price; and Wendell Phillips, aristocrat by birth and blood, paid the same price, and put himself on the level of the "nigger" for the principle that it involved. That is loyalty. That is loyalty to a cause; and that is, the kind of price that you may be called on to still if you pay wish to be loyal to the cause that promises the next step in human advance. I have left time only to touch on the question of religious loyalty. I can only suggest to you what I mean; but the principles are so clear and so important that perhaps a suggestion is enough. What is it to be loyal in a religious way? There are thousands of people in this country to-day who are where they are from what they regard as loyalty to the memory of father and mother. I know one woman, distinguished in Europe and America, whose name you would recognize in a moment, should I mention it, who is held by just this sense of loyalty to parents. She says, "I love the old hymns that my mother used to sing." And that bond is enough to keep her in associations which do not represent her vital belief, which do not stand for the highest religious visions of her soul. Is that true religious loyalty? Go back in thought, for a moment, to the beginning of the world. Suppose the first person who ever had a higher conception of religion than the man-eating barbarians had been loyal to his father in that sense. The whole world would have stayed wild man-eating barbarians. I do not count that the highest loyalty to my father which would keep me just where my father was. I think the truest loyalty to him is for me, in my place and in my time, to be loyal to the new light that has come to me, as he was loyal in his day. He was true to the best light he had. I am loyal in the noblest sense of the word to his memory, not when, parrot-like, I repeat what he said, but when, manlike, I follow his example, and am loyal to the highest and best which I can see to-day. That is true loyalty to father and mother; and I know my father and mother, if they can see, if they can hear, if they know, approve of the kind of loyalty which I manifest towards their memory. There are people who are loyal, and feel that it is a high and noble kind of loyalty, to their historic and inherited statements of belief; but, note again, a statement of belief good enough in the past was only a statement of the clearest ideas which at that time were attainable. If the world is to grow any, if the world is to see anything better, to attain anything finer and higher, its statements must be restated. There must be a larger vision, a broader conception of things. So it comes to be a question, Shall I be loyal to that which was stated two hundred or five hundred or six hundred years ago, or shall I be loyal to that which they tried to state, and did state the best they knew how; that is, to the divine truth which they were reaching after? Shall I be loyal to that spirit which animated them? That is true loyalty,- not loyalty to the word, not loyalty to the form, not loyalty to the institution,loyalty to the truth which inspired the word, the form, the institution, and which temporarily incarnated itself in them. Shall I be loyal to the shell which the growing life has cast off and left behind, or shall I be loyal to the life which is secreting a finer shell, which, in its turn, too, must be discarded, and left behind? There is special reason why this matter should interest Unitarians in this country to-day, because, through I know not what fault on the part of Unitarian parents in training their children, there is a wide-spread movement on the part of those Unitarian born to turn towards what is a lower type of religious life. This is to be accounted for in two ways. First, the old churches are softening the hard outlines of dogma, so that they do not hurt any more as one rubs against them, and people forget that they are still there. But the greater influence seems to be this; and this is where the strenuousness of the principle of loyalty must come in. There is something more of finish and color and antiquity, a touch of the poetic and sympathetic and beautiful, about some of the older forms of worship. Young people go to Europe, and they are impressed by the cathedrals, the fine music, the order of the service; and I have known a large number of young people, trained in Unitarian families, who have come back from Europe converts to those older types of religious life, because they have not stopped to think what is involved. When the Pilgrims came over here to settle Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, do you suppose they did not leave behind them luxuries and elegances and beautiful things and forms that were attractive to them? They did not underrate these things. Neither did they and here is the principle- go back to them, because they were looking for a higher life for men. It takes time to create these things. It took the Christian Church three or four hundred years to get its grand music, its ritual, its order, its services, arranged as the clothing for its young life. Early Christianity, as compared with Judaism or with the religions of Greece and Rome, was crude, uncultivated, and poor. The scribes and Pharisees, the rich and powerful, had nothing to do with it. Those who accepted it were supposed to be the off-scouring of the earth. But it stood for principle; and it clothed itself with fitting forms of art and beauty, after a time. You may admire a castle all you please; but, if you are a sensible man, you will not wish to go back into that type of civilization that produced castles, because you know that this present civilization, even with cabins and log huts, is unspeakably better for men. Go, if you will, and admire cathedrals: but, if you know what you are doing, if you appreciate the principle involved, and the hope of man that depends upon it, you will not wish to go back into that type of religious life that created the cathedral, for it was a poorer, less hopeful, less educated type of religious life. We, with our larger, grander life and hopes, are free to create our own music, our own forms and rituals, as much as we will. Only do not dare to be false to God, false to the new and higher truth, false to the larger hopes of humanity that depend upon your being loyal to the highest and last revelation of truth and to the utmost freedom of thought; for these things contain within themselves the promise and potency of the next great step in the religious evolution of man that points towards the divine future. Father, let us be loyal to Thee, to truth, to our fellow-men, loyal to that which is highest and noblest in ourselves; and then we cannot be false to any interest on which the welfare of man depends. Amen. |