We require no display of spiritual pyrotechnics. Enough for us that there is truth, and that we have the intellect to perceive it—that there is right, and we have the will to obey it. Neither a human God nor a divine man can enlighten us further than this. There are freedom and impulse for us to attain the highest degree of illumination of which we are capable. The human aspiration soars beyond the path of the lightning. In every noble idea, every worthy desire, we have a mediator with God. The more silent the work, the more certain that the principle of all life is performing it. In this is our eternity, and there is nothing beyond. CHAPTER XI. THE IDEAL CHRIST _“What think ye of Christ? Whose son was he?”—Matt. 22: 42._ NEARLY a quarter of a century ago (1868) a very remarkable pamphlet was published by request of the Free Religious Association, written by that remarkable man, the Rev. Samuel Johnson, a Unitarian minister and an author of no little repute. The subject was _The Worship of Jesus._ It had a very limited circulation, and the stereotype plates were destroyed in the great Boston fire, and it is now very difficult to find a copy. Mr. Johnson takes the ground that “Christianity is a temporary step in the divine growth of man through the worship of the ideal; and this hope lies, not in pausing on this step as final, nor in proving the names and personalities associated with it to be as valid for ever as they have been in the past, but in that which underlies and governs the whole process—_the law of religious idealization._ “This is no speculation; it is the positive law of progress, as history presents it. To worship ideals is the condition of spiritual life. To lose belief that there is somewhere a better than ourselves is to gravitate downward to what is worse than ourselves. We grow better by definite homage to a best. And this worship of ideals is a process of idealization.... Man’s power of growth, therefore, resides in the ability to shift his veneration.... “Ideals prove themselves to be idealizations, that they may point him on to higher levels. This is religious progress.... “So a time comes when every religion that centres in an individual’s prerogative of divinity falls under criticism, and is, so far, referred to temporary causes. Christianity cannot escape this law. As a distinct religion it is but Christism, and passes away, like Jehovism, before a broader faith. Whether what succeeds it be called Theism or Pantheism, this terminology of systems fails to express its scope. It is free worship of the one infinite and eternal life of the spiritual, moral, and physical universe....