power; and the one great hunger of the ages, beside which all other forces and passions are comparatively weak, has been the hunger of man for God. Study the history of the world, the history of the lowest tribe that can to-day be discovered, the history of the highest and mightiest civilization. of the past; see the temple pointing heavenward under every sky; see the art and literature, the ritual, the service of any kind; read the books that have been poured out of the longing heart of man; see the long lines of pilgrims marching through deserts and over mountains in search of some shrine where they believe they can hear the divine word spoken or get a glimpse of the divine glory. There is no hunger, not even that of love, not even that of ambition, not even that of gold,- there is no hunger that has touched or characterized man for good or evil that is comparable for a moment to this human hunger for God. It has been the cause of more wars, it has set up and cast down more thrones, it has had more to do with shaping human history, than any other desire the human heart is capable of. This spiritual nature of man is not only universal, not only eternal, but it is that which is highest and most characteristic in man; and on this impregnable and eternal foundation that can never crumble stands by natural right the Church.

Now, in the second place, when people care very much about anything, they naturally seek sympathy in that care. They seek somebody else that cares; and they naturally join forces in ever larger and larger aggregations for the accomplishment of that which they desire. This natural association which constitutes the bond that holds the Church together is the simplest and most universal in the world. It is precisely the same thing that we discover in a hundred other departments of human life. Men who believe in music associate together for the better expression and propagation of their ideas and theories. Those who love to study nature associate; and we have the great scientific organizations of the world. We have those who love art; and in every department of life and in business there are very

few who stand alone. Even those who are carrying on business for themselves do not stand alone: they depend at every turn upon the sympathy and co-operation and help of somebody else; but most of the great businesses of the modern world are simply gigantic corporations or combinations of men engaged in common purposes for the sake of better carrying out their ideas. What more natural, then, than that those who believe in the spiritual life and who hunger for truth and God; those who wish, if they can, to find the secret of human life, deliverance from its evils, the place of the soul's peace,- what more natural, I say, than that they should join hands with others, having the same feelings, the same hopes, the same aspirations? The moment that a half dozen or a hundred or five hundred people unite together for these common ends, then you have a church. Those people who do not believe in a church, or who are interested merely to break it down, accept the same principle of association, and organize a church for the purpose of doing anti-church work. The principle is so human and so natural that you cannot possibly escape it.

They organize also, not only for sympathy and to help each other, but they organize for the purpose of spreading around the world their faiths, their hopes, and the better life which they are persuaded will be the natural fruit of these. And so you find that those religions of the world which are alive, those churches that have any power in them, and that are likely to have any future in the world, are always mission churches. Inevitably, they are so. What kind of a man can he be who is persuaded that he possesses knowledge that would be for the benefit of his fellow-men, and yet hides it in his own heart, and never speaks of the grand discovery to another? By as much as a man is a man, by as much as he professes to believe, by as much as he cares for the betterment of the world, by as much as he has any vital hope in him that the world can be better, by so much must he associate, call it church or not, in some organization that shall consecrate itself to the service of making the world nobler and better.

A church, then, is the most natural thing in the world. And there is one more reason for it,- a reason that takes us back into the consideration of the old idea about it for a moment, a reason which thousands seem to think that they have left behind, but which, I am persuaded, is as vital and important to it as it has ever been. The old church existed to save man,—to save man from God's anger, to save him from hell. Is there any need corresponding to that existing to-day? Are there no hells from which people need to be delivered? I do not believe, as you well know, that God is angry with his children. We are his children; and, by as much as he has made us, by so much he will be tender and patient with us, however ignorant, however evil for the time. But the fundamental fact is here: we desire life, we desire happiness, peace, protection from the evils of human life. Do we get these because there is no burning hell in the next world? Do we get these simply because God is not angry with us? Look at the common sense of this view for a moment. A man goes to Harvard. There may be no one on his day of graduation to seize him and drag him off to torture if he has not kept up to a certain grade in his studies; but, because of that, is the need of study taken away from him? Will it make no difference on the day of his graduation whether he has devoted himself to his manly, moral, and spiritual culture or not? Will he be just as well off, when he gets out into the world, if he goes out ignorant and half-trained as if he came out with a mind stored with knowledge and every faculty cultured to its best? It seems to me it is a very shallow idea on the part of thousands of people who think it does not make any difference whether there is any church or not, if you abolish hell; that it does not make any difference whether they go to church or not, unless God is angry with us. Consider for a moment, friends. When we pass the line of the invisible into that other life in which I believe as thoroughly as in the present, we shall leave behind many of the things that constitute our lives to-day. We are going into a set of conditions where,

