The democratic movement, insomuch as it feels a common spirit in all men, is of the same nature as Christianity; and it is said with truth that while the world was never so careless as now of the mechanism of religion, it was never so Christian in feeling. A deeper sense of a common life, both as incarnated in the men about us and as inferred in some larger whole behind and above them—in God—belongs to the higher spirit of democracy as it does to the teaching of Jesus. He calls the mind out of the narrow and transient self of sensual appetites and visible appurtenances, which all of us in our awakened moments feel to be inferior, and fills it with the incorrupt good of higher sentiment. We are to love men as brothers, to fix our attention upon the best that is in them, and to make their good our own ambition. Such ideals are perennial in the human heart and as sound in psychology as in religion. The mind, in its best moments, is naturally Christian; because when we are most fully alive to the life about us the sympathetic becomes the rational; what is good for you is good for me because I share your life; and I need no urging to do by you as I would have you do by me. Justice and kindness are matters of course, and also humility, which comes from being aware of something superior to your ordinary self. To one in whom human nature is fully awake “Love your enemies and do good to them that despitefully use you” is natural and easy, because despiteful people are seen to be in a state of unhappy aberration from the higher life of kindness, and there is an impulse to help them to get back. The awakened mind identifies itself with other persons, living the sympathetic life and following the golden rule by impulse. To put it otherwise, Christ and modern democracy alike represent a protest against whatever is dead in institutions, and an attempt to bring life closer to the higher impulses of human nature. There is a common aspiration to effectuate homely ideals of justice and kindness. The modern democrat is a plain man and Jesus was another. It is no wonder, then, that the characteristic thought of the day is preponderantly Christian, in the sense of sharing the ideals of Christ, and that in so far as it distrusts the Church it is on the ground that the Church is not Christian enough.