“Herein must lie all real power; herein lay Christ’s power, that he appreciated the beauty and richness of humanity, that it is very near the Infinite, very near to God.  These two facts—­we are the children of God, and God is our Father—­make us look very differently at ourselves, very differently at our neighbors, very differently at God.  We should be surprized, not at our good deeds, but at our bad ones.  We should expect good as more likely to occur than evil; we should believe that our best moments are our truest.  I was once talking with an acquaintance about whose religious position I knew nothing, and he exprest a very hopeful opinion in regard to a matter about which I was myself very doubtful.

“’Why, I said to him, ‘You are an optimist.’

“‘Of course I am an optimist,’ he replied, because I am a Christian.’

“I felt that as a reproof.  The Christian must be an optimist.”

Men and brethren, I set these words over against those of his Master with which I began, and the two in essence are one.  “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.”  There is a life nobler and diviner than any that we have dreamed of.  To the poorest and meanest of us, as to the best and most richly-dowered, it is alike open.  To turn toward it, to reach up after it, to believe in its ever-recurring nearness, and to glorify God in attaining to it, this is the calling of a human soul.

Now then, what, I ask you, is all the rest of religion worth in comparison with this?—­not what is it worth in itself, but what is its place relatively to this?  This, I maintain, is the supreme question for the episcopate, as it ought to be the supreme question with the ministry of any and every order.  And therefore it is, I affirm, that, in bringing into the episcopate with such unique vividness and power this conception of his office, your bishop rendered to his order and to the Church of God everywhere a service so transcendent.  A most gifted and sympathetic observer of our departed brother’s character and influence has said of him, contrasting him with the power of institution, “His life will always suggest the importance of the influence of the individual man as compared with institutional Christianity.”

In one sense, undoubtedly, this is true; but I should prefer to say that his life-work will always show the large and helpful influence of a great soul upon institutional Christianity.  It is a superficial and unphilosophical temperament that disparages institutions; for institutions are only another name for that organized force and life by which God rules the world.  But it is undoubtedly and profoundly true that you no sooner have an institution, whether in society, in politics, or in religion, than you are threatened with the danger that the institution may first exaggerate itself and then harden and stiffen into a machine; and that in the realm of religion, preeminently, those