unless our souls are cultured, we shall be stripped and lonely and poor. I believe that many of us will find hell enough in the memory of wrong done here and of wasted lives, until, through God's help, we retrieve the blunders and errors of this, and have gone through suffering and culture into fitness. for the kind of life that awaits us there. Just as much, then, as under the old theories, you need now and here the church devoted to the culture of the moral and the spiritual, the finest and highest, the eternal things, as a preparation for going in the midst of these spiritual and eternal things. We need it as much on the new theory as on the old.

Now, then, to pass to two or three other phases of my theme, let me say that, since the Church represents the highest and most important things in human life, he who would call himself a man must be interested in it, must take a part in it, must do his share, for the sake of his own soul, his God, and the sake of his fellow-men. I do not say that you must attend this church. I do not say that you must attend the Episcopal Church, the Congregational Church, the Catholic Church. I do not say that you must of necessity attend any organization that goes by that name. But I do say that he who will be a man, who appreciates what that word means and cares for what it stands, must, by every necessity of his manhood, do something to help on that for which the Church stands; that is, the moral, spiritual culture and lifting up of the world. There is too much in the present time indeed, it has always been true-of one-sided religion, too much of being willing to take, and not being alert to give.

Let me say one thing right here. I am not, and never have been, a good beggar; and I shall never try to be. When anything is asked for the church, it is not begging. It is asking only that you pay a little back for what you have so abundantly received, and that, if you believe in it, you help spread the good it stands for all over the world. I remember a saying attributed - with what truth I do not know - to Dr. Bushnell, of Hartford. It is said that on a certain.

occasion he went to a man and asked him for money to help on some religious enterprise in which he was engaged; and the man, though wealthy and receiving in indirect ways a thousand benefits of religion, was not disposed to help. At last Dr. Bushnell turned on him, and said, "How much do you suppose real estate was worth in Sodom?" In that way he brought home to the man a certain side of the problem that had never met his attention before. A business man absorbs himself in his business, and cares for little else. If the church comes to him, and asks him for help for his fellow-men, he looks upon it as a beggar, and tosses it a crumb, as he would to any other beggar. And yet consider for a moment - what would be the business condition of the world and the opportunity for the successful carrying on of business but for the moral and spiritual side of man? That is the basis on which a successful business rests, just as it is the foundation of the church itself. Where would your real estate be in Boston if every church should withdraw from the city its influence? Where would the lives of your families and your homes be but for the cultivation of that for which our organized religious work stands? A man, then, when he is asked to do something for religion, is asked to create a better atmosphere for his home, a better opportunity for the carrying on of his business,- he is asked to contribute something to the higher valuation of his own real estate. He is asked to make the city in which he lives, mentally, morally, and spiritually and in every way, a better place for himself as one of its citizens. Yet there are thousands of people to-day outside of the churches who are receiving benefit from the fact that the churches exist; but it never occurs to them that there is the slightest obligation on their part to lift their finger for anything except that which they think touches their own indulgence or their own success.

This gives me an opportunity to say a word on another phase of the same subject. I suppose there are hundreds of people in the city of Boston who, if I stay here fifteen or twenty years more, will wish me to bury them. I judge