stand upon the broad ground laid down in the editorial which Dr. Gladden criticises:

"The good any man does deserves honor, whatever evil he may have done or may do again. The evil a man does deserves rebuke, whatever good he may have done or may do again."

So much by way of direct reply to Dr. Gladden. The importance of bearing testimony against public policies and practices that injuriously affect the general welfare, which Dr. Gladden emphasizes, The Outlook also emphasizes. And before his letter was received it had in type the editorial which follows, written, not to influence the action of the American Board, but to guide our readers to what we deem right answers to the two questions, Ought the Church to bear testimony against public and popular sins? and if so, How should it bear such testimony?

The Church of Christ ought to be a witness-bearer not merely to general principles of universal application, but to the special application of those principles to the life of each particular epoch. It should bear witness against the sins of its own time, and it should study the evils of its own time, and indicate the direction in which remedies are to be looked for.

It is not enough for it to say in general terms, We are saved by hope; it must also point out in what direction hope looks for salvation from special disorders. It is not enough to say, Thou shalt not steal; it must also point out the special forms of disregarding the rights of property which constitute characteristic stealing at any particular age or in any particular community.

If

the recent agitation shall quicken the sense of this duty in the Church, and make it more definite, more specific, and more vigorous in its witness-bearing against sin, and more intelligent in its prescription of remedies, it will have accomplished a great and much-needed service to the community. There are two principles respecting this witnessbearing by the Church, which must be regarded if the witness-bearing is to be effective.

I. We may well turn to the Bible on the assumption that the example of the Prophets and the Apostles, and especially of Jesus Christ, furnishes a guide for us in the twentieth century. The Prophets rarely, if ever, bore testimony against the sin of any particular individual whom they specified by name. We do not recall any instance in which the Apostles did so in any public preaching, though there are one or two references to individual wrong-doers, as Paul's reference to Demas, in the Epistles. We do not think that Christ ever singled out a person for public condemnation, though. more than once he made the act of an individual, whose hospitality he was receiving at the time, an occasion for rebuking the sins of a class to which his host belonged, sins of which his host was guilty (Luke xi. 37-54; xiv. 1-11). The sins which were condemned by the Prophets and the Apostles and the Master were the sins of their community, or of certain classes in their community.

The sins which they thus rebuked were sins characteristic of that time, and calling for rebuke then and there. "Woe to them," cries Micah, the prophet of the poor, "that covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage." But Micah does not mention any one prince or noble who has done these things. "Him, being delivered, by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain," says Peter in his Pentecostal sermon. But he does not mention Pilate, or Caiaphas, or Annas; he charges the guilt home upon his auditors. "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites !" cries Christ, "for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." But he pillories no person to receive the condemnation either of the bystanders or of subsequent history. Once Christ was asked to pass judgment on a particular transaction, and a particular person accused of dishonesty in that transaction. "Speak to my brother," says one of his auditors, "that he divide the inheritance

with me." Christ refused to interfere. He refused to pass judgment on the transaction and on the brother accused of the wrong-doing; but he took the occasion to condemn the national sin of coveteousness. "Man," he said, "who made me a judge or a divider over you? And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of coveteousness."

If we can judge at all of what Christ would do in our time by what he did in his time, he would denounce political corruption, but he would not sit in judgment on Matthew Quay. He would denounce gambling, but he would not pillory Richard Canfield. He would condemn the spirit which converts commerce into war, but he would not call Mr. Rockefeller before himself as judge. In short, he would condemn the National sins of our time, he would not select special sinners to be the subjects of his special condemnation.

II. The other principle which the Church needs to bear in mind is the method by which its witness is to be borne against sins common in its time. When a Church is organized, and has in its organization some person or some body which has a right to speak authoritatively on its behalf, this person or this body is the proper instrument by which to bear its testimony against what it regards as current errors or current sins. Thus Pope Leo XIII., in his encyclical on Socialism, vigorously condemned the spirit of greed and selfishness characteristic of a commercial age, and condemned it alike in all classes. Thus the Episcopal General Convention has borne vigorous testimony against the lax notions of the family tie and the easily granted divorces characteristic of certain classes in American society to-day. Thus, too, in the decade 1850-1860, various church bodies bore their testimony against slavery, and both before and since they have by resolutions borne their testimony against various phases of intemperance.

In the Congregational denomination there is no body which has any right to speak with uthority on behalf of the churches, in such a way as to bind them, as the Episcopal Church is bound by the utterances of the General Convention, or as the Roman Catholic

Church is bound by the utterance of its Pope. But it has State and local Associations and a National Council, and any expression of opinion by a State Association is justly taken as indicative of the opinion entertained by churches in that State, and any opinion expressed by the National Council is justly taken as indicative of the opinions entertained by the churches throughout the Nation. If the Congregational ministry desire to have the Congregational denomination, as a unit, express its opinion on any ethical question, or bear its witness against any current sin, it is by the State Association or by the National Council that such utterance should be made, such testimony should be borne.

