of the human mind is simplicity; the supreme significance of God lies in his unity and universality.  The God you salute to-day is the God of the Jews and Gentiles alike, the God of Islam, the God of the Brahmo Somaj, the unknown God of many a righteous unbeliever.  He is not the God of those felted theologies and inexplicable doctrines with which your teachers may have confused your minds.  I would have it very clear in your minds that having drunken the draught you should not reverence unduly the cracked old vessel that has brought it to your lips.  I should be falling short of my duty if I did not make that and everything I mean by that altogether plain to you.”

He saw the lad whose face of dull defiance he had marked before, sitting now with a startled interest in his eyes.  The bishop leant over the desk before him, and continued in the persuasive tone of a man who speaks of things too manifest for laboured argument.

“In all ages religion has come from God through broad-minded creative men, and in all ages it has fallen very quickly into the hands of intense and conservative men.  These last—­narrow, fearful, and suspicious—­have sought in every age to save the precious gift of religion by putting it into a prison of formulae and asseverations.  Bear that in mind when you are pressed to definition.  It is as if you made a box hermetically sealed to save the treasure of a fresh breeze from the sea.  But they have sought out exact statements and tortuous explanations of the plain truth of God, they have tried to take down God in writing, to commit him to documents, to embalm his living faith as though it would otherwise corrupt.  So they have lost God and fallen into endless differences, disputes, violence, and darkness about insignificant things.  They have divided religion between this creed and teacher and that.  The corruption of the best is the worst, said Aristotle; and the great religions of the world, and especially this Christianity of ours, are the ones most darkened and divided and wasted by the fussings and false exactitudes of the creed-monger and the sectary.  There is no lie so bad as a stale disfigured truth.  There is no heresy so damnable as a narrow orthodoxy.  All religious associations carry this danger of the over-statement that misstates and the over-emphasis that divides and betrays.  Beware of that danger.  Do not imagine, because you are gathered in this queerly beautiful old building today, because I preside here in this odd raiment of an odder compromise, because you see about you in coloured glass and carven stone the emblems of much vain disputation, that thereby you cut yourselves off and come apart from the great world of faith, Catholic, Islamic, Brahministic, Buddhistic, that grows now to a common consciousness of the near Advent of God our King.  You enter that waiting world fraternity now, you do not leave it.  This place, this church of ours, should be to you not a seclusion and a fastness but a door.