actual fact. There is no reality they say corresponding to the name we reverence. Faith in God is an hallucination destined to become as obsolete as the belief in ghosts and witches. Religion should be studied as part of pathology in a course in a medical school that deals with nervous disorders, or as an historical curiosity, as we examine the superstitions of savages. But in setting this school of theology side by side with these other scientific institutions we claim that we deal with reality as truly as they. "We know Whom we have believed." The invisible God is as genuine a fact of human experience as men and things, although we apprehend Him by faith and not by sight. Like other sciences, theology tests and criticizes its conclusions, and grows more clear and precise from age to age. Its data are given, as are all other scientific data, through the experiences of men, primarily the experiences of the living-for we are in touch with the living God-but also, and often far more richly, through the experiences of the religiously gifted of the past, the seers of all time. It is the discoveries of their souls in God, discoveries confirmed by similar experiences of our own, which give us the name we fear. Ten thousand times ten thousand of every race and condition have been in Christ before us, and these all have had witness borne to them through their faith. Their witness is evidence which we are not afraid to submit to the most rigorous tests. The forms in which they bore their testimony may be open to correction and improvement, but the testimony itself is unimpeachable. They looked unto Him and were radiant.' They discovered, as it were, a vast new continent. They explored and chartered Him who is invisible. They mined unsearchable riches of comfort and strength in God. They reaped harvests of peace and joy from fellowship with Him. They have been enraptured with prospects of surpassing beauty in the character of the Altogether Lovely. They have emigrated to Him and exchanged the ideals and sympathies and interests of the world about them for the mind and heart and purpose of God, and He has been the home of their spirits while they moved freely in the life of earth. The name they fear is the interpretation of their experience, their description of what God has been to them. And that name they pass on to us as their most precious bequest.

The word in our text which needs most emphasis to-day is the word name.' There is so much anonymous religion among us. Men devote themselves to investigations of various

sets of facts, to the invention of all sorts of appliances, to social justice, to economic readjustment, to political reform, to art, to crusades against disease and vice, with a consecration that is essentially religious. In every sphere of life one finds altars to an unknown God. The devotees of personal integrity and public rightousness, the zealots for sympathy and service are legion. And for all this we cannot be too grateful. But relatively few of the followers of truth and right, beauty and love, are aware that through these they are in fellowship with the Lord of heaven and earth, the God and Father of us all. We should impress our ancestors as extremely undevout. They might call us irreligious. And in part they would be justified. One cannot imagine our contemporaries establishing a day of public thanksgiving to God. That custom remains with us as a survival from an era when men in general took God far more seriously than do we. Ours is not an age of public or family or personal prayer. Men do not ask themselves how they stand with God. Pure religion and undefiled is, for us, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unspotted from the world, but we forget that James wrote, "Pure religion and undefiled before our God and Father." We insist that it is required of us "to do justly and to love mercy," but we seldom finish the sentence, to walk humbly with thy God." We assent to the saying that whatever we do to the least of Christ's brethren we do to Him, but we are not often conscious of direct intercourse between ourselves and Him in the service of men. Our sense of social responsibility is strong, but we have little sense of personal accountability to God. Not many men give us the impression of being intimate with the Most High," far ben," as the Scotch say, His close friends and companions.

It would be very easy and pleasant, although certainly not novel, to point out the advances we have made upon those who bequeathed us their convictions. The founders of this institution would probably admit that we were trying to apply Christianity to many relationships of life which they had overlooked. The attempt seriously to embody the mind of Christ in business ethics, in international affairs, in the treatment of the criminal, in every phase of our complex social existence, commands far more interest than in their day. One is sure, however, in reading the charter of this institution that with all this modern broadening of the scope of our religious responsibility our founders would have been in complete accord. But in this development we must admit that there have been some,

perhaps unavoidable, losses. We have lost in our thoughtfulness of God. His universe is so fascinating and absorbing that we seem to have no surplus attention to devote to Him. We have lost in reverence. The Old Testament phrase "them that fear Thy name" seems scarcely applicable to our religious experience. We have lost the tone of authority which conscience had when men connected it directly with Him that sitteth upon the throne. And above all we have lost that definite consciousness of our personal relationship with God, which comes very near to being the essence of vital religion. Indeed, there is much Christianity which it would not be wholly false to describe as godless. There are many men who share the humanitarian attitude of Jesus, who are in sympathy with His ethical ideals, who cherish His social hopes, but who part company with Him in that which was with Him fundamentalHis sonship with God.

