The Brotherhood of Man.

First, the religious and moral beliefs of that age had become purely formal.  There was the letter of conviction, but not the spirit of it.  The creed, the ritual, the ceremony were there, but the life had departed.  And so today our beliefs have lost vitality to a large extent because we have been content to indulge in formulas oft repeated, which have ceased to have significance for our thoughts or for our feelings.  We have allowed ourselves to be betrayed by words which are mere sounds without substance.  We have verbalized our beliefs, and have depotentialed them of vital significance.  Take, for instance, the phrases, “The fatherhood of God” and “The brotherhood of man.”  They have been so often upon our lips as to become trite; their real meaning has disappeared.  It is easy to repeat the words, and to be satisfied with the repetition, and nevertheless remain wholly insensible to their profound import, and under no compulsion whatsoever to obey their sublime command.  We assent to the formula:  but it does not become a determining factor in our purposes and plans.  There is perhaps no age in the history of the world which has so emphasized the idea of the brotherhood of man as our own, and never in all history has there been such a denial of this idea as by the present European war.  If the brotherhood of man had been the living, dominant idea of our civilization, could this present tragedy of the nations have occurred?  If the world had believed profoundly in the idea of God, would we now be daily reading of the ghastly scenes where human life is no longer sacred, where love gives place to hate, where the constructive forces of the world are superseded by the destructive, and all the passions of man’s brute inheritance are given full play and scope?

Second—­In the teachings of Christ there was a remarkable expansion of the idea of God.  Instead of the tribal God worshipped as the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, He substituted the idea of God, as the God of all peoples and all races, the God of the Jew and Gentile, of the Greek and barbarian, of the bond and the free.  It was the great apostle of the Gentiles who at the centre of Greek civilization announced this fundamental conception of Christianity to the old world: 

     God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on
     all the face of the earth.

This was the sublime idea of the God of a united humanity.  The God of the tribe had given place to the God of the whole world.  That conception was very foreign to the popular religious notions current at the time of Christ, and it seems still further away from our ideas of the present day.  It is a very narrow and circumscribed view of God to regard Him as concerned merely for our little insular affairs, to regard Him simply as a God of the individual or of the home, or even one’s nation.  He transcends all these limitations of particular interests and particular