seems to be swimming against the current of commonplace; he is original in thought and expression. He is so because he is true. As men are made differently from each other, every man who really thinks, must think in his own way; and if he is true to himself he must speak in his own way, use his own language, and not that of others.

So also in art. The true artist has style, but not manner. Every one who travels in Europe and sees the paintings of the masters soon comes to know each one of them by his style. Style means originality, personality put into work. The great masters have style; their imitators have manner; that is, they follow a fashion, they imitate the external form, but the soul escapes them. It is therefore the duty of artists to be unfashionable; that is, to be themselves, to be genuine, to be sincere, simple, and true.

As truthfulness is opposed to fashion in literature and art, so it is in religion. The real objection

to creeds is that they tend to insincerity. Creeds are particular fashions of thought, crystallized and made authoritative and permanent. The religious fashion of thought in the seventeenth century in England was expressed in the Assembly's Catechism. Our present fashion of thinking is wholly different; and yet many thousand churches in the United States hold to that creed, and insist that the religious faith and feeling of the nineteenth century shall be expressed in the language of the seventeenth.

Elijah the Tishbite was an unfashionable person in his time. The Israelites, wishing to be popular with their neighbors, had taken to worshipping their gods. They did not wish to be singular or puritanical; so when they were among the Phonicians they worshipped Baal or Astarte. Just so a Unitarian now sometimes goes to the Episcopal Church and says, "O holy, blessed, and adorable Trinity!" The Jews were the Unitarians of their day, and worshipped only one God when they were at home; but they were ashamed of being so unfashionable among the Phoenicians and Canaanites, and by degrees they came to think it liberal to worship the gods of all the nations round about them. I suppose they called that "Liberal Judaism" or Broad Judaism." But Elijah the Tishbite was of another sort. He went at once to the King of Israel, who had introduced this heathen religion, this polytheism, and denounced it as false and wrong. He defied the false gods and their prophets. He stood alone against them all, contending for the truth. Theirs was the popular and fashionable religion, his the unfashionable one. Baal had a thousand ministers; Jehovah only one, and the queen was trying to kill that one. That queen

was Jezebel, and her name has become the type for all female wickedness. Yet she was only a zealous worshipper of Baal and Astarte, and I have no doubt that the priests of Baal considered her as an eminently pious woman for persecuting the

priests of Jehovah. She was like Philip of Spain, Madame de Maintenon in France, and Mary in England, who with cruel conscientiousness persecuted the Protestants. Elijah and his friends were the Protestants of Syria. They were few, and their worship was unfashionable, so they had to hide in caves to escape their persecutors.

All the great religious reforms have been unfashionable at first. Christianity was unfashionable among the Jews. Protestantism was unfashionable among the Catholics. Methodism was unfashionable in the days of Wesley. Quakerism was unfashionable in the time of George Fox. The teachers of these religions went in the heat and bitterness of their spirit; they were lonely, they were unpopular, they were the objects of hatred, contempt, ridicule. Of each it might have been said:

"He came, and baring his heaven-bright thought,

He earned the base world's ban;

And, having vainly lived and taught,

Gave place to a meaner man."

He did not really live in vain, but he seemed to do so.

Religion, in its very nature, begins in unpopularity. It is lonely at first, living in the depths of the soul. It does not take counsel of flesh and blood; it does not know how to express itself so as to be understood. It begins in secret, in retirement and reserve. Afterward it may come out

and become a great motive-power in the world. But all the prophets of God are lonely at first, and for a time Elijah was lonely. He lived alone in the hills of Gilead; he hid in the caves of Horeb. He said to God: "Let me die; I am so lonely I cannot bear it." Then God told him there were many others he had not heard of who felt just as he did; who had not bowed the knee to Baal; and he was comforted in the thought of that invisible sympathy, that unknown brotherhood. He was compassed about by a great cloud of witnesses, though he could not see them.

How lonely Luther was during many years, alone with his solitary convictions! He stood by himself against the whole Christian church, — against the empire, against the religion of his day and the civilization of his time. He, with nothing but truth on his side, he could not see, he did not foresee, what a great multitude would follow him. Like all the great prophets of God, he stood alone and said, "I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen!

Every truth is born at first in some lonely brain, -in the mind of some solitary thinker, who loves truth better than fashion, better than popularity, better than comfort, better than his own life. Elijah the Tishbite, Paul of Tarsus, Luther at Worms, John Wesley, George Fox, Swedenborg, Channing, Theodore Parker, were all willing to be unfashionable, lonely, despised, and rejected of men.

"Therefore sprang there, even of one, and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the seashore, innumerable." The unfashionable thinker of to-day sets the fashion for the age which is to come. Let every lonely, conscientious, God-seeking soul remember this and take courage.

The Pilgrim Fathers were unfashionable people in their time. They were Protestants of the Protestants, regarded as ultraists, outsiders, and fanatics, by all the respectable people. Nothing suited them. They wished for perfect independence in the Church and State, perfect freedom of thought and life. They could find this nowhere in Europe, so they came to look for it in America. They took their wives and little ones, and came to live among the wolves and Indians rather than obey the bishops, or submit to creeds they did not believe. Half of them died the first winter. But they had faith in God. Like Abraham, they went out, not knowing whither they went, and sojourning in the land of promise as in a strange country. They were poor, hungry, and cold; they had little for the comfort of their wives and children; but they were free. They were able to worship God as they would, and to teach their children what they believed the truth. So from that little seed has come a great tree, whose branches reach to the river and its roots to the sea. From their unfashionable puritanic conscience has come this great Union