Even the great religion without God, Buddhism, to the study of which we shall by-and-by address ourselves, has so deeply felt the force of the unselfish impulse imparted to it by Gotama, that it has elaborated the wonderful figure of the being who makes the "Great Resolve" not to attain deliverance alone, but to toil through a vast series of existences in the laborious exercise of the Ten Perfections, that he may fit himself to bring deliverance to gods and men. Then there arises the distinction between the Great and the Little Vehicle. There is the Pacceka-Buddha, enlightened for himself alone, who mounts a car only for one; there is the Bodhisat, or Buddha to be, who chooses a car that will embrace all living beings. The later books represent the Buddha as surrounded by hosts of them numerous as sixty Ganges' sands;* they are ready "to assume countless forms for the salvation of all sentient creatures, for the benefit of ages yet to come."+ And as the system grows, under the perpetual play of the religious imagination, the Chinese Bodhisat, Kwan Yin, engages himself by a mighty oath to enter into every one of the innumerable worlds, and bring deliverance to all creatures who inhabit them, while his worshippers address him thus--"O great and compassionate Kwan Yin, may all emerge from the wheel of transmigration, and be saved! When it is remembered that continuance in the wheel of transmigration is due solely to evil, and that deliverance from it can only be attained by overcoming evil. with good, the significance of the Bodhisat's vow, and of the devotee's prayer, becomes plain. Universal deliverance can only be achieved by universal holiness.

* Saddharma Pundarika, xiv.

+ Beal, Catena of Chinese Buddhist Scriptures, p. 287. Ibid, pp. 398, 409.

By the Christian, this question will be answered on other grounds than the Buddhist impulse of compassion. He will not only pity the man who has been born depraved, with a congenital twist still further perverted by an education in crime; he will not only ask himself whether it is fair that the guilt of forefathers should be thus visited upon children; he will not only deny that society to-day is justified in thus extinguishing, without penalty to itself, the vicious products of its own past; but he will declare that if the service of man rest on the service of the God within man, the right of society to suppress the evil is transformed into the duty of redeeming them. For they, too, are the children of God. The existence of each individual is not a mere matter of the convenience or the discomfort of the rest. It possesses, even for the basest, a wholly incalculable significance; and the greater the difficulty that besets them in realising the divine purpose for them, the more need have they of our most patient aid. And so the modern preacher who asks himself

"Why do I dare love all mankind?"

cannot doubt what is the answer.

"Tis not because each face, each form

Is comely, for it is not so;
Nor is it that each soul is warm

With any Godlike glow.

Yet there's no one to whom's not given

Some little lineament of heaven,

Some partial symbol, at the least, in sign
Of what should be, if it is not, within,
Reminding of the death of sin

And life of the Divine.

There was a time, full well I know,
When I had not yet seen you so ;

Time was when few seem'd fair ;

But now, as through the streets I go,
There seems no face so shapeless, so

Forlorn, but that there's something there
That, like the heavens, doth declare

The glory of the great All-fair;

And so mine own each one I call ;

And so I dare to love you all."

To this service, Gentlemen, you dedicate yourselves anew. May the spirit of the Master hallow alike our study and our work!

XV. The Gains of Freedom in regard to

Religious Fellowship.

BY THOMAS SADLER, PH.D.*

GENTLEMEN,

ONCE again it has fallen to me to address to you a

few parting words of sympathy and encouragement. I know not in what way I can better offer you encouragement than by dwelling, for a little while, on the great opportunities we enjoy through our free position as students and ministers. If it were not for some real advantages, we might reasonably feel compunction at the price paid for this position by those of our fathers who won it for themselves, and have left it to us as an inheritance. It was bought, as so many of the best things in this world have to be bought, by suffering.

In 1644, when Presbyterianism was in power, and a deputation of five Independent divines craved for toleration, Thomas Fuller tells us the Presbyterians "highly opposed it," "such who desired most ease and liberty for their sides, when bound with Episcopacy, now girding their own government the closest about the consciences of others." There were large-minded and large-hearted men among them, notably Richard

* An Address to the Students at the Close of the Session, June, 1888, by the Rev. T. Sadler, Ph.D., Visitor.

Baxter; but, as a body, they were intolerant, and justified the reproach that "exact concurrence with the Presbyterian Government was a kind of conscienceprison, whilst accurate conformity to the Scotch Church was the very dungeon thereof."

At the time of the Restoration, however, the rigour of the Presbyterians had been so far relaxed that comprehension was all that was asked of Charles II. by the deputation which waited on him at Breda. Then followed the Act of Uniformity, passed by the slender majority of six, and supported by those grievous persecutions by which an attempt was made to banish Nonconformity from the land. But out of these persecutions arose, purified as by fire, the noblest champions of religious liberty in the whole history of the Church, the men who, at the Salters' Hall Conference, carried the Bible against a creed by four, the authority of the Bible being to them the authority, not of everything in the Bible, but of its plain teaching, and especially of its definitions of true religion.

Fully to understand what these men had become, we must look in upon them in 1772, as they appear in some unpublished documents in my keeping,-the Minutes of the Three Denominations in and about the Cities of London and Westminster. After thirty-seven years of persecution, the Nonconformists were tolerated on condition of subscribing the doctrinal articles of the Church of England. For upwards of eighty years the condition remained in the statute-book, though by no means always complied with; but, in 1772, a Bill was brought into Parliament substituting for subscription to the doctrinal articles of the Church of England a general