The Outlook would like to see a committee possessing some expert knowledge of economic and industrial conditions, a committee containing such representative men as Dr. Gladden, President Tucker, President Hyde, of Bowdoin College, and President Hadley, of Yale University, formulate some statement respecting the Christian principles applicable to the present industrial and commercial conditions, and involving some testimony against current industrial and commercial wrong-doing. If such a witness were formulated by such a committee, and after full discussion were adopted by the National Council, and perhaps also by State Associations, it would have a deserved influence in the community in defining, if not raising, ethical standards, and in expressing and forming, if not in creating, a public sentiment against the violation of such standards.

But while such organic testimony against wrong-doing by the proper representative bodies of a denomination is not without considerable value, in the main the Church must depend for its efficiency as a witness-bearer upon the courage, the candor, the rational judgment, and the outspokenness of its inaividual ministers. What Isaiah said of the Messiah may be said of all his ministers: "Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people." This is precisely one of the functions of the Christian minister to bear witness, not against individual men-he is not appointed to be a judge or a divider between men;

not upon individual transactions-he is not appointed to be an investigator of special acts, and certainly he is not appointed to condemn special acts without investigating them; but to be a witness for the essential principles of truth and righteousness, as they are interpreted by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and to be a witness against the violation of those principles wherever and whenever and by whomsoever that violation may be manifested. The age is truly characterized as a commercial age. Its virtues and its vices are both those of commercialism. And the Church can perhaps render no better service to such an age than by raising, through the voice of its ministry, the ideal of commercial integrity, and bearing a courageous testimony against every violation of that law of mutual service which is fundamental in the teaching of Jesus Christ.

The University of Virginia: Its New Day

Few academic events of recent years have had so great significance as the inauguration last week of Dr. Alderman as President of the University of Virginia. It means more than the entrance of a new personality into the life of a great institution, for it involves a transformation of the organization of the institution itself. As Harvard embodied the spirit of the New England colonists, so the University of Virginia embodied the spirit of the Southern landholders. Harvard is distinctly an inheritance from the days of the monarchy; the University of Virginia is an inheritance from men who had established a democracy. Harvard for generations bore the marks of the time when the government was under the Crown, and the Church, albeit Congregational, laid claim to privileges of establishment. The University of Virginia at its very outset was clear of Church control and even of religious atmosphere, and avoided so amply the dangers of executive despotism that it dispensed with the office of President. While the Northern university has been learning its lesson of religious and aca

demic freedom, the Southern university has, without losing its freedom, made provision for religious worship and preaching, and has now at last created, in the interest of administrative efficiency, the office of President. No one who does not know Virginia, and especially the University at Charlottesville, can very well understand how the theory that administration by a group of men is freer and better than administration by a single executive has given a tone to the whole University. The election of a President means the abandonment of that theory, and the adoption of the belief that the function of administering university affairs ought to be exercised, not as an incident to the teaching function, but as an independent, positive force. This necessarily involves the view that the university owes to itself the opportunity of aggressive expansion.

What such expansion means to the commonwealth of Virginia President

Alderman indicated in his inaugural

address. It means an attempt to carry out Jefferson's idea that the University of Virginia should be the leader, so to speak the federal head, of all the educational forces of the State. Dr. Alderman would establish relations of comity and co-operation, not only with the common schools, but also with private and denominational colleges; he suggested that halls and domitories controlled by them should be established at the University, and that a school of education should be maintained in the University to be a place of training for teachers to be leaders of public opinion.

The expansion of the University of Virginia ought to have a peculiar meaning for the whole South, for, as Dr. Alderman said, to great numbers of men throughout the South it has been known as par excellence the University. For generations the people of the Southern States have exalted the value of political liberty; conditions now existing in the South demand, and are ripe for, the promulgation of a new liberty-liberty of thought and of speech. Especially the task set before the South of establishing relations of justice and mutual service between two separate and distinct races cannot be performed without such intel

cannot but foster; and the greater the University of Virginia becomes, the greater will be its service in this respect. Were the significance of this inauguration to end here, it would make the event worthy of record in the history of academic progress in America; but it extends far beyond Virginia and the South. Though in plan and spirit the University of Virginia has from the first been truly a university, its poverty and the lack of unity in its administrative organization have prevented the realization of its ideal. Now, with a centralized organization and the machinery for getting financial strength, it will, by having more to offer, draw more students from North, East, and West. To this end its situation, not far from the traditional line separating North and South, will be an aid. Numbers of Southern young men have gone into the North for their training, or at least a part of it; hereafter, with the expansion of the University of Virginia, the small number of Northern young men going South for at least some of their education will be increased. Every man born and bred in the North who goes to Charlottesville will gradually learn to understand from the community a point of view in many respects new to him. He will learn by concrete experiences how men value race integrity when they think they see it threatened, how they insist on the value of a man apart from his money or his enterprise when the means and the spirit of commercialism are absent, how they can exalt honor into a force as powerful as greed or passion when they have been bred to do so. Northern universities have done inestimable service in giving Southerners a point of view they never could have obtained in the South. The University of Virginia is in position to give Northerners a point of view that can be had only in the South.

