was worse than a bad man in it.  If that was not the teaching in the book, it was at least the form in which it took lodgment in my boyish brain.  Thank God it never found permanent foothold there.  Instead, I hold in my memory the Eastern story of God’s rebuke to Abraham when he expelled the Fire Worshipper from his tent.  “Could you not bear with him for one hour?  Lo!  I have borne with him these forty years!”

I have always thought that a knowledge of what our neighbors believe is an excellent balance-wheel to our own beliefs and that our own beliefs, so balanced, will be saner and more restrained.  It would be well, I think, if we could have a survey of the world’s religions, setting down in parallel columns all the faiths of mankind.  If this is too great a task we might begin with a survey of Christianity, set down in the same way.  I believe that the results of such a survey might surprise us, showing, as I think it would do, the many fundamentals that we hold in common and the trivial nature of some of the barriers that appear to separate us.

In your course, just completed, you have had such a survey, I doubt not, of the beliefs of our own beloved church.  Where her divines have differed, you have had the varying opinions spread before you.  You have not been told that the mind of every churchman has always been a replica of the mind of every other churchman.  Personally, I feel grateful that this has not been the case.  As I say my creed and begin “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” I realize that the aspect of even such a basic belief as this, is the same in no two minds; that it shifts from land to land and from age to age.  I know that God, as he is, is past human knowledge and that until we see Him face to face we can not all mean just the same thing when we repeat this article of belief.  But I realize also that this is not due to the mutability of the Almighty but to man’s variability.  The Gods of St. Jerome, of Thomas Carlyle and of William James are different; but that is because these men had different types of minds.  Behind their human ideas stands God himself—­“the same yesterday, to-day and forever.”  So we may go through the creed; so we may study, as you have been doing, the beliefs of the church.  Everywhere we see the evidences of the working, upon fallible human minds of a dim appreciation of something beyond full human knowledge—­

  “That one far-off divine event
   Toward which the Whole Creation moves.”

We have a wonderful church, my friends.  It is a church to live with; a church to be proud of.  Those who miss what we are privileged to enjoy are missing something from the fulness of life.  We have not broken with the historic continuity of the Christian faith:  there is no chasm, filled with wreckage, between us and the fathers of the church.  Above all we have enshrined our beliefs in a marvellous liturgy, which is ever old and ever new, and which had the good fortune to be put into English at a day