duties of this life, and the undue prominence given to a supposed preparation for an alleged future life, of which he has no evidence and can form no conception.
But though the Church fails to furnish adequate ethical training to those who can not accept its theological teachings, some kind of moral education is necessary if we would have true moral development. While much can be done in the home circle in teaching the rudiments of the science of duty—the beauty of love and charity and other attributes of noble character—this is not alone sufficient to meet the demand which should exist for true ethical culture. Teachers are needed. The complicated interests which surround most of the great social and moral problems demand the most careful and patient study, and only he who has brought to these tasks the forces of a well-trained mind can suggest the true means of relief from conditions which all may recognize as deplorable. The value of association with a broad and generous mind—a mind filled with high and pure conceptions of duty a mind which ever presents and holds before us high and noble ideals, can not well be overestimated.
The time may come when the Church will so far outgrow the myths, the dogmas, and the beliefs with which it now straggles that there will be room within it for all who would earnestly unite in efforts to better the condition of man, and to diffuse a knowledge of those principles which lie at the foundation of human happiness. There is, indeed, a progress of thought in the Church far broader and deeper than any actual modifications of written creeds would indicate. We will not pause to inquire as to what class of thinkers is chiefly entitled to the credit for this progress. This rapid development in the direction of individual freedom of thought may give us at length a church—by whatever name it may be designated—where the only creed held binding will be the creed of love, the only devotion essential to true fellowship a devotion to truth and duty.
Meanwhile, though there are signs of progress, and noble exceptions in the few societies for ethical culture now existing, and in similar organizations, it is evident that the demand for ethical progress outside the Church has not as yet culminated in any general constructive effort either in the direction of improving the condition of the weak, the needy, and the suffering, or in the cultivation of the science of duty.
It is in one sense an unfortunate circumstance that most rationalists are persons of very independent habits of thought. Their work in the past has been necessarily and perhaps almost too largely one of iconoclasm. The exposure of shams, the demolition of creed and dogma, the unveiling of myth and traditional faith based upon foundations which have slowly crumbled away in the light of increasing intelligence, have thus far largely occupied the attention of the rationalist. The men who have done this work are not of a nature which
