Many a one not now ready to acknowledge the claims of the faith of the Universalist Church has this, mainly, as his reason for it, that it has not been for centuries past the popular faith of the churches in Christendom. There are great numbers of Christians who have in reality no more plausible reason why they are not better acquainted and more in love with this faith. Whenever they have heard it spoken of it has been in such words as to lead them to regard it as a modern innovation. Beyond this they have not looked. Convinced of this, they have not desired to look farther. But they should. A faith making such pretensions and appeals ought to be looked after. Men are not wise and humane; they are not lovers of their race and its truest well-wishers in the Christian sense; they are not in readiness to rejoice in view of the widest and most thorough dispensation of Divine grace, in the most extensive and effectual work of salvation through the "One Lord Jesus Christ," while they regard with indifference the affirmation which the Gospel makes of this very work with all souls. Is it true? This ought to be the eager inquiry of everyone professing faith in the significance of the second commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Where this love pervades the heart, will not that heart seek every evidence that can be offered in proof of this most desirable of all results, the reconciliation of all souls to the Divine administration, the Divine love regenerating, uplifting, and glorifying all God's offspring? We press these questions home, without a word of apology, to every lover of Christ and the Christian cause.
If these hesitating ones of whom we speak would take up the examination, they would find that some of the clearest and noblest minds of the past have given their assent to this very faith, and that the doctrines in opposition to it are not to be regarded as past questioning when they have been sanctioned by generations involved in as much mental and moral darkness as most of those which have preceded us.
Christ came to teach positive truth, and his religion invites the largest and freest inquiry as to its claims. And so this theology of the past will be investigated. It is undergoing the process now in minds and in the midst of institutions where this old conviction of the superiority and sacredness of the past has been revered as it never can be again. All the sects are more or less affected with this contagion of inquiry. It will not be suppressed. To silence it for a season is but allowing it to accumulate greater force with which it shall again make itself manifest. Said a speaker, a few years since, in a Methodist Conference in New York city:--