With this promise for the educational advancement of the Commonwealth, the nourishing of intellectual liberty in the South, and the spread of a National rather than a sectional outlook among citizens throughout the Nation, the University of Virginia has been, as it were, born anew.

"All the world loves a lover" not only because he recalls a brief ecstasy in the memory of the multitude who are living in the light of common day, but because he rounds out to its full dimensions the passional and romantic capacity of the race. For a host of men and women life is a tracery, gradually becoming obliterated, of generous passions and great hopes; a fading of the sky of dawn into the dull arch of a gray noon. It is not the blackness in life that brings weariness and repulsion, it is the monotonous grayness; it is not radical skepticism that blights faith and takes the bloom off the days-it is indifference, disillusion, cynicism. The root of these destructive forces which rob life of its romance, its wonder, its perennial freshness of interest, is in the man, not in the order of things; and society has always been full of those who, losing the mind and heart of childhood, have not realized the aging of their spirits and have thought the world grown old. Now the lover, wiser than the children of the world, carries the fresh heart and keeps his vision securely among the blind.

"Great men are the true men," writes Amiel, "the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary, they are in true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be." The story of the rise of men from the stone age has been a long record of discovery-the continual finding of unsuspected wealth and of unused forces in earth and air; and it is quite certain that there are hidden from us to-day, within our reach or the reach of our children, a thousand uses of the chemistry of the soil and air, of which the marvelous divinations of the last two decades have been only dimly prophetic. If this inexhaustible treasury of uses and adaptations, of force and material, were not matched by a kindred capacity in men, there would have been no history of science, and the world would present the ignoble paradox of an incalculable fortune in the keeping of an imbecile. That treasury never opens save at the touch of intelligence, and the rarest things it guards are accessible only to the insight

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of genius, so that the story of discovery is the story of the discoverer; his growth has been registered in the uncovering of the secrets of the world in which he lives. From the beginning he has been slowly or rapidly bringing out of the depths of his nature great and heroic qualities; he has, with infinite labor, made a place for himself not only with the work but among the thoughts of God. And he is still in an early stage of his growth; despite the forebodings of the faint-hearted or the near-sighted, despite the apprehensions of those who do not recognize the multiplying signs that we are in a growing, not in a completed, universe, the future holds more spiritual and subtle gifts in its hands, and men are unfolding more and more the capacity to receive and use these higher things. In the face of a thousand discouraging outbreaks and downfalls, men are rising in the scale of spiritual living, and there are before the race almost unsuspected possibilities of greatness.

The unimaginative suspect the reality of the conclusions of the man of insight, and in every age the Cassandras who have foreseen the approach of fate have been rejected and scorned; but the man of imagination is the only man who really sees the world or knows what it holds for men. Greatness has so far been incredible to small men, and from time to time futile attempts are made to explain genius as a form of disease; as if the early stages of growth could be whole some, and the supreme stage, the final decisive planting of the feet on the summit, abnormal! It is in greatness, not in littleness, that nature touches the goal of her endeavor; and great spirits are neither abnormal nor diseased; "they are in true order." This does not involve a new kind of men in the world; it involves a higher development of the men now in possession of the world. It may be suspected that a vast amount of what appears to be mediocrity is in reality undeveloped intelligence and power, and that society needs not so much a wider possession of intellect as a higher energizing of the intellect it is very inadequately using.

In like manner there are immense reserves of passion, devotion, chivalry,

OF THE

still to be drawn on; the world is full of men who might be great lovers if they knew that love is an art as well as an ecstasy. There are as many undeveloped resources of love in the hearts of men as there are undeveloped forces and qualities in the world about and the soul within us. Under the pressure of the tyranny of things, in a critical age which distrusts the reality of great spiritual superiorities and is afraid of great passions, those who might reap the uttermost harvests of love are content with a few sheaves; they look at the glow in the sky of youth as a pathetic promise of a day which never dawned. The ecstasies reported by the great lovers they regard as the poetic or symbolic expressions of imaginative men. To the literalminded such an experience as that recorded in the "Vita Nuova " has no roots in reality; it is an elaborate and somewhat morbid fiction of a great poet. There are many who accept the authenticity of Romeo's consuming passion but reject utterly the sustained passion transmuted into a great idealism which has its classic examples in Beatrice and Laura. In the preoccupation of pressing affairs, the absorption of vitality in dealing with things, the imagination is undeveloped and becomes atrophied, and the stunted spirit grows skeptical of the reality and uses of poetry; and in like manner the failure to unfold the power of love by the practice of the art of loving makes the maimed spirit incredulous. of the ecstasies and adorations of those who are possessed by the genius of passion.

Mercutio makes sport of Romeo's intensity of emotion because the great passion has not touched him; let the faintest breath rest on that gallant nature and the scorn of a world would not count a feather's weight against its splendid devotion. To believe in great thoughts and deeds a man must share in them; to believe in a great passion a man must experience it; for to every man come the things which belong to him by reason of his aims, loves, faith. To the commonplace the commonplace is always present; to those who have vision as well as sight the world grows more wonderful the further they penetrate its mysteries. To the nature that