over the sessions of the Twenty-fifth is availed of in simple fashion, in the hope that, through your influence in the communities from which you have come and the record of the proceedings of this Conference, some seed-truths relating to subjects of vital interest to our national welfare, which we have considered together, may strike root and bear fruit in parts of our land in which no duty is publicly acknowledged by the State to its dependants, and where State supervision of them is a thing unknown.

4

II.

Conference Sermon.

THE THEOCRATIC REPUBLIC.

BY WILLIAM REED HUNTINGTON, D.D., RECTOR OF GRACE CHURCH.

My son, keep thy father's commandment; and forsake not the law of thy mother."- PROV. vi. 20.

In a later chapter of this same book it is written of the virtuous woman that "in her tongue is the law of kindness." Bringing this to bear upon the teaching of the text, we may, I think, safely infer that "the law of the mother" stands for mercy, even as "the commandment of the father" stands for discipline. "Charities" and "Correction," therefore, seem both of them to look out at us from this ancient exhortation, and, since we have met to confer together with regard to "Charities and Correction," what text is there in all the Bible that could better serve our purpose? Moreover, seeing that this is a National, and not a merely local Conference, we shall be justified in giving to the words a more than personal significance. God was wont of old to speak to Israel, his people, in this affectionate, confiding strain as his "dear son," his "pleasant child." What forbids, then, that we Americans, whose lot has fallen in a time when every nation may, if it will, accept the filial status,- what forbids that we Americans should hear God, out of his heaven of heavens, saying to us as a people, a great commonwealth of souls, "My son, keep thy father's commandment, and forsake not the law of thy mother"?

I make a plea forgive me if it should pass into an argument for a generous recognition in our public and civil life of what conscience and the heart demand of men. "My song shall be of mercy and judgment."

Doubtless the metaphor which gives to nations personality, speaking of them under such names as "Columbia," "Britannia," and

the like, may be overworked; but it is better to overwork it than to lose sight of the invaluable grain of truth and fact which it enfolds. A nation, even though it have not all the traits and features of a person, certainly has some of them. For a nation, as for a man, selfishness and unselfishness, justice and injustice, clemency and cruelty, are possible alternatives. A nation may love another nation or may hate it, may treat a sister fairly or unfairly, may cherish a high ideal, or may deliberately turn its back upon some heavenly vision. In all these points the way of a nation is as the way of a man.

And yet, curiously enough, there is nothing of which a people needs to be more frequently or more urgently reminded than this very thing. We lazily consent that the ship of state shall drift as the currents of commercial advantage may determine, when the national conscience ought rather to be steadily attent upon the needlepoint of duty, and the national will strenuous in its grasp upon the wheel. "After all, she is but a merchant ship," we say, why worry? Any winds that can be called trade-winds ought to be good enough for us." That is the doctrine which the utilitarians have been preaching to us for the better part of a century. But, thank God, there are some left who disbelieve it, some who still hold that the nations have callings which it is blessedness to see and ignominy to miss, some who refuse to be persuaded that for a people, any more than for a person, it is possible to live "by bread only."

"Spain," wrote a wrong-headed or else grossly misinformed Frenchman a few days ago, "Spain is a nation. The United States are only a syndicate." Were that indictment sound, we Americans might well hang our heads for shame. The syndicate can never become a substitute for the State. The syndicate is a mechanism, a skilled contrivance made of pieces glued together for a temporary purpose; but a nation is a growth. "As the days of a tree are the days of my people." For a syndicate, it is enough if the prices current hold their own; but a nation withers and fails when its ideals die. National prosperity does, it is true, rest upon a contract; but the contract is none other than that ancient and sacred covenant in which the party of the first part promises his blessing, and the party of the second part his allegiance.

It is said that the per capita consumption of iron is larger in this country than anywhere else in the world, and that the per capita

consumption of iron is everywhere the index-finger of civilization. But what was Almighty God expecting of us Americans, when he cast our lot in a land whose stones are iron? Had he no better purpose, think you, than the accumulation of statistical wonders? Had he in mind only the multiplication of flouring-mills and rolling-mills, of machine-reapers and electric engines? I do not deny that these things were in the creative thought; I do not question their having formed part of the providential purpose; but with the whole strength of a Christian's conviction I do refuse to them the foremost place in that thought and in that purpose. What! are we to imagine that the God who formed the soul, who made man, can find his satisfaction in coal-beds and rivers of oil? Nay: depend upon it, his real purpose lies far back of all these outward forms and shows of things. Nothing is so substantial as spirit. No interests are so dear to God as the interests of truth and righteousness. For these he plans, for these he legislates, that he might save these, he sent his Son into the world to die.

It is with a nation as it is with a family. It does not matter how luxuriously you wall it in and roof it over; unless the life of the family thus enclosed is what it ought to be, home there is none; a house, yes, but not a home. I am not declaiming against civic magnificence. We have not half enough of it. We shall do well to make our civilization as splendid as you will. God has given us without stint the means of doing so. He has withheld no necessary thing. He has lavished upon us all his treasures, and put in our way the grandest opportunity ever vouchsafed to man. By all means, then, let us make our civilization splendid; but, first of all, let us take care that discipline and brotherly love, the father's commandment and the mother's law, have place in it.

It is ten times more important that we should remember points like these than that we should "remember the Maine." They are guilty of a perversion of Kipling's famous refrain, "Lest we forget, lest we forget," who turn it into a formula of vengeance. The thought of the precariousness of the tenure by which empires that have suffered themselves to become exclusively commercial hold the thread of life is the true keynote of the "Recessional."

"Far-called, our navies melt away,

On dune and headland sinks the fire.

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!"

It was the subtle quaver of melancholy lurking in those four lines that drove the poem home to every heart in Greater Britain.

The Assyrian civilization, in its day, was splendid. It was a cruel civilization, and it fell. The Egyptian civilization was splendid. It was a superstitious civilization, and it fell. The Greek civilization was splendid. It was a self-centred civilization, and it fell. The Roman civilization was splendid. It became a pampered civilization, and it fell. And what of the American civilization now in its beginnings? What of this latest of all the "births of time,” — what of this?

Can it be, as our critic affirms, only the product of a "syndicate," nothing better than a commercial venture, a moneyed enterprise, a speculative scheme?

This National Conference of Charities and Correction is itself an answer in the negative. You represent in your own persons a vast army of men and women who throughout the length and breadth of the Republic are laboring, the most of them at their own charges, for the betterment of the common weal.

In you and in the tens of thousands next of kin to you, quite as really as in the persons of the great officers of state, we discern the credentials of a true nationality. John the Baptist, in a moment of despondency, demanded better evidence than had yet been given him of the genuineness of Christ's claim to the Messiahship. Jesus met the messengers who had brought John's question with an argument from which there was no escape; for "in that same hour," so the record runs, "he cured many of their infirmities and plagues and of evil spirits, and to many that were blind he gave sight." This closed the case. No more testimony was needed. No more witnesses were called. "Go your way, and tell John," said Jesus, "what things ye have seen and heard." It is upon a like array of witnesses we count, and count with confidence, when asked for proof that our claim to a true nationality is valid. The truth is that within our visible body politic, wrapped up and hidden there, very much as the Psyche is enfolded within the larva, there lives a spiritual body politic, whose chief concern is with those interests of human life which transcend commercial lines completely. He who would really understand and do justice to American nationality must get down beneath the outward and visible political integument, and study the movement and direction of the life-currents below.