take to itself until it shall be wiser than it is to-day:  “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  “If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God.”  Ponder those words, my friends.  See how reasonable they are.  See how important they are.  See how they have the secret of your own life, of what it is to do, of what it is to be, forever and ever sealed up in them.  These two things, I am sure, are true with regard to the method of belief—­that no man can ever go forward to a higher belief until he is true to the faith which he already holds.  Be the noblest man that your present faith, poor and weak and imperfect as it is, can make you to be.  Live up to your present growth, your present faith.  So, and so only, as you take the next straight step forward, as you stand strong where you are now, so only can you think the curtain will draw back and there will be revealed to you what lies beyond.  And then live in your positives and not in your negatives.  I am tired of asking man what his religious faith is and having him tell me what he don’t believe.  He tells me that he don’t believe in baptism or inspiration or in the trinity.  If I asked a man where he was going and he told me he was not going to Washington, what could I know about where he was going?  He would not go anywhere so long as he simply rested in that mere negative.  Be done with saying what you don’t believe, and find somewhere or other the truest, divinest thing to your soul that you do believe to-day, and work that out:  work it out in all the action and consecration of the soul in the doing of your work.  This I take to be the real freedom of Christian thought—­when the man goes forward always into a fuller and fuller belief as he becomes obedient to that which he already holds.

But yet I know I have not touched the opinion, the feeling, nay, I will say the black prejudice that is upon many, many minds.  “Ah, but you have bound yourself,” you say.  “You have given your assent to a certain creed, you believe certain dogmas.  To put it as simply as you have put it to us this morning, you believe a certain person.  I, I am free, I believe nothing, I can go wandering here and everywhere and disbelieve to my heart’s content.”  Yes, I do believe something, and I thank God for it.  But I deny with all my intelligence and soul the very idea that in believing that something I have shut my soul to evidence.  I am ready to hear any man living, any man living to-day who will prove to me that the Christ has never lived and that he is not the Lord of men.  I will listen to any man who is in earnest and who is sincere.  I will not listen to any trifler, caviller, who is merely trying to make a point and to get ahead of the poor arguments that I can use; but let any fellow-man come to me with an earnest face, either of puzzled doubt, or of earnest and convinced unbelief, and say to me, “Are you not wrong?” or “I believe that you are wrong,” and I, of course, will talk