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The day of the belief in a personal God is gone, according to Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York, who preached in Mandel Hall at the University of Chicago recently.

"Science has broken down this belief and philosophy has destroyed it. God is the source of all life, all thought. He is the source of life, with the plowman as well as with the poet. This is far from the idea that God is a great big man, seated on a white throne in the center of the universe. Old churchmen stick to this belief because they are afraid to lose the humanity element in God. They want the personal element. But they need not have a personal God to feel this.

"When we see a painting of a great master and study its lines, as the beauty of the masterpiece overcomes us we feel the power of the master without knowing him personally. So it may be when we study nature. God paints the leaves autumn colors with His invisible hand, but the painting is going on. Thinking men no longer believe in a personal God. God instead is about us, without us, within us.

"A great many people in universities think they are losing their religion because they are getting a new one. They shudder to think of this. But theology follows experience.

"We don't have to go to church to find God. The great question with the church to-day is not how to get men into the churches, but how to get God into men. You can worship God as well with your flowers in the garden as with your friends in the church.

"The new birth is not a sudden transformation. It comes in successive awakenings. It is a gradual growth in truth until the dawn of righteousness breaks upon you."

Chicago Examiner.

The Christian life is a temper and a spirit in which all life is to be lived, and not a unique and special mode of activity. The farmer, the mechanic, the merchant, is not necessarily, or even probably, summoned away from these vocations by becoming a Christian; he is to live the Christian life in the performance of the duties which his existing relations to human interests involve.

All men, except those whom the Master commissions to a special service, are to find in the arena of ordinary human relations and tasks and responsibilities the sphere in which they are to serve the Lord. For most of us the call to a Christian life does not mean a summons to break away from the human activities and relationships in which our capacities and the providential ordering of our careers has placed us; it means a summons to put into our tasks and into all our associations with our fellow-men the Christian spirit so that even the commonest activities shall be interfused and interpenetrated with the disposition of Christ.

The Watchman

The need of a great religious awakening in our churches is apparent to the most superficial observer. The multitudes that are unreached by the Gospel, the self-satisfied supineness of so many of the churches, the comparatively small number added yearly to the membership, all pointedly emphasize the fact of the need and the greatness of it. We are compelled to recognize the need, yet how sluggish are our pulses at the call of God to awake to duty and a living sense of responsibility!—The Examiner.

The secret of a richer peace among our restless workmen lies in an improved spirit of industry, for the shirk knows nothing of the contentment of labor, but only its weariness and impatience. Nothing satisfies like honest performance; for still, character, in the marketplace, the shop, the field, the kitchen, the studio, is the prime source of contentment.

Universalist Leader.

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