If men could only come to see this more clearly and to trust their own divine nature to enable them to follow and express the truth as well as to receive it, they would not suffer themselves to be hampered by formal and literal statements of belief whether in the church, the Bible, or anywhere else. But this is what they seldom do. Your devout Anglican or Roman Catholic will tell you that the church teaches this or the church teaches that: as though that fact ever permanently settled anything. One cannot really begin to appreciate the value of united continuous church testimony until one is able to stand apart from it, so to speak, and ask whether it rings true to the reason and the moral sense. Suppose the Christian church enjoined or permitted rape and murder, would the devout Catholic believe and obey? "But it is inconceivable that the church could ever do that," he might answer. Yes, but suppose it did, would he obey? If not, why not? He would not obey because he would know quite well that the higher law within his heart would forbid and render impossible any such obedience. That is all the answer I want. Why should we not apply it all the way round? The real test of truth is to be found in the response it awakens within the soul. +The supposed authority of the letter a great hindrance to truth.+--Now one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way of many devout and intelligent minds to-day is that of the supposed binding authority of the letter of scripture. When a good man hears some inspiring or common-sense statement of truth,--for instance, that of universal salvation,--he often replies in some such way as the following: "Yes, I know it seems very plausible, and my heart desires to believe it; but then, you know, it says in the scripture, 'These shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteousness into life eternal.' I cannot get behind that." He will go on stringing together, passage after passage, often without the slightest suspicion that the original meaning had nothing whatever to do with the subject under discussion; as, for example, that well-known sentence in Ezekiel, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." Whatever Ezekiel originally meant by that saying,--and it is well worth examination,--he was not thinking of a modern revival meeting. The plain, average, level-headed business man of religious temperament will sometimes bother himself in this way until he thinks of giving up religion altogether. The letter of scripture often seems to say one thing and the Christlike human heart another. Take, as one example out of many, that pungent passage in Psalm cxxxvii, "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." That passage does not breathe the spirit of Jesus, nor is it true to the best in human nature; no follower of Jesus wants to see a little one dashed against a stone. But even to do justice to a passage of this kind we have to get into intellectual and