no longer men. Every real man-every moral person realizing the moral scope of manhood-every real man will yield to Christ and enter the new race and love his Lord, and love all men forever. The final brotherhood will have lost only those who refused . to be men complete."

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ; according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love; having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will." (Eph. Ist chap.)

There seems to be quite a conflict between these opposite theories of Free Agency and Fatalism, and my candid opinion is that both of them are relatively true when viewed from their own standpoint, but not so when viewed from the opposite standpoint. The question now arises, Of what use is man in this grand machinery of Nature?

It seems that all advance is made by individual effort; and as the body is made up of myriads of atoms or molecules, and all these are subservient to the one will-our will-so, too, I believe each man represents an atom or a molecule in the Universal Spirit of our system, and that at some future time, when we have become perfected, then we will all become subservient to the one will, even the Lord of our universe.

My own view of evolution is this: The spirit of God which is in all men was perfect in the beginning, and will be perfect for all times, and for all eternity. There is no necessity for the development of Deity. It is only the heterogeneous development of the natural man, that part of man which is made or evolved from nature, that is imperfect. I believe that it became necessary for the spirit of the Universal Christ to take a new body, or to reincarnate in a new solar system, a long time ago, when our solar system had its origin. The spirit was perfect and fully mature in the beginning, as it is now, and ever will be; but the material universe was not. The universe must be brought to perfection through the process of evolution and development, which requires a very great length of time to accomplish. First came the formation of the system, then the geological developments, then the vegetable, mineral, and animal kingdoms, of

which man is at the head. Progress is made slowly, and sometimes there is a retrogade movement, but in the main we are forever progressing, and we must continue to progress until the universe has come to a state of perfect spiritual adaptability, and everything in the universe becomes obedient to the one will of the Universal Christ. If we look upon the multitude of people as we find them to-day, we find they are selfish and sinful in every way, and we are very far from being perfect. But let these same selfish and sinful people evolve higher in the scale of intelligence, purity, righteousness and spirituality, and they will become perfectly good, unselfish, angelic, and they will all become obedient to the one will of the Universal Christ. And, since the head of every man is Christ, it requires all of us to make up His stature, we are all a part of Him. When we all shall have become perfect, then the kingdom shall be delivered up to God, that God, through Christ, may be all in all. And as the body is composed of myriads of atoms, so the men and women correspond to the spiritual entities of which the body of the Universal Christ is composed. This theory may argue the development of Christ, but I am inclined to believe that the development is all on the natural and not on the spiritual side, yet there may be some development of the spiritual, concerning which I cannot say.

Mr. Curtis says concerning the human race: "Why does a man, in this need of personal isolation, feel such a need of fellowship with men? Because one feature of self-consciousness is self-estimate, and when a man comes, with any degree of thoroughness, to place estimate upon self he perceives his own fragmentariness, his own need of supplement. He feels as a selfconscious leaf might feel blowing about away from the tree. A man feels in this way because his incompleteness is a fact. He is an unfinished item, a splinter of a comprehensive plan. And it is not merely that he is finite and needs to be filled out by the Infinite God-that is a larger point to be placed fully in another connection; no, it is that every man is made for other men—is purposely created jagged so as to fit into other men-is planned to be a reciprocal factor in a great social organism. This great social organism is the human race." And I will add here that that organism, in a spiritual sense, is the spirit of the Universal Christ.

"For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order; Christ the first fruits; afterward they that are Christ's at His coming. Then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign, till He hath put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For He hath put all things under His feet. But when He saith, all things are put under Him, it is manifest that He is excepted, which did put all things under Him. And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all."

Finally, from what has been said concerning the various religions I do not wish it inferred that I believe any of them necessarily evil, or that the persons believing in them will be destroyed, or that everyone will be consigned to the infernal regions who has not embraced Christianity. On the contrary, in this regard, I must agree with the Rev. Enoch Pond, who said, "I can conceive of a man being saved who never heard of Christ, so long as he conforms with the Christ principle.'

"Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind,

Sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind."

We may well believe that all men are spiritually conscious of everything that is going on in our universe, although the natural conscious mind may know nothing of it. Therefore we may well believe that there are very many, some even among those who are outside the Church, and who may have never heard of Christ, and yet who are looking forward with joy to that time when, "The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the Arch Angel and with the trump of God." "Every eye shall see Him,” and we cannot reasonably doubt but that in that great assemblage there will be some "of every kindred and tongue and nation.”

Mr. John Dewey, in his "Pathways of the Spirit," says: "When the West is Christianized, it will Christianize the world; and the Christ will bring all men into fellowship with one another and with himself in the universal realization of At-one-ment with the Father. And other sheep I have which are not of this fold;

them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.'"

We have seen that Veneration or Holy Love is the highest faculty of the mind, and that all the lower faculties converge into this; and it is only reasonable to believe that all the religious thought must eventually converge in Veneration to the one grand central idea which Christ has declared unto us that, "God is Love."-Universal Love.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE REVELATIONS.

So much has been written about the Revelations, so many different constructions have been placed upon them, and during the Crusades, and perhaps at other times of which I know nothing, so many people have lost their lives and property on account of their misunderstanding of the Revelations, that it naturally inclines us to approach the prophesy of this book with fear and trembling; lest, perchance, we might do wrong. And then, above all, the Spirit has said, "For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophesy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and if any maǹ shall take away from the words of the book of this prophesy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." (Rev. 22: 18-19.) Perhaps there have not been any wars or series of wars since the Apostolic age when there have not been at least a few overcredulous people who have taken this to be the prophesied "Wars and rumors of wars" which were to precede the coming of the Millennium. This ante-millennial scare, in fact, has occurred so often all through the ages that it is doubtful if anything short of actual demonstration could move the mass of the people in this regard at the present time.

There were some who seemed to believe that the Millennium would come during or immediately follow the Apostolic age.

This was undoubtedly talked of so much that the Apostle Paul found it necessary to say, "Let no man deceive you by means; for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition," etc. (2 Thes. 2: 1-9.)

Chamber's Encyclopedia has this to say in part: "It has been stated that not less than 80 systematic commentaries are worthy of note, and that the less valuable writings on the subject are unnumbered, if not innumerable. All we can do here is to characterize the different schools, so to speak, into which the interpreters of this wonderful book may be arranged: 1. The Præterist School of interpreters, who look upon the Revelation as fulfilled in the past, and especially in the great conflicts of Christianity with Judaism and Paganism, and its triumph over them in the ages following the time in which it was written. To this class of interpreters, belong, among others, Grotius, Hammond, Bossuet, Calmet, Eichhorn, Ewald, Lucke, De Wette, Stuart, Lee, Maurice. 2. The Futurist School regard this book, with the exception of the first three chapters, as referring to events yet to come to pass; and this view has been advocated, in modern times, by such writers as Dr. S. R. Maitland, Dr. J. H. Todd, Newton, and others. 3. What has been called the Historical Continuous School of expositors, who regard the Revelation as a progressive symbolic history of the fortunes of the church from the 1st c. to the end of time. To this school of interpreters belong a host of eminent names, such as Mede, Sir I. Newton, Vitringa, Bengel, Faber, Elliot, Wadsworth, Alford, Hengstenberg, Ebrard, and others.

"There are others, again, who are not disposed to allow any exact prophetical character to the book, but simply to regard it as a species of symbolic poem, setting forth the eternally-recurring principles of the divine government. The real fulfillment of the Revelation, therefore, is not to be sought in any definite historical events, but in the vindication of these principles shadowed forth more or less in great historical crises, yet transcending all partial historical results. The grand symbolic imagery of the book has never found and will never find its exact counterpart in any earthly facts, but it finds its spiritual counterpart constantly in the career of the church-the unceasing conflict of truth with error, of righteousness with sin, of life with death, of the king