Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/121

 ASSEMBLING AND WELCOME. 93 I, for myself, declare that I am here as an individual Evangelical Christian, and that I should never have set my foot in this Parliament if I thought that it signified anything like a consent that all religions are equal and that it is only necessary to be sincere and upright. I can consent to nothing of this kind. I believe only the Bible to be true and Protestant Christianity the only true Religion. I wish no compromise of any kind. We cannot deny that we who meet in this Parliament are separated by great and important principles. We admit that these differences cannot be bridged over, but we meet, believing everybody has the right to his faith. You invite everybody to come here as a sincere defender of his own faith. I, for my part, stand before you with the same wish that prompted Paul when he stood before the representative of the Roman Empire and Agrippa, the Jewish king. "I would to God that all that hear me to-day were both almost and altogether such as I am." . . . We Christians are servants of our Master, the living Saviour. We have no right to compro- mise the truth he intrusted to us, either to think lightly of it or to withhold the message he has given us for humanity. But we meet together, each one wishing to gain the others to his own creed. Will this not be a Parliament of war instead of peace ? Will it not bring us further from instead of nearer to each other ? I think not, if we hold fast the truth that these great vital doctrines can only be defended and propagated by spiritual means. An honest fight with spiritual weapons need not estrange the combatants ; on the contrary, it often brings them nearer. I think this conference will have done enough to engrave its memory forever on the leaves of history, if this great principle found general adop- tion. One light is dawning in every heart, and the nineteenth century has brought us much progress in this respect ; yet we risk to enter the twentieth century before the great principle of religious liberty has found universal acceptance. . . . The principle of religious liberty is based on the grand foundation that God wants the voluntary observance of free men. After a few courteous and sympathetic words from M. Bonet-Maury, representing religious thought and sentiment in France, a representative from the remotest antipodes was 'ntroduced, Archbishop >Redwood of New Zealand. In presenting to the assembly this distinguished guest, President Bonney remarked that the Most Reverend gentle- man came from that part of the globe which is fruitful of new things and new views, which has given us a new form of ballot, and a new mode of transferring real estate, and which has made the greatest advance in the application of arbitration to the settlement of trade disputes. After a brief exordium, the archbishop said :