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"Some great cause, God's new Messiah”

MESSIAH PULPIT

NEW YORK

(Being a continuation of Unity Pulpit, Boston)

Entered at the Post-office, Boston, Mass., as second-class mail matter.

293

ORDER OF SERVICE.

ORGAN VOLUNTARY.

HYMN I.

All people that on earth do dwell.

SCRIPTURE LESSON.

PRAYER.

HYMN II.

God of ages and of nations.

SERMON: THE REV. M. J. SAVAGE, D.D.

BRIEF ORGAN VOLUNTARY.

HYMN III.

Nearer, my God, to thee.

BENEDICTION.

The Publishers

RELIGION: ITS CHANGING FORMS AND

ITS ETERNAL ESSENCE.*

I WILL ask your attention this morning to the theme which I will thus put into words,-Religion: Its Changing Forms and its Eternal Essence.

As a text, I have chosen the last clause of the twentieth verse of the fifth chapter of St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians: "Be ye reconciled to God."

It is not so many years ago, as the epochs of history are measured, that the creed of Christendom was supposed to be in all its grand essentials substantially fixed and settled for all time. The Rev. Doctor Richard S. Storrs, of Brooklyn, now a part of the greater city of New York, once said that progress in theology was absurd. From his point of view and granting his assumption, there would be no questioning the statement. Theology, as he regarded it, was only the rational interpretation of the manifestation of the divine and infallible revelation of truth which God had made to man. In such a revelation, of course, there could be no progress. I suppose that it could hardly have entered into the mind of the great man who used to stand in this place, and rule from here as from a throne, that the essential teaching of his creed could ever be in any definite way changed or outgrown. John Milton, when he made this theological scheme the framework of his great epic, could not for one moment have imagined that he was constructing it of such stuff as dreams are made of. And yet we are

A sermon preached in the cathedral of St. Peter, Geneva, on Thursday morning, August 31, to the members of the International Council of Unitarian and Other Liberal Religious Thinkers and Workers.