THE EXCELLENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.
A GRAND memorial chapel was recently dedicated at Palo Alto, Cal., in connection with Stanford University, built by Mrs. Stanford in memory of her husband. Protestant Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian, Unitarian, and Jew took part in the dedicatory exercises. Dr. Heber R. Newton, a liberal of the liberals, is the pastor, and preached the dedicatory sermon. The sentiments expressed may be found in the two excerpts which follow, as reported in the daily press:— There is a oneness of ethical and spiritual religion in which Christian, Mohammedan, Jew, Hindu, Japanese, Chinaman, all alike stand confessedly the children of one Father. With the Persian mystic we, too, may each say: “I am at home in mosque or synagogue, in temple or in church.” The pulpit of this church is to try to find the common denominator of our manifold forms of Christianity. It is to present those essential, ethical, and spiritual truths which are the heritage of all who bear the name of “Christian”—which we are now discerning to be the heritage of all who bear the human name, the sons and daughters of God in every race, in whom shineth the “Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” All this seems very beautiful in sentiment; and in a certain way there is a common fund of sentiment and ethical teaching in all religions. There are many things common between the counterfeit and the genuine, between the false Sabbath and the true. But the Christianity of Christ differs in one respect from all other religions whatsoever; and that is in its intrinsic uplifting power. Other religions, at their best, are but ethical forms, empty ceremonies, a round of meaningless mummeries. They give no power to live the morals they teach. Their powerlessness has been demonstrated among the peoples of the great dark lands of earth. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” But into all these forms, into all this death, comes the life of God in Christianity. It has its ethics, pure, high, divine—the royal law of the Most High. It has power to translate those principles into living characters. It has the demonstration of that power in its fullest perfection in the life and character of Jesus Christ. And He has put that life into the dead stones that the dead forms of worldly religion could never reach, and made them living temples of God. He has put His life into the lowest of men and women, and made them ministering angels. And all the betterment we see in this world to-day has been wrought by, or is the growth of, the life of God in Christianity. To place it on a level with other religions is to take only its dead form; is to present the empty sepulchre of a living Saviour who has gone on before. Christianity, true Christianity—not its form, not its perversion—comes to the devotees of all these soulless forms, and offers them life, life, eternal life. That is its only mission in this world. It is only when men lose knowledge of its power that they make it one of a sisterhood of creeds, cults, or systems.