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offerings are devoted to him to express the desire of the offerer to meet personally with acceptance; mystic rites are performed to unite the soul to its maker; sensual enjoyments are abandoned in pursuit of devotional exercise of the heart; mediators and intercessors are cultivated to insure the longedfor access; edifices and altars are constructed and consecrated to promote the intercourse aimed at; books are composed to convey ideal divine messages; and priests and ministers are established to regulate, preserve, and build up the whole fabric of religious exercises. The forms and adjuncts vary, but the end striven for is the same in the breast of every true and earnest devotee.

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The great object to be ascertained and kept in view is the character of the being with whom we seek to associate ourselves. If we form a false estimate of this, we shall be led to approach him in some inappropriate manner. The common error has been to attribute to him very much such thoughts and designs as may belong to a human potentate. In some way he has to be made our friend. He is thought to be open to the access of motives such as govern the human heart. we have offended him, we have to atone for the offence; if we desire his favour, we have to purchase it with gifts. The Christians entertain and act upon such ideas equally as have done the most ignorant of the idolatrous races. It is this that we strenuously dispute. The estimate currently made of the author of all we maintain is an erroneous and unworthy one. The Being we desire to approach is far above those considerations which may influence earthly rulers, and acts towards us ever in the highest exhibition of creative power. The one who made us is our friend from the beginning, and our friend for ever. His presence is never removed from us, and it is always in action for our advantage. Nothing can raise in him a thought hostile to those to whom he has given being. He has surrounded them with an atmosphere of beneficence. He has placed them in a strong current flowing onwards continuously in exhaustless blessing. Thoroughly intimate with all that pertains to the objects he has created, he has ordered all things for their good. Nothing has been overlooked, and nothing misdirected. The means and the ends are all equally assured, and all are worthy of the great projector. Boundless

wealth of resources, boundless knowledge and power belong to him, and all is exerted for the benefit of those whom he has made. We can bring him no offering out of what is not already his own; we are incapable of compensating him who possesses all things. Nor can we atone to him for our transgressions. We miss his blessings simply by turning out of the course in which they run; we get injured by misusing the means at our command; our remedy is to get into the right course and pursue it faithfully. There is between us and him no Esau whom he has hated, and no Jacob whom he has specially loved. We are all in this aspect Jacobs, towards whom the Almighty has sympathies, the depths of which are unfathomable. Gladly he accepts and restores us when we turn broken and bruised through our own foolish aberrations to him. The hurts we meet with are corrective, not punitive. We learn what are the evil ways from the evil consequences they introduce. And when we have apprehended and profited by the lesson, the reckoning is over. We pass into the true grooves of the creation to further knowledge and more assured stability. There is no judge putting us into scales and weighing our worth. There is no pause or interrupting process of decision to arrest the onward path. Either we are walking with the Almighty and reaping blessing, or we have turned out of the way and are incurring trouble. We are never thrown aside as hopeless and irrecoverable.

Such is the creed to which I have been introduced, and

many, I believe, possess it with me. It is based upon a sense of the all-sufficiency of the Almighty. I do not require a written volume to lead me to apprehend him. I do not require to place before him a blood, or any other offering to reconcile him to me. I believe in his unalterable friendship for me, and what I offer him is myself, that he should mould me to his will. There is much to do in me and towards me, but he will do it all unfailingly. Merely I am not to be wilfully self-seeking or rebellious. He has endowed me with free-will, but I am to take the consequences of using it wrongHe makes good good to me, and evil evil, and this I He teaches and controls me through all I must walk with him in his ways, and not Whatever are my hopes for myself I have

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depart from him.

the same hopes equally for others. We may not all know our blessings, but all will surely be introduced to them nevertheless. There is none who can remove himself from the atmosphere of the Almighty, and that gracious influence must prevail over all for their good through time and eternity. The ultimate results for the entire race, I am persuaded, will be such as more than to fulfil the most unbounded expectations we can form of whatever is supremely virtuous and glorious. The accomplishment of blessing may in cases be long deferred, but the end is nevertheless an assured one, because the supreme worker cannot fail. The Almighty has set himself against every form of evil, for the happiness of all whom he has brought into being, and he must triumph.

