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There is no more critical test of theologies and theologians than the question what message they have to a dying person whose sins are unforgiven. If the salvation which a preacher has to offer is only a course of moral improvement, what can he have to say in such a place?

Some of the details appear trivial; but grave history which concerns itself only with the actions of conspicuous persons, with the manoeuvres of armies, the schemes of politics, the battles of theologies, fails signally to give us the real life of the people by which we judge the character of an age.

The love of discussion and speculation creates considerable variety in practice and almost unlimited variety in creed and theory. There are few dogmas known to the theologies of the world which are not held by some of India's multitudinous sects and it is perhaps impossible to make a single general statement about Hinduism, to which some sects would not prove an exception.

For the sake of clearness, and in order that you may definitely comprehend the doctrine of sin and atonement which I believe to be the true one, I need in the first place to outline as a background that which lies at the foundation of all the popular theologies of Christendom.

All the newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the new medicines and new theologies, all the glare and blare of the gas and brass of modern times it is against these that the national school must bear up if it can. I will not question that our elementary education is better than barbaric ignorance. But there is no barbaric ignorance.

Thus the nature and place of man, under the influence of these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and more important as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceased to be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendence of deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures, which inform both the Jewish-Christian Scriptures and the philosophic absolutism of the Catholic theologies.

From the first, then, humanistic leaders have not only frankly rejected the scholastic theologies, which had been the traditional expression of those absolute values with which the religious experience is chiefly concerned, but also ignored or rejected the existence of those values themselves. Thus Petrarch is generally considered the first of modern humanists.

Theologies, philosophies, scientific theories these change like the shifting and shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of another shape and hue. But the knowledge involved in love is veritable and is verified at least for us who love.

Barnum's administration in Bridgeport has been mild, but characterized by firmness and independence. His trouble with the Jews was of short duration, for he is most respectful toward all theologies. He has not been able to carry out his extreme temperance views; but he has made a very good Mayor of a city, for whose prosperity he has labored for half a lifetime."

It is only in the last three or four thousand years, and through weak and tentative methods of expression, through clumsy cosmogonies and theologies, and with incalculable confusion and discoloration, that the human mind has felt its way towards its undying being in the race.