“It is urged that we destroy the basis of religious unity when we take away this historical and personal centre of faith. Men absolutely need, it is said, that concrete form, that individuality, under which the divine is represented to them in the Christ. There would be more cause for this anxiety if it could be shown that they have ever possessed such a centre. But what have they had, after all, but a common name for ever-changing ideals? The belief that all eyes were turned to a common authoritative centre was an illusion, which had its uses, indeed, but becomes a breeder of strife in proportion as men learn the rights of free inquiry. ‘Worship the Christ! follow Jesus!’ cry the ages. But who is Jesus? and what is the Christ? The Jesus of Matthew is one, the Christ of John is another, the ‘second Adam’ of Paul is a third. The moral as well as the theological contents of the name vary with the ages and the sects that appeal to it. As the Christ of Luther was not the Christ of Augustine, nor his the Christ of James, so the Christ of the Unitarian is one, of the Calvinist another. Whom the one will save, the other will destroy; what to the one is moral wrong, to the other is divine right; what love would require in the one, justice would foreclose in the other. What common centre can the liberal Bible scholars and the panic-stricken, text-ridden Revivalists find in the name of Christ? All the warring sects have been ‘standing up for Jesus;’ and which of them knows what Jesus was? The farther you get back toward the original, the less sure do you feel of your own knowledge, and the less right should you feel from what you know in part to assume that you have found the appointed centre of religious thought. It would be easy to show that unity is impossible so long as it is sought to found it on the claims of a person to that position, since the mysterious irrationality of such an office must keep the speculative faculties of mankind in ceaseless self-contradiction and strife. It would be easy to show that this claim of Jesus has been the perpetual root of dogmatic warfare—that all barbarism of the Christian Church in past ages has come of jealousy about the honor due the person of the Christ.” We offer no apology for these long extracts from Mr. Johnson’s inimitable little book of ninety pages. “He being dead yet speaketh,” and his words give no uncertain sound. He was in advance of the times, and if his brethren in the Unitarian ministry would regard Jesus, whom they almost deify, as an _ideal_ (quite imperfect) that has come down to us from pagan peoples, and cease to court the favor of the orthodox, they would have more self-respect and more real regard from the thinking men of the age.