The Christians, in words, acknowledge the love of God, and his all-sufficiency, but their system is constructed in practical denial to him of these attributes. The first parents are set by them on a fancied pedestal of perfection, from which they fell. The object is to restore the supposed lost image of the divinity. As the parties stand fronting each other, nothing subsists between them but absolute hostility. The Creator frowns upon his creation, and overwhelms it with a curse, and the creatures hate his presence, and flee from it. He calls loudly for blood,—their blood, and has prepared a place where he may feast himself with their torments for ever. Lest there should be a chance left them of personal escape, there is an evil being let loose upon them, gifted with power to reach every soul and pervert it. He can make good appear to them evil, and evil good, and "take" them "captive" "at his will." Then they have to look about them for a remedy against all this unutterable woe, and they find it in the reputed son of a carpenter, Jesus of Nazareth. He is exalted to be the son of God, and, in fact, is recognized as "equal with God." He provides the wrathful creator with that blood which he demands. He is "made sin" for the sinful, and the "curse" designed for them falls upon him. Then the creator is satisfied. The eternity of woe designed for man is removed by a few hours passed by the substituted victim upon the cross. But the redeemed must believe in their redeemer. They must not challenge any circumstance of his marvellous history. Mark may contradict

Matthew, and Luke Mark, and John may contradict the other three, but they must unquestioningly believe the whole. The gospel may be formed appropriate only to the Jews, or it may prove specially adapted to the Gentiles. The saints may be long-suffering, turning the other cheek to the smiter, or they may raise, as in the Apocalypse, an impatient cry for vengeance. It is nevertheless to the Christian a consistent scheme, stamped as true throughout by the divinity. There was a time when he satisfied his people with "carnal ordinances," and "beggarly elements," made "to perish with the using," but it is not so now. The Almighty may, in past days, have established dispensations of a delusive nature, not calculated to secure their declared ends, but having Christ as his instrument, he now sets up a work that cannot fail. Unfortunately, however, the benefit is secured for only a "little flock," selected out of the vast multitude of the offenders. The rest are "vessels of wrath fitted to destruction," and for them there is no deliverance. They are the hated Esaus who must perish, or rather linger for ever in excruciating torment. They are the creation of Ahriman, and not of Ormuzd, and when they call upon the appointed saviour, he will have to say to them, he "never knew" them. The "salvation" arranged for is thus a very partial one, suitable for a few devotees, and the world at large are left absolutely uncared for to perish in their iniquities.

We quarrel thus not only with the facts of Christianity, which we find baseless and ideal, copied from Pagan models, but also with the principles of Christianity, which exalt Christ at the expense of the Almighty, and are constructed on too narrow foundations to meet existing evil. We condemn these principles moreover as subversive of substantial and universally recognizable truth. It is impossible that the sin of one man can be imposed upon another. It is by a fiction not to be realized by the mind that the transference is to be made. Nor can blood of any sort wipe away sin. Sin has to be repented of and turned from, and can be got rid of in no other manner. The process is a continuous one, not established in a day. It is vain to say, not I that sin, "but sin that dwelleth in me.' The sin makes the sinner, and he must cease to be one. The figment is that there is such an appropriation of Christ by the

believer that when the Almighty eyes look for the sinner they see only Christ. "I am crucified with Christ," the sinner is persuaded. The thing never occurred, but there it is to be believed in and realized; and the next step is, "nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' And by this ideal substitution evil is considered to be disposed of, and the adverse creator converted into a friend.

We seriously object to these artificial and distorted views. Truth is not maintainable by means of fiction, and nothing loses its real character by the alteration of its name. We are jealous for the honour of the Almighty, and wish mankind to know and use him as their friend. We have not to plead Agni to remove our guilt, or to imbibe Soma to obtain immortal life, or to lay hold of Ráma, or Krishna, or any other, to secure salvation. Our God loves us because he has made us, and in him we find never-ceasing remedy and support in all our need. That we should strive to dissipate the mists which hide his true aspect from the eyes of others, appears to us a legitimate and a necessary task, and the desire so to serve the best interests of our fellowmen must be our apology for whatever we offer to their consideration on this momentous subject.

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