meet it this life-school of preachers?
It is said, by some, "Has not Christianity been preached by plain men, who did not understand so very much about human nature, in every age of the world?" It has; and what has eighteen hundred years to show for it? To-day, three-fourths of the globe is heathen, or but semi-civilized. After eighteen hundred years of preaching of the faith under the inspiration of the living Spirit of God, how far has Christianity gone in the amelioration of the condition of the race? I think that one of the most humiliating things that can be contemplated, and one of the things most savory to the skeptical, and which seems the most likely to infuse a skeptical spirit into men, is to look at the pretensions of the men who boast of the progress of their work, and then to look at their performances. I concede that there has been a great deal done, and there has been a great deal of preparation for more; but I say that the torpors, the vast retrocessions, the long lethargic periods, and the wide degeneration of Christianity into a kind of ritualistic mummery and conventional usage, show very plainly that the past history of preaching Christianity is not to be our model. We must find a better mode of administration.
We need to study human nature, in the first place, because it is the Divine nature which we are to interpret to men. Divine attribute corresponds to our idea of human faculty. The terms are analogous. You cannot interpret the Divine nature except through some knowledge of human nature. There are those who believe that God transcends men, not simply in quality and magnitude, but in kind. Without undertaking to confirm or deny this, I say that the only part of the Divine nature that we can understand is that part which corresponds to ourselves, and that all which lies outside of what we can recognize is something that never can be interpreted by us. It is not within our reach. Whatever it may be, therefore, of God that, by searching we can find out, all that we interpret, and all that we can bring, in its moral influence, to bear upon men, is in its study but a higher form of mental philosophy.
Now, let us see what government is. It is the science of managing men. What is moral government? It is moral science, or the
