Article January 15, 1910 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

[Universalist Leader.]

Let the preacher and pietist and moralist take courage. Man, individual man, is coming to a moral consciousness of himself as a part of one stupendous whole. He is feeling his corporate responsibility. He is reaching after that ideal which is at the bottom of gospel. The kingdom is the growing burden of his hope; his citizenship is in that redeemed society which the Master anticipated in his loftier ideal. He no longer thinks of saving himself alone. If the acuteness of his own sense of guilt is passing, it is passing into that larger life and grander consummation where he feels a common guilt, and rejoices in a common dream of humanity's beatification. If sometimes we miss the single, solitary voice of a perturbed and tormented soul breathing its tragic grief into the heart of God, let us not miss that far-reaching, rhythmic music of world-hope and world-hunger for honor and justice and righteousness which swells like the mighty anthems of "Dies irce" and "Laus Deo" over the surging tides of the world's vast energies. The consciousness of sin which stirs the mass of eighty millions of people with the repentant travail of a new and better life is a grander spectacle to angels and men than the guilty cry of the old days when men fled in terror from the threatened wrath of an angry god. What the world has lost in this or that individual cry for deliverance, it has more than regained in that wider, higher, deeper sense of our common need of a better, truer, kindlier life together in the world.

[Churchman.]

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