They, whose legatees you and I are, were no worshippers of an unnamed Deity. They knew Him far too personally for that. He was the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the God who revealed Himself to holy men of old and is still revealing Himself to holy men to-day, the God who became entirely frank with His children when His Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and so gave us God's own name for Himself:

"Jesus, name of wondrous love,
Human name of God above.”

Jesus of Nazareth was for them, as He is for us, God's Selfdisclosure in a human life, "God's God in the mind of man.'

One may say without exaggeration that all the efforts of the scholars who gave this Seminary its reputation in days gone by, and all the struggles for truth and liberty in which it has engaged, were motived by the desire to set forth more clearly Jesus Christ as the only and final name for God. This was the impulse which led its teachers of a past generation to modify their inherited Calvinism, and which has influenced its more recent scholars in their Biblical criticism and their restatement of theology in terms of the social purpose of Jesus -the Kingdom of God. Many good people have not understood them, and have been led to criticize and oppose, when could they but have known their motive, they would have been in heartiest sympathy with them. Such misunderstandings are pathetically inevitable in all advances of thought. The in

terest in Jesus Christ we inherit is in Him as the name, the revelation of God. We give Him all our loyalty, all our trust, all our consecration, all our worship, and are not idolaters, because He is for us the image of the invisible God. When we name Him, we do not think merely of One who lived in the past, but of the living God, His God and Father, of whom He is the likeness and to whom He is the way.

The task to which those whose heritage is this conviction must set themselves to-day is the interpretation to men by Jesus of that which they are seeking with such religious devotion anonymously. "What ye worship in ignorance, this I set forth unto you-the God that made the world and all things therein, He being Lord of heaven and earth, is our Father disclosed in Jesus Christ, His Son." We must make them feel that in investigating truth, they are discovering the mind of the All-wise, whose treasures of wisdom and knowledge for life are accessible in Christ; that in shouldering social obligations they are bearing burdens which rest on the heart of One who unceasingly and unsparingly gives Himself to be God and Father to everybody, as Jesus gave Himself to be everyone's Friend; that in attempting economic readjustments by which none shall waste and none shall want, they are fulfilling His will in whose household there is bread enough and to spare, and that in the solution of their complex problems they can draw on His wisdom and sympathy extended in Jesus; that in working for human health and happiness, they have His cooperation whose attitude towards pain and misery is manifest in Him who Himself took our infirmities and bore our diseases, and willed that His joy should be in us and that our joy should be made full; that in seeking to redeem the worthless into useful men and women, and to regenerate a selfish world into a “realm where the air we breathe is love," they are coworkers of Him whose eternal purpose is the heavenly social order Jesus proclaimed and whose nature is the redeeming love commended to a sinning world on Calvary. The heritage of which we, with the Church universal, are custodians, and which it is ours to give to all men, is fellowship with God through Jesus Christ in seeking His kingdom and His right

eousness.

It is significant that the most noticeable and the most beautiful of this group of buildings is not that which contains the library or the lecture rooms, but the chapel. This Seminary exists to train men to be skilful workmen in a most, surely in the most, difficult of callings-the inspiration of lives

with the Spirit of God. In their equipment we deem the primary requisite not knowledge of methods of work, not familiarity with the best religious thought of others, past or present, but personal acquaintance with God Himself. Before all they must be “ men of God." And as the center of this institution's life on its new site, as on its old, we dedicate a house of prayer.

66

That which claims the first attention of all who enter here is yonder window. It symbolizes two great sacraments. The one is the sacrament of responsibility. Go ye into all the world and make disciples of all the nations." It reminds us that the Church's task is the transformation of an entire world into the kingdom of love, the remodeling of every institution and the redemption of every man, woman and child, until society is divine and every individual Christlike. And such responsibility is a sacrament. It is when men are captivated by this vision and feel themselves committed to this labor that they realize how desirable, how indispensable God is.

"Ere earth gain her heavenly best a God must mingle in the game.

The other is the sacrament of memory. The window commemorates a Christian who was a splendid type of the Godfearing man this Seminary would have its graduates seek to produce by their ministry; and it portrays in symbolical figures the Church of the past and above all its Lord and ours. As the light streams through those figured panes into our faces, so through the memories of the saints, and supremely of the King of saints, God reveals to us His name. There is the type of religion for which this Seminary stands-a whole world for which to feel responsible, and the God disclosed in Jesus Christ and all His followers with whom to serve it. This responsibility and these memories are our inheritance, the heritage of those that fear God's name.