What the world needs most to-day is a willingness to change in order to meet the demands of the age, a readjustment from the old, dead things of the past to the vital purposes of the living present. Many people are still living in the graves of the dead thoughts of bygone ages. These thoughts may have met the requirements of the past, but no longer fill the needs of the present. The inevitable results are that we have numerous organizations apparently for the sole purpose of charitable and religious effort, which are lifeless bodies without soul or spirit, sepul-chers filled with the fantoms of a dead past and superficial modern conventions. If change is needed anywhere, surely it is needed now among those who think they are in the van of human progress, but who in reality are living in the dark ages, a thousand years behind the times. And yet, I want to say at the same time that the quality of stability is as necessary as that of change. This may seem contradictory, but stability has to do with the soul, while change concerns thoughts, words, and outer forms. Love is as eternal as Life; the world may change and pass away, but Hope abides. The sun may grow cold and lose its light, but Faith lives eternally. While in the inmost recesses of life all is stedfast, on the surface all is change. God never changes, life never changes, truth never changes, but our mental conceptions concerning all three change constantly.

As the mind of man comes in closer touch with the divine in man, it attains to the wider, grander vision, as one who stands on the mountain top is able to view the whole horizon. The mind which has immediate access to God becomes fixt in the eternal principles underlying all life, and there comes to it a greater stability of thought and purpose, changing the outer expression to a thing symmetrically beautiful, increasingly so with each succeeding change, until the very outermost takes on something of the stability and permanency of the inner. Let the mind be founded in the eternal verities of life.

The mind should become so centered in principles which change not, that only the highest ideals would find expression.

A purely intellectual conception of the kingdom that is latent in every soul is an impossible thing. The servant can not comprehend in all its fulness the Master's will, and intellect is but the servant of the Master. What a man feels is greater than what he thinks, and thoughts and words are but feeble instruments to express the inmost depths of man's feeling. The light that is coming into the world, that is shining over the threshold of the new day, shows that a man to be great should feel after God, and come into vital touch with his fellow man through his deepest and truest feelings. This being the case, the true thought, word, and deed will follow as a natural sequence, and man will thus truly express himself from the center to the circumference of life. The love and adoration of the people of both the past and the present time, for the Christ or the Buddha, have not been for their intellectual conceptions of life, have not been for what they have taught, but rather for what they have revealed and what they have lived. Their loving service to humanity has endeared them more to humanity than any one, or all other things. Loving service comes from what a man feels. The new commandment of life, which is just as new now as it was two thousand years ago, is "that ye love one another," that love is the fulfilling of the law, and that only by it and through it can come the fulness of life.

Let the individual remember that that which is true of the nation or the race holds good equally for himself; that each man epitomizes, as it were, the whole feeling and thought of the world, and in his life passes through every phase that it is possible for the race or the individual to experience. Hence, in the considcration of a religion of life, the personal application is the initial one - perhaps the only one that is of immediate profit. The kingdom of God is brought upon earth through individual effort, and every individual is responsible for its coming to the extent of his knowledge. In fulfilling the law of life, it will be found that it requires far more a development of heart than of intellect.

The intellectual reconstruction of the world is an impossible thing. No matter how clearly men may see the truth, if such truth is held only as an intellectual conception of right, wrongs will be perpetrated by man upon his fellow man regardless even of true thought conceptions. Intellectually, man knows a hundredfold more of the right than he lives, but if a man feels, he lives what he feels. A thousand men have written books on the cruelty and injustice of man to his fellow man, but the love of a Jesus or a Buddha would outweigh in its productiveness of good all the logic and mental reasonings of the thousand. What the world needs more than all else is kindness of heart, good-will, more brightness and hope, more joy and gladness, more faith in mankind and its ideals, and, greatest of all, more love. Through the expression of all these feelings the mind of man would become renewed, quickened, strengthened, made whole, and the world would rejoice in the springtime of a new age, an age wherein "righteousness would cover the face of the earth, as the waters cover the face of the great deep."

The prophets for this new age are needed more than they ever were in the past, because humanity as a whole is more ready to receive a life-giving gospel than ever before. Humanity is hungering and thirsting, and the desire for a fuller life is being everywhere exprest.

What the prophet Emerson believed he saw in his day is being fulfilled in our own. But there is a mightier power at work than Emerson's intellectual conception of life. It is not man's intellect that creates the world, it is not man's intellect that renews life, and not by any thought or reasoning process do we find God. Let the prophets of the new age proclaim not what a man should think, but rather what he should feel. Let them make a new departure, no matter what ridicule or censure they may bring upon themselves from those who do not understand what they are trying to do. The true reformer in every new departure has had to contend with all manner of persecutions, coming even from those to whom he would do the greatest good. Let no obstacle, great or small, stand in the way of this gospel - that what a man feels, makes him what he is. When we look about on every side, and see the dried and withered forms of people, misshapen and shriveled up by their thoughts, because of the lack of vital feeling, we feel constrained to cry out: "Oh, that God would fill the minds of people with the spirit of his love and goodness! "

The mind of man makes its own divisions in religion - its creeds and its dogmas - and of these divisions there seems no end. The soul knows no division - has no sense of separate-ness or limitation; for it, none of these things exist, because religion - "the homing instinct of the Soul" - is one - a common need, a common impulse among all peoples. It may be summed up in two words - Love and Service. Love is the divine element, service the human expression. Before these two conditions of life every creed shall pass away, because the time is coming when the world will know the truth and enter into its true inheritance - a kingdom of God on earth where peace and good-will reign supreme. The Spirit of Love lives in every life and is ever seeking perfect expression. Through it every thought becomes beautified, through it every ideal is realized. Thought becomes great only as it expresses truly the feeling beneath it, as it is filled with the spirit of love. The mind becomes illumined only as it draws its vitality from the soul-feeling. The barriers which now separate mankind and keep men of different faiths apart, will be forgotten when the real religion of life finds its place in the hearts and minds of mankind. We will have a new symbolism - one which will truly represent a universal religion; and we will no longer, then, worship the symbol, for it will serve only to indicate in an outer way what man knows and believes in his heart. And man's creed, if there be any, will be the recognition of human rights, of justice for all, from the least even unto the greatest. There will be everywhere that fraternal expression of life, too, which will make the brotherhood of man something more than a name - a living, vital thing. There will no longer be any desire to oppress the weak. The strong nations of the earth will lend of their strength for the upbuilding of the weaker. There will no longer be the very rich and consequently there will no longer be the very poor, but each will have enough to supply all mental and physical needs.

The love of the beautiful, too, will become a part of the new religion of life, and the handicraft of the world will be more beautiful because of it. Each man's work will be his religion, and whatever his hand finds to do he will do with the might of a beautiful ideal as well as an earnest purpose. Health, strength, and happiness will be the natural outcome of such a religion - a religion which will dispense with all outworn creeds and empty forms, which will not even ask whether a man be a Roman Catholic or a Protestant, a Jew or a Mohammedan. The balance of true fellowship will so unite its members that each one will become a law unto himself as regards what he thinks. No one will be taken to task or questioned about his beliefs or unbeliefs, because where love is, there is freedom, there is unity, there is peace and satisfaction of life, wherein a man comes into at-one-ment